Scid vs. PC

Shane's Chess Information Database is a powerful Chess Toolkit, with which one can create huge databases, run chess engines, and play casual games against the computer or online with the Free Internet Chess Server. It was originally written by Shane Hudson , and has received strong contribution from Pascal Georges and others.

Scid vs. PC began with bug-fixes for the computer-versus-player features of Scid (hence the name), but has evolved into a solid alternative with many new features and interfaces. The project is authored by Stevenaaus and numerous contributors (thanks).

See changes for a comprehensive changelog, or the gallery for some screenshots..

New and Improved Features

include

• Overhauled and customizable interface.
• Engine versus engine computer tournaments.
• Extra search features, including move, end-of-game, and stalemate/checkmate searches.
• Drag+Drop file opens for Windows and Linux.
• Rewritten Gamelist widget with convenient context menus and buttons, and integrated Database Switcher.
• Improved Computer Game and FICS features, including premove, and simultaneous observed games.
• Many chess engine improvements, including max-ply option, an unlimited number of engines running, and the function hot-keys can be explicitly set.
• New EPD search and analyze features.
• Tri-coloured Tree bar-graphs, and options for more or less statistics.
• Ratings Graph can show multiple players, and Score graph is an attractive bar graph.
• Improved Book windows, including book compare, and remove move features.
• Redone Button and Tool bars.
• The Chessboard/Pieces config widget has been overhauled, and includes support for custom tilesand pieces.
• Browse multiple games.
• Recent Game and Player-info histories.
• Bug tested Undo and Redo features.
• The Help index is meaningful to new users, with links to the game's main features.
• Clickable Variation Arrows, and Paste Variation feature.
• A user friendly Annotation feature, with search-to-depth feature.
• Better support for UTF and Latin character sets in PGN export/imports.
• Improved and more powerful Tree Mask feature.
• Chess variants are unsupported except for Chess960/Fischer Chess - which is supported by a source-code patch.

Source scid_vs_pc-4.25.tgz

Windows Scid vs PC-4.25.exe

Windows 64 bit Scid vs PC-4.25.x64.exe

Mac ScidvsMac-4.25.dmg

Mac 64 bit (beta) ScidvsMac-4.25.x64.dmg

Other resources

The latest code is available from subversion https://sourceforge.net/p/scidvspc/code/HEAD/tree/

Other project files , including german / deutsch versions.

Linux , Unix

Installing from source is reccommended, though there exists deb packages of some versions (from third parties) in the linux packages

Scid vs. PC requires Wish (Tcl/Tk) 8.6 or later and a C++ compiler.

Example packages required include "tcl, tk, tcl-dev, tk-dev" and "gcc, g++ , libstdc++"; but will vary with your distribution.

The default installation directory is /usr/local, which is generally empty, but any version of Scid here will be overwritten. To install into /usr (for eg) use ./configure BINDIR=/usr/bin/ SHAREDIR=/usr/share/scid/

Installing from source:

---

tar -xzf scid_vs_pc-4.25.tgz
cd scid_vs_pc-4.25
./configure
sudo make install
scid

---

Extra chess pieces (such as Berlin) are now enabled by default for Wish 8.6, but 8.5 requires installing TkImg. Sound support requires the buggy library Snack.
If your distro does not provide these packages ("tkimg", "tcl-snack"), you can install from source using these links (both of which have fixes applied).
TkImg, Snack.

Note Wish 8.5.10 has severe bugs, and many versions of Tk-8.6.x have *severe* memory leaks. To avoid many of these leaks, or simply for a performance boost, compile with Gregor's tk::text (patches/gregors_tktext_inline.patch).

Windows

Windows installation simply requires downloading the executable, and following the prompts.

The configuration files, including the chess engine list, are stored in the Scid-vs-PC\bin\config directory, and may be copied over from old versions to make upgrading easier. If the app is installed in "Program Files" On Windows 7, the config files are mirrored in C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Scid vs PC

Our main windows build system is MinGW and Makefile.mingw. We also have a Makefile.vc for visual studio, but it does not get updated too often.

Mac OS X

The ScidvsMac-4.25 app should include everything you need. Simply drag and drop the App into /Applications (or similar).

