Running Windows engines under Mac HCE?

[Eric Wainwright]

I’ve been trying to get Windows engines to run under Mac HCE 1.7, but I haven’t had any luck.

Here is the solution I tried:
1) Download a Windows engine of your choice, e.g. Stockfish DD for Windows from: http://stockfishchess.org/download/. (I’ve tried other Windows engines too, with similar results.)
2) Download and install WineBottler 1.6.1 from: http://winebottler.kronenberg.org
(This will also install the Wine emulation libraries on your Mac.)
3) Run the WineBottler app.
4) Click the “Advanced” icon at the top.
5) Click “Select File” and locate the .exe file of the engine. In this case, I selected the “stockfish-dd-32.exe” file. (I also tried the 64-bit version, “stockfish-dd-64-modern.exe”, but HCE didn’t recognize this one as a valid UCI engine.)
6) Click the “This is the actual program, copy it to the App bundle” option.
7) Click “Install” and choose a name and location for the new file, e.g. “Stockfish”. (This will create a Mac application that bundles the .exe. file along with a bunch of emulation stuff.)
8 ) In HCE, go to Engine Prefs and add the new engine file.
9) Click “Configure” and verify that all the options look normal including the About tab, e.g. authors “Tord Romstad”, etc. (The fact that you can load the engine file and view the engine options looks promising!)
10) Now, play a game with this new engine. Nothing happens! The engine won’t make a move.
11) If you try to run an Engine Match with this engine, you’ll get this error message “Stockfish DD has unexpectedly quit”.

Has anyone else been successful in getting Windows engines to run on the Mac? Or, is there possibly a fix the Hiarcs team could make in the next version of HCE to get this to work?

Regards,
-Eric

[Mark Uniacke]

I would suggest using native Mac chess engines on the Mac under HCE instead of trying to get Windows engines working on a Mac using some 3rd party translation layer.