Greetings,
I've been trying to think of ways to give engines their own book when running engine matches in Explorer on a Mac. One the last modifications to Polyglot was to support UCI, so that it could be used to provide an opening book for UCI engines that don't support OwnBook, like Stockfish 6, Firenzina, and Gull. However, Polyglot seems to require a custom command line for at least specifying its INI file. As it stands, Explorer can't add Polyglot as a UCI engine without rebuilding it to use a hard-coded INI file.
Has any other Explorer user been able to use Polyglot or some other UCI shim to provide an opening book for another UCI engine?
Alternatively, a feature request. Have Explorer itself optionally provide one if its supported books or a Polyglot book as part of per-engine configuration. Last we heard in 2013, Mark had acknowledged this as a low-priority feature request.
Can Explorer use Polyglot?
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h.g.muller
- Member
- Posts: 32
- Joined: Fri Jan 09, 2009 11:14 am
- Location: Amsterdam
Note that Polyglot already does use a hard-coded ini file: polyglot.ini in the current directory. Only when its command line specifies another filename, or the option -noini, it would be prevented from using ./polyglot.ini .
So the commonly used solution to this problem is to create a separate folder for each engine you want to run through Polyglot, and put a copy of polyglot.exe together with a polyglot.ini file for the desired engine there. By having the GUI invoke that polyglot.exe you would then be able to run the engine. The folder used for this could be the same as those where the engine .exe and possible support files for it are.
In fact you could even avoid making copies of polyglot.exe, as it is perfectly possible to start programs that are not in the current directory. The only thing that is important is that the directory is set to the folder where the polyglot.ini is before Polyglot gets launched (which should be done by the GUI). If polyglot.exe is in the parent folder of all such directories, you could then run Polyglot with the command ../polyglot.exe . Or, when it is compliantly installed, as /usr/local/bin/polyglot .
So the commonly used solution to this problem is to create a separate folder for each engine you want to run through Polyglot, and put a copy of polyglot.exe together with a polyglot.ini file for the desired engine there. By having the GUI invoke that polyglot.exe you would then be able to run the engine. The folder used for this could be the same as those where the engine .exe and possible support files for it are.
In fact you could even avoid making copies of polyglot.exe, as it is perfectly possible to start programs that are not in the current directory. The only thing that is important is that the directory is set to the folder where the polyglot.ini is before Polyglot gets launched (which should be done by the GUI). If polyglot.exe is in the parent folder of all such directories, you could then run Polyglot with the command ../polyglot.exe . Or, when it is compliantly installed, as /usr/local/bin/polyglot .