Due to technical build reasons, only Mac OSX 10.10 and later are supported. Previous versions (including Snow Leopard) should install Scid vs Mac 4.16). Additionally, Newer macOS have removed 32-bit app support, and are only supported by our beta ScidvsMac-x64 app, which is not as robust as the 32 bit version.

To compile from source - once you have XCode installed - please read ScidvsMac-HowTo.rtfd in the source tarball for some older information.

Users upgrading may have to remove (or edit) $HOME/.scidvspc/config/engines.dat to properly configure the chess engines.

July 2017

Thanks to (our best bug reporter) Ileano for finding a bug in the new Best-Games/Browser feature. I've made a 4.18.1 point release to include the fix. This version also includes a minor PGN import fix.

October 2016

4.17 has a bit of a tough life, and is being re-released with a bug fix 28th October. Otherwise, it is an exciting release for hackers, with patches for chess960 and Gregors speedy tkText rewrite.

April 2015

Exciting to have some usability fixes for the Tree Mask. Hopefully this feature will start to get some real use.

April, 2013

Finally have a docked windows feature. It's a damn complicated thing, but i am fond of it.

September, 2012

I've been messing with OS X and noticed an issue with the 4.8 build - which was made on Snow Leopard. Luckily i've kepy my OS X 10.5 around, and have made a new build with it (which also includes PPC support). Macs are lovely things .... when they work.

March, 2012

Big effort by Gregor to write Drag and Drop support for Scidb and ScidvsPC ! Thanks. FICS is looking great too.

February 14, 2012

4.7 is out and includes tree bar-graphs, and the ability to observe multiple games in FICS.

September 29, 2011

Jiri Pavlovsky has made a windows installer. It's a nice piece of software :) Big thank-you. And we now have undo and redo features.

July 8, 2011

Thanks to Gilles for the web page restructure and OS X testing. Gregor Cramer http://scidb.sf.net has contributed a PGN figurine feature.

April 19, 2011

A belated thanks to Lee from Sourceforge for this article.

December 10, 2010

Scid vs. PC 4.2 includes support for Scid's si4 db format.

July 3, 2010

For the tenth release I've adopted verison number 4.0 . It includes a new Computer Tournament feature (thanks to some UCI snippets from Fulvio) and the Gamelist Widget is finally up-to-speed for large databases.

April 19, 2010

Release 3.6.26.9 includes a Fics accept/decline offers widget.

December 20, 2009

Thanks to Dorothy for making me a Mac DMG package with this release , 3.6.26.8.

August 16, 2009

With 3.6.26.6 I've fixed Phalanx's illegal castling. There is also changes to the Setup board and Toolbar configuration widgets.

July 17, 2009

3.6.26.5 - New Gamelist widget, and re-fashioned main buttons. Project's looking quite solid :->

June 23, 2009

The monkey on my back has really been having a good time. This release includes changes to the Gameinfo, Comment Editor, and Board Style widgets, some new chess pieces, colour schemes and tiles. Thanks to Michal and Alex for feedback.

June 4, 2009

Well, the html is up, and i've got a couple of files in the downloads section. My project is fairly modest fork of Scid ... just rewriting Tk widgets when i get the urge.

Scid vs. PC 4.25

• Extra Tags - bulk add Extra Tag feature.
• Enable pattern matching in the Name Editor.
• Show Comments in Game Preview/Browser windows, change colours to match PGN, and ControlKey+Load does not close the Browser window.
• LaTex Game Export - draw Marks in chess diagrams, indent variations, and other minor changes (from Bruno).
• Crosstable: add clickable column headings for Nationality, Rating and Score.
• Engine Annotation - Score last move in case of checkmate (and stalemate).
• Tree mask - Options to hide Markers (default), disable tooltips, and make the mask move colour steelblue.
• Engine - Right-clicking AddAllVars adds all first moves only.
• Comment Editor - Remove 'Apply' button, instead automatically apply miniboard changes. Add wheelmouse move-forward/back bindings.
• Player Info - don't show 'filtered games' stats if they duplicate the normal stats.
• Make the Tree Bargraph height similar to the font height (for high def displays).
• Add a few Keypad bindings, re suggestion from Patrick.
• Pressing Home-key inside a variation moves to var start instead of game start.


