Engine Updates

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Down chess websites
Averno site down for 47 days
BabyChess site down today
Dann Corbit site down right now
Pierre site down for 80 days
ZebraChess site down again
All 110mb sites back up (ChessGUI, Matacz)

Chess News

Polyglot 1.4.50b
Michel Van den Bergh's Linux and Windows builds based on Fonzy Bluemers modification
of Fabien Letouzey's Polyglot with original work and bugfixes
- Change in architecture. Persistence is disabled. The user is required to
push the "Save" button explicitly to save the settings. What is retained is
that in case PG is invoked with -noini (or as a special exception for WB 4.4.0
when the config files are polyglot_1st.ini or polyglot_2nd.ini) then PG uses a
default config file whose name is derived from the engine name
- New option: OnlyWbOptions (default: true). Restrict the options that PG
sends to those that are potentially useful for WinBoard
- Try to detect if the engine is not an UCI engine
http://alpha.uhasselt.be/Research/Algebra/Toga/polyglot-release/

Chessdiagrammer 5.1 Build 1011
Chess Diagram creator
http://www.chessdiagrammer.com/cdg_startpage.html

Patrick Buchmann Thematic books
books are in Chessbase's ctg format
- D70-99 Grunfeld Defense
- E12-19 Queen's Indian Defense
http://americanfoot.free.fr/echecs/ctg-thematique.htm

Bonus Notifications (free stuff)

WPG System64 1.4b
free open source native 64-bit programming tool bundle for Windows x64
includes:
- Mingw-w64(GCC 4.41/4.5.0 for Win32/64) with full extensive toolchain
- Sun Java SDK x64 (Sun Java JRE6), Apache Ant 1.7.1 (Java 'Make')
- Active Perl 5.10 x64
- Active Python 2.6.2.2 x64
- Silksubversion 1.6.3
- Gimp, GTK+, CodeBlocks
- much, much more
http://www.cadforte.com/system64.html
http://www.cadforte.com/downloads/system64/Release4/changelog.txt (changelog)

SQLite 3.6.18
open source database; written in C; small, stable, and powerful
- better optimizization for join command
- added recusive triggers
- bugfixes for rare and obscure errors
http://www.sqlite.org/download.html (download)
http://www.sqlite.org/releaselog/3_6_18.html (releaselog)

Avant Browser 11.7, build 37
free web browser designed to expand Internet Explorer features
http://www.avantbrowser.com/

Vista Codec Package 5.4.2
free codec package for Windows XP or Vista
http://shark007.net/vistacodecpackage.html

VirtualBox 3.0.6.52128
open source; run multiple operating systems on the same computer
http://www.virtualbox.org/

Hi Ron

just for my interest - how long must a webside of an engine be down before you put it on retreated-list

Hi Ron

just for my interest - how long must a webside of an engine be down before you put it on retreated-list

That's a good question, Gerhard! I have no answer for you. Certainly two of those engines (Averno and Pierre) belong on the retreated engine list, but I won't do that until I do a thorough search on the web making sure that these engines have not moved to a new, unannounced homepage.

Averno's page was on Geocities, but Yahoo is closing down all of Geocities (has already closed it?). There is the chance that the author is not aware of this and thinks the site is still up.

Things look worse for Pierre. If there is no new site, then almost certainly it is a retreated engine.

Ron