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miIGU 0.5.6.2

News: miIGU now has more features than Chess Vision Trainer!

miIGU (pronounced me-e-goo) stands for "mi interfaz gráfica de usuario", simply the Spanish for "my graphical user's interface." It's a GUI for UCI engines, specially designed to be a chess vision, combination and blindfolded chess training tool.

History
Features
ToDo
Known issues
Prerequisites
Download
Donations
Contact

History

Some day I found in the Internet advertising of a software called Chess Vision Trainer. After reading it, I liked the idea behind that program, so I bought it. It was much more than those GUIs that only have a check box captioned "blindfold" and when you activate it the only thing that happens is chessmen disappearing. Chess Vision Trainer (CVT) has wonderful additional features: it displays a delayed board in relation to current position of a game, forcing the player to always calculate, with a consequent enhancement of his/her combinatoric vision; besides, it let hide partial board ares in order of making blindfolded training to be gradual.

It's a great piece of software, but it began to lose my favor. The matter is that CVT has those innovative features not present in any GUI, but, at the same time, it lacks very basic features. It doesn't support Winboard, nor UCI, its opening book is a tiny one, can't save/read PGN, doesn't support time controls.

For those reasons, I abandoned it. Then I thougth that a wonderful idea would be if CVT features had been added to some freeware or open source GUI, like eBoard, Xboard, or Arena. I suggested that in Talkchess and Rybka fora, but the only answer I got was from Odd Gunnar Malin, programmer of PolarChess, telling me that PolarChess does support delays, so I downloaded, but... it only allows 4 ply delays... not enough.

Finally, I put myself, just a hobbyist programmer, to develop on my own this project. The intention I have is to share it for free. Nowadays, progress has been small. I've got only my personal version, lacking a lot of features (i.e., it's only a pre-alpha). But, I will continue on it, uploading all pre-alphas, alphas, betas and, hopefully, some day a stable version.

Update: finally Rybka Aquarium team gave me a response: the first release will not include training capabilities. So, miIGU has future. Hope it will be useful to you.

Features

Notes:

  1. The root in the XML opening book is named "Libro", inside nodes are called "Posición" with an attribute "FEN." Every "Posición" contains the moves for that specific FEN coded position, those moves are inside nodes named "Jugada" (move), with attribute "Calificación" (percentage of success of a given move) and as inner text the move itself in computer notation (e.g. g1f3).
  2. To delete an opening book move use right mouse button.
  3. Configuracion.xml contains the language ("idioma") (EN or ES), the path to last UCI engine ("motor"), player's data, the last delay used, top score reached by a player and the last time control.
  4. Minimum score by move (playing without delay, no hidden squares) is half point (0.48, to be exact). Maximum is 5 (playing with hidden board). If someone feels curious about it, the fomula is

    0.48 + (hiddenSquares * 0.055) + ((1 - delay / 64) * (delay * 0.11))

    where, hiddesSquares are the total squares marked "?" in the Areas dialog box.

  5. In order to use it on Linux, you need writing permission for the miIGU folder, and execution permission for the Fruit engine (use chmod)

ToDo

Known issues

Prerequisites

Tested on Windows 98 SE, Windows XP, Windows Vista and OpenSUSE 10.3 (on Mono 1.9).

Downloads

Last build June 12th, 2008.

Windows (with Toga II 1.4 beta5c)

Linux (with Fruit 2.3.1 para Linux)

Donations (via PayPal)

 

 

Contact

I apologize for not introduce myself before. My name is José Portillo Parra. You can contact me at:

luna.azul.ti@gmail.com

Best regards.

 

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