General Bugs
• Twin Game checker minor fixes.
• Some spinboxes (annotate(blunder)) had erroneous error checking and threw exceptions.
• Some graphs didn't show the correct final/current year, gah!.
• Minor optable.tcl fixes/clean-up. Opening Table max games is now 100,000 (was 25,000).
• Add current decade to Opening report Current popularity.
• EPD analysis hardening.
• For a few widgets - dont scroll text windows when using control-scroll to alter font size.
• Update stats/etc on Game quickSave.

Scid vs. PC 4.24

• Gamelist (and Best games) 'Copy to filter' context-menu/feature.
• Support for Graham O'Neill's (UCI engine) eboard drivers.
• New 'Country' feature/option for the Player Finder (though it's slow with big databases).
• Global background colour option, and use BWidget::Selectcolor (if found) on Linux.
• Player Ratings Graph now has a history context menu, and Player Info binding for the Player Name.
• Arrows in the small engine boards can now be clicked to add moves, and fix these arrows with Xboard engines and MultiPV.
• Big toolbar icons option, and a new GameInfo toolbar icon.
• Gamelist (and Best games) have an option for custom font (Selectable in the Switcher context menu - using the Small Font).
• Some comment editor / drawing improvements : Support for Chessbase arrow/squares diagrams. Shift+Button now draws the last symbol from the commenteditor (instead of always a full square). Change circle size..
  
  
• Reinstate the Suggested Move feature.
• Simplify batch annotation feature.
• FICS - Enable use of zseal (an opensource timeseal).
• Some Edit menus were missing undo points.
• Undo for clipbase copy and paste was kindof broken / leaky.
• Add sanity checks for CC and CXX to configure.
• Little colour theme change, and high DPI doco, from Aditya's wordpress blog ;>.
• Explicitly kill all engines when program close and at program exit, be nice and wait a little for uci (and eboard) engines to close.
• Add a check for Carbon macOS, and don't enable transient noborder for engine/gamelist popups if Cocoa.
• Text-search / FlashEntryBox improvements.
• Disable the nasty, persistent ComboBox entry highlighting after selection.

Scid vs. PC 4.23

• Game move/reorder feature - From the gamelist context menu it is possible to move single games to any position in the DB. Seems robust, but please backup DBs. Short 'moves' only require a few si4 writes, longer ones basically rewrite the entire si4 file, and if interupted DB will be broken.
  
  
• Browse multiple games feature - please read help topic.
• Player Ratings graph can now (optionally) use the ratings history in the spelling "ratings.ssp" file.
• New Online tablebase lookups by Michael Brown (lokasoft bases are gone), and other minor tablebase window tweaks.
• PGN Window has a new 'Delete Comment' context menu.
• MS Windows bugfix - can now have sg4 files larger than 2gb.
• Allow for globbing/wildcard matches in the Name Editor date fields.
• Time graph: when we are calulating movetimes from %clk, allow for a TimeControl tag.
• Give the comment editor some decent colours, and increase board size.
• Player vs UCI Game - nodes do not have to be in 1000s (helpful for some new chess engines).
• Tree mask/cache - change 'fill with base' to 'fill with filter', speed up mask fill, and fix up the progress window..
• Don't auto-focus text widget in comment editor as there may be timing related side effects.
  
  
• New treeviewFont.diff patch which allows the gamelist font to be configured (system Small font).
• Nicer board arrows.
• Ensure Stockfish w/d/l percentiles total 100 - author Michael.
• Better allign the UCI config window widgets - author Aditya.
• Epd load random position (Control-?).

Scid vs. PC 4.22

• Show Stockfish Win/Draw/Loss (as White/Draw/Black) infos in information window.
• Add an 'Extra Tags' field to the header search (eg 'Annotator').
• Revamp colours and size of the Comment Editor.
• New 'Highlight' colour option (affects crosstable, reports, pgn moves and name-editor).
• Animate the Rook in Castling. (author Uwe - Nice).
• Engine analysis: option to wrap long lines.
• Engine annotation: option to disable adding an end-of-game variation.
• Playing an opening against an UCI engine - openings can be imported from the ECO Window.
• Improve the tree training feature by automatically enabling Trial mode.
• Minor tweaks to the spacing in long comments in the PGN and Gameinfo windows..
• Export Games: add option to disable inserting newlines every 80 chars or so.
• Serious game: When using book, leave a comment when book is exited / exhausted.
• Add an undo point at the start of every annotation game.
• Add a Switcher menu item to show/hide the gamelist buttonbar.
• Update Player Data (spelling) file.
  
