[XBoard-devel] Question: bughouse support

[Arun Persaud]

Hi,

got a question about the best way to add some bughouse support, if you 
not interested in it, just skip this email :) it got a bit longer than I 
thought, sorry... ;)

a while ago I added some bughouse support to my version of xboard (for 
FICS). I just added in backend.c a parser in read_from_ics which looks 
out for thinks like:

if(looking_at(buf,&i, "* agrees to be your partner")|| ... or other 
bughouse related messages

and opens a second xboard with StarChildProcess (not iff already running 
of course). I then logged in a guest and started following the partner 
game of either me or if I observe a game of that guys partner... the 
moment the game was over and an unobsever or end of partnership was 
announced it closed the second window. Worked quite well for me, but I 
just tried it out again(after not playing bughouse online for a while) 
and found out that FICS closed the guest accounts :( which kills my 
bughouse support...

now I guess, if the quick and dirty hack with the guest account wouldn't 
have worked, I would have realised that I could have just done 
everything in one FICS session: start the second window as usual, 
observe partners game my own session, forward positions of partners game 
to second board... I just had another look at the source and figured 
that I could find my partners game by adding some lines to

    if (looking_at(buf, &i, "* *vs. * *--- *")) {...

which is also in read_from_ics to check if it's my partners game... but 
I'm not sure where to go from there.

questions:

A) how would I get the second board into ics mode, so that it also 
checks read_from_ics, in which case I guess I could just copy the move 
info into the FDin of that process and it would automatically be 
displayed... or is there another way to get xboard parse game positions 
which come from an ICS?

B) I would need to store the name of the bughouse partner somewhere, 
where would be the right place? gameInfo is just valid for on game, or? 
But putting it in appData, doesn't sound right either...

C) I added a boolean to appData to check if the second window is open or 
not. is that where it should be?

I wouldn't mind posting the patch, if I get it to work... but since I 
don't have much time and am not that familiar with the xboard-code it 
might take a while...I also don't have access to ICS and to FICS only, 
so I can't really test it, same goes for other OS than linux...

I think xboard could need some more bughouse support though ;) and this 
should be a relatively easy thing, which I think I could add... BTW: 
would this way be platfrom independent(e.g. using StartChildProcess)?
Really nice IMHO would be a jail with images of the pieces your partner 
has captures and not haveing it in the window-title.... ;)

Thanks
        ARUN -- is happy to see that work on xboard continues!