  
• Help and translation updates.
• Book tuning tweaks.
• Graph window tweaks.
• ECO window tweaks.
  
  Bug Fixes
• The Gamelist 'next moves' feature didn't work for transpositions at differing depths.
• Remember arrow lengths/widths.
• Batch stripping comments/vars could sometimes break the namebase.
• Fix / enable hiding of 'Colored Squares and Arrows' on the main board.
• Windows drag and drop typo/fix from Oz.

Scid vs. PC 4.21

• Gamelist (and Best Games) can now show 'Next Moves' instead of just the 'Opening Moves' if the tree is open and adjusting filter.
• Text foreground colour option for listboxes and text windows. (and remove the 'global' colour option which is too rough).
• Fics: allow moves made by examiners to be seen by other examiners/observers, and fix longstanding init fail.
• Mac: 64 bit macOS port. Poor performance but mostly working.
  
  Engines
• Allow multiple engine logs at once, which can be nicely updated in real-time (and bind 'space' to engine stop/start).
• Small engine boards now have an alternative display mode: Arrow shows best move.
• Free up right-click for windows 'copy text'. (Use middle click instead for toggling analysis modes).
• Can now always show 'Infos' via an option in the main Engine config widget.
• Low level support for alternative "GO" modes for UCI engines. (::uci::goCommand).
• Give transient engine popup buttons the same bindings as their originals.
  
  EPD Window
• New annotaion/analyze features (UCI only): Count best moves and (optionally) show/store results. Allow selecting the engine.
• New 'find' entrybox searches EPD file for matching text.
• Basic EPD/FEN export feature.
• Menu rearranges, including enabling more translations, and changing menubuttons to standard menu widgets.
• Paste analysis now removes previous analysis opcodes.
• Bind space in listbox to start/stop engine.
  
  Minor
• Tree window - options to hide buttonbar, and always 'Adjust' filter.
• Display a board in the Player Report (if applicable).
• Full German help update from Christian.
• Improve Gamelist 'see' issues.
• Brazil-Portuguese language update from Gilberto de Almeida Peres.
• Opening Books - don't clobber existing game mainline with book import (was 'export'). Unneeded 'update -pgn' was slowing everything down too.
• Refresh score graph at end of fics game.
• Pressing End key twice always goes to game end.
• Show Tux in the comment editor, and update the gifs.
• Update chess 960 patch.
• New flip board button.
• scidt reverse sort feature. Also - don't accept empty sort criteria, and accept 'si4' filenames.
• Don't ask to 'Save Game' if the game length is zero, and try to stop ECO window clobbering (any) game changes (New 'sc_game info halfmoves' command).
  
  Bugfixes
• PGN - Properly handle all level of var indentation.
• Windows: Fix extra text in the Player Info windows.
• Fix Tree cache getting saved with app close.

Scid vs. PC 4.20

• The Score Graph can now display move-times (using "%emt" and "%clk" pgn values).
• Option to display a black rectangle for the "selected square" instead of a coloured square (Options->Moves->ColorSelected).
• Several translation updates including a complete German help file from Christian Opitz.
• The Setup Board window now has a coordinate axis and a flip button.
• Computer Tournament - Don't enforce a ten-engine limit, have a new statusbar to show progress and the winner, include Uwe Klimmek's carousel scheduling.
• EPD rewrite from Bonnie A. - Annotations are now compliant with the EPD specification, Flips the board to side-to-move, other bug fixes.
• In Game Annotation, don't miss analysing last-move blunders.
• The ECO finder has a basic "Find Opening by Name" feature.
• A quick Piece Position Search implemented using CQL.
• Gameinfo window always shows a rehoned "Material Advantage" value.
• Board Options window can now display all custom piecesets in a gridded manner, and also highlights the current piece style.
• FICs - Automatically store move-times, some changes to the button/font, and don't store adminBOT tells.
• Tree Mask - Add 'unfold' option to the Mask window, and fix up some allignment/font issues.
• Update the Spelling file with Uwe's 2018 update.
• Pressing 'End' key moves to end-of-variation (if in var) instead of end-of-game.
• Minor Book Window fixes - enable undo, remove the arrow buttons (use wheelmouse instead), and properly name and document the 'Other Moves' button.
  
  
• Analysis Engines: pressing keys 1 to 5 sets PV.
• Set undo point when marking squares.
• Remove Suggested Moves feature.
• Update Gregors tktext patch to current (2018-08-13).
• Xboard protocol fixes: setboard should come after analyze, send 'nopost' to xboard engines in comp mode, and acknowledge 'my move' in analysis, as sometimes xboard engines (scidlet) dont send any other infos.
• Relocate a couple of colour option menus to their proper windows (Crosstable and Score Graph).
• In PGN import, handle the case when there are two comments for a single move.
  
  Bug fixes
• Fix serious built-in-engine and PGN-import errors.
• Tree - the greying of the tree moves (if the progressbar is hidden) disabled the tree mask's move colouring.
• Disable gamelist flag/delete menus if read-only.
• Mate in N fix and hardening.
• Ignore Country names if they dont look right in the gamelist and database sort.
• Disable MS Windows screenshot feature (broken in Tk).

Scid vs. PC 4.19

• New 'Default Databases' feature (Options->Save Bases as Default).
• CQL 5.2 search feature (Search->CQL). Thanks Lionel and CQL authors.
• General search can now match any (non-hidden) pre-game or final move Comment.
• Export Scid Flags feature.
• Big speed up for bulk Strip Comments/Variations feature. (Also make the 'Stop' button work).
• Improvements to loading games at the correct position (resolve a conflict between the tree window and search results), and small Tree speed-up.
• Remove 'Magnetic' for Paul's chess pieces. New 'Ascii' chess pieces (thanks HGM) and 'Green' colour scheme.
• New Turkish translation (thanks Ali Sen).
  
  
• Right-clicking button bar changes, including right-click Window button shows Splash window.
• Some tree tweaks and doco updates, and tree Fast+Slow mode now doesn't break the win/lose graph.
• Tweak progress bar update frequencies (base export, game copy).
• OS X has a faster build.
• New Windows build system from Oz.
• A new script, 'sc_filter_pgn', which filters multiple PGN files for games matching a certain position.
• FICS - Offers Graph is disabled while playing a game. Change the censor button a little, and control+censor censors person chatting to you.
• Escape key in main board cancels piece dragging/move.
• Input engine fixes (DGT board). Widget now resizes ok, and bitmaps display properly on OS X. Thanks to Davy De Roeck for debugging it on OS X.
  
  Bug Fixes
• Fixes regarding other language piece letters.
• Fix up showing the first gamelist/game in searches.
• Fix up the days of the months in the calender widget.
• Fix up window placement on multi display desktops.
• Best games 'Reset Column titles' was broke.
• sc_game startPos segfaults if !HasNonStandardStart.

Scid vs. PC 4.18

• New Best Games widget, similar to the Gamelist.
• Score Graph now highlights the current move.
• New annotation feature: Show missed/shorter mates.
• A little new Gamelist button to reveal hidden/squeezed buttons (finally!).
• The GameInfo Window has a right-click menu, and other minor menu changes.
• Basic support for horizontal scrolling (in gamelist, crosstable and bestgames) for mousewheel buttons with horizontal capability.
• Finnish translation, from Mika Kaakinen.



• Engines: if an engine shows a Mating line, show the whole line in analysis window, disregarding Max-Ply variable.
• Don't show an error message when importing null PGN tags... too verbose.
• Fics: try to handle case when move is made after run out of time. (We don't want to mark the game as out of sync).
• Minor Translation, Mask and Fics tweaks.
• Hide Board resize buttons in docked mode if auto-resize is enabled.
• Revert Control-b binding to Book window.
• Focus the text box of Comment Editor when raised.
• Show a busy cursor when backing-up databases in the finder.
• Game Save: also use previous Round with the 'Use Previous' button/feature.
• Running Engine 1 in the statusbar needs special handling if using docking, as it cannot be withdrawn properly and was confusing before.
• Show correct position in the pgn window after adding a new var/move.
• Show PGN scrollbar by default.


Bug Fixes
• Redock Windows after they have been undocked then destroyed. Before, such windows were remade undocked, and *without* menus.
• Keep comments when truncating game from start.
• Fix broken 'Copy' button in Engine's config window.
• Promoting variations didn't handle precomments.

Scid vs. PC 4.17

• Analysis/Engine window.
• * Show checkmate/stalemate messages instead of sending 'no-move positions' to engine.
• * In engine configuration window the 'Date' field of an engine is now its exe modification time (mtime).
• * Speed enhancements for processing UCI engine moves (pv).
  
  Gregor's improvements to the player and tournament finders (which Shane never implemented properly).
• * Previously - only the *first* 50 tournaments were used (eg) when looking for the 50 tournaments with most players.
• * Compilers must now support c++0x / c++11.
  
  
• Custom player photos (Place correctly named gifs in $HOME/.scidvspc/photos or bin/photos).
• Resign button for playing UCI engines and Phalanx, analog clocks can now be hidden ('x' button in the white clock), and add the 'Skill Level' to the pgn header (eg - as used by Stockfish).
• A patch to include Gregor's tk::text improvements.
• New Chess 960 patch! Thanks to Britton Farrar, who now has a project at https://github.com/brittonf/scid-vs-variants.
• New 'Under Promotion' search item in General Search.
• Computer Tournament: when 'First engine plays others', flip board to show games from first engine's view.
• Flip game browser if matches myPlayerNames.
• Clipbase game limit is now 5,000,000, and game undo buffer is 20.
• Chess Pieces: remove 12 piece-set limit, and adventurer and kingdom pieces. Reinstate old Merida1 as Merida3.
• Row colour is now configurable for Player/Tourney/DB finders and Crosstable rows.
  
  Fics
• * Offers graph is updated in a better manner.
• * Save game and add message disconnected while playing.
• * Top three buttons are now configurable.
• * Add a 'follow+' command, which automatically saves followed games.
  
  
• Tweak Find Best Move feature, which now also recognizes non-standard starts.
• Game Save dialog: extend use of 'Use prev tags' to 'Use previous' (for Names, Site, Event, Elo, dates).
• Switcher - replace readonly foreground color with a '(readonly)' message, and add a 'Confirm Copy' option menu.
• Disable tree updates while annotating games and computer tournament.
• Tree: Instead of having a 'stop' button, grey the tree text when updating (if progressBar is hidden).
• Change a few shortcuts. control-b board colours. control-B setup board. control-G general search.
• Control-TrialMode button, automatically adds a null move, and tweak the trial mode button pic.
• Gregors namebase hardening.
• PGN Import now converts any empty Name/Event/Site/Round tags to '?' (according to pgn standard, these should not be empty).
• Minor fixes for Setup Board.
• Allow Merging Games with non standard starts.
• Bind pressing 'vv' keys to enter first variation.
• Remove Crafty specific command 'mn', and it seems unsupported in Crafty 25.
• In the tree window, when deselecting "Adjust Games", we now keep the current gamelist/filter.
• Make hideNextMove non-persistent.
• Right clicking 'Exit Var' button will exit all vars.
  
  Bug fixes
• Fix a nasty memory leak (in PgnParser).
• Fix name counts when using globbing in the name editor.
• Fix Mate-in-N (Tactics) bug.
• Some charsetconverter (internationalisation) fixes from Gregor.
• Removed xdg-open for opening URLs which just doesnt work for me.
• Tree info button (short display) was broke.
• Bugfixes for compiling on some linux platforms (including Raspberry Pi 2).
• Some clock fixes. Digital clock was busted (counting up). CompTournament clocks are now digital only.
• Stop tacgame/phalanx from failing to restart.

Scid vs. PC 4.16

• New Checkmate/Stalemate general search option.
• Make fics premove work properly, and with promotion.
• New Switcher menus to Open Tree/Best Games/Change Icon, and negate any open base filter.
• The Best Games window can now be unsorted (on ELO).
• Tree window has a short-display option (default is on).
• New Merida1 piece set with large sizes (from Richard).
• Change the colours of switcher current-base and book/book-tuning/tree next-moves.
• Update all latex export features from Chess12 to the modern Skak (author Richard Ashwell) and add Latex previews for game exports (linux only).
• Some Opening-Report and Player-Report fixes, and fix the Opening-Table options window.
• Show the custom flag names in the statusbar.
• Player Info: Add an extra 'Filter Games' hyperlink.
• Tournament finder: Change behaviour re showing tournament crosstable.
• Portugese update from G. Silva. Spanish update from Benigno.
• Add 50 move draw detection to Phalanx and UCI computer games.
• And new fics 'smoves+' command stores move-time (%emt fields).
  
  Bug fixes
• Export PGN bugfix introduced in 4.15.
• Properly handle OpenRecentAsTree, if base is already opened.
• 'Round' wasn't getting shown in the gameinfo if Date was unset.
• Annotation: try to handle zero move games.
• Work aroud for occasional Tcl issue which affects piece dragging.
• Game Save dialog didn't have translations.
• Remove a heap of compiler warnings.
• Tournament finder was showing incorrect number of games.

Scid vs. PC 4.15

Engines
• Limit engine ply option.
• Bind Control+Enter to add whole line.
• Tweak variation creation to avoid occasional var staggering.
• Show 'Ponder' as a UCI configuration option (now that engines may play with Ponder on).
• For the addmove button '+'. If move exists, just move::Forward.
  
  Annotation
• Options for the score format (which allows them to be hidden in the PGN window).
• When finished annotating game, move to last move (instead of sometime staying at second last move).
• Dont show out-of-book messages for non-standard starts.
• Use-book feature didn't work under certain condition.
  
  Gamelist Window
• Columns can now be reordered, hidden, or right/left alligned (right-click column titles).
• Replace the Flag button with context menus.
• Left/right keys scroll the gamelist view.
• 'Merge Game' menu item (patch only).
  
  Tree
• When deselecting 'Adjust Filter', make the current adjusted filter remain.
• Fix up a few tree translations/text formatting issues.
• Option to show/hide the progress bar. (On OS X, the progressbar makes searches much slower).
• Fix unusual coredump closing unused tree.
  
  Spelling
• Make Spellcheck interuptible, and remove limit of 2000.
• Update spelling file against Franz' June 2015 release.
• Skip spelling date check if game has no date.
• Tweak AddEloRatings feature to work properly with FIDE rating data newer than 2012.
• Don't ask confirmation of spellchecking clipbase.
  
  UTF-8 support (from Gregor)
• Databases can now be exported to PGN using either UTF-8 or Latin-1 character sets.
• Detect correct charset of imported pgn and convert all to utf 'Avoiding a mix of character sets inside a database.'.
• Support for ChessBase proprietary character set in PGN header.
  
  FICS
• Add flip-board buttons to the mini observed games.
• Add a 10 minute line to offers graph.
• Hack to destroy the results messageBox if we are being 'rematched' or challenged.
• Unhide fics boards when a new observed game is announced.
• New takeback code (better, but needs more work).
• Add a 'Time' tag.
  
  Computer Tournament
• Remember selected engines when changing number of engines.
• Use new is-check routine for stalemate detection (sc_pos analyze could cause core dumps).
• Change the tournament per-game time controls from min/secs to secs/secs (base/incr).
• Don't add time increment for in-book moves.
  
  Translations
• Update for French from Dale Cannon.
• Minor Portugese update from martinus.
  
  Player Info
• Player Info history feature (right click window).
• Add 'Total' separators to the playerinfo stats.
• Filtering opponent games wasn't working if tree open.
  
  Bug Fixes
• MS Windows - preempt/fix possible db compaction failure due to inherited engine file descriptors remaining open.
• OS X Board Options colour buttons were not coloured.
• OS X and maybe win32 - game import wasn't automatically pasting the text copy buffer.
• The pgn middle-button board popup could rarely be placed off-screen.
• Fix occasional (but annoying) bug regarding game truncation and variations.
• Creating a new database - board wasn't getting refreshed.
• Browsing a game - autoplay didn't stop straight away when requested.
• Some EPD fixes. Notably - auto save position.
  
  Also
• Minor Compact database fixes; create a new game when compacting db (instead of leaving the current game as game 0, which is confusing), and ask for SaveGameChanges before compacting.
• Autoplaying multiple games - pause at each game end.
• Database switcher uses font_Tiny, so handle/resize this font a little better.
• Usual Help updates, including add a help button for the NAG window and Correspondence Chess / Xfcc / email help update.
• OS X hack to activate shortcuts keys when wm gives app focus.
• Setup board should always start with the current position.
• Try to make all base filenames absolute, hoping to fix duplicate file history entries and db opens.
• Add a string length validation procedure, and use it to limit Custom Flag entry boxes to 8 chars.
• Dont reload last/first game if already active.
• Gregor's qsort implementation for player finder sorting (sc_name plist).
• Bump player/tourney finder defaults.
• Make tournament finder respect EventDate tag.
• Patch to always load last game (ignoring base autoload).
• Bind Control+Wheel to font resize in the player and tournament finders.
• Merge game: move the merge game comment to the start of variation, and simplify comment.

Scid vs. PC 4.14

• Tree Mask
• Mask auto-load option
• Automatically add move to mask instead of showing silly error message.
• Holding Control while opening the Mask context menu (marker/nags/color) adds a marker to the whole line (etc).
• Make Mask moves easier to see, and tweak menus.
  
  Board Setup
• Enable piece dragging
• Flip the setup board if main is flipped.
• Make 'Clear Setup board' have Kings.
  
  Searches
• Add End-Position-Only option to Material Search.
• Knight+Bishop sanity check was wrong, and we werent saving Knight+Bishop joint totals in saved searches.
• Tweak the other-base combobox in Board Search.
  
  Fics
• Double clicking an observed game makes it your primary game (number is shown as bold)
• Refine Offer Graph layout (most games are short), and add a close button (previously was only escape key)
• New 'Censor' button (+censor opponent)
• Add a show/hide buttons feature
• Control+Wheelmouse alters Fics console font size.
• Only save games a few moves long.
  
  Computer Tournament
• Automatically adjudicate in simple cases of insufficient material.
• Make the window more ergonomic
• Fix ponder not working with non-standard starts.
  
  Game Information
• Comments now have their own line, and move some infos to the Statusbar
• When Gameinfo is hidden, make the mini Player Names clickable.
  
  Book Tuning
• Add/Remove Line features
• Clicking on Book Tuning next move (in yellow) moves forward.
• Bugfix - truncate the polyglot books when using Remove Move.
  
  Score Graph
• Remove the errant rounding up of +10 to +11 in y-axis, and raise border over graph bars
• Add backGround colour to graphs
• Middle button pops up the game position for any move.
  
  Other
• New Portuguese translation from R. Silva (martinus at FICS)
• Update to Phalanx XXIV. The Tactical Game feature is a proper challenge now.
• Place Best Games window beside Tree window (in docking mode).
• Playerinfo: still show Bio info (if available) when there are no games in database.
• Automatically add the final move if adding a var at game end with the AddVar button
• Minor improvements for html/html+javascript Game Exports
• Set filter to deleted games prior to compacting game file.
  
  Documentation
• Document how to alter the Game List fields
• Update OS X build notes.
• Update chess960 patch (no code changes), and document known issues.
  
  General Bug-fixes
• Xboard engine annotation was ignoring 'Use Book'.
• Correspondence chess tls/encryption bugfix (Alexander)
• Properly flip comment editor board (if applicable) and other tweaks
• 'Find Best Move' feature was broke
• When saving game, throw error for badly formed extra tags (instead of silently discarding).
• When adding a var to end of game, make sure to auto enter *this* variation, in case of vars already existing
• Exit trial mode when changing bases.
• Gamelist sort confirmation column-name was not translated.
• Change move overwrite behaviour of eco browser and Opening Table moves.
• Remove superfluous padding from OS X aqua theme

Scid vs. PC 4.13

• Analysis Engine: exclude move(s) feature. Mouse-hover shows excluded moves (UCI only).
• Analysis Engine: button to pop-up unrevealed buttons, and redo a few icons.
• Maintenance: Bulk strip Comments/Variations.
• Depth-based Engine Annotation improvements.
• Tweaked key bindings (including FilterReset Control-r and GameSave Control-s).
• Improved Background Colour feature.
• Add 'Find' entry boxes to more windows (including spelling corrections) , and widget can now use regular expressions.
• Splash widget console now has a simple command history (up-arrow).
• Better Repair Base feature (from Gregor).
• Include Gregors fast file opening with the windows 32-bit binary.
• Bind Control-Wheel to alter fixed font size (in some windows).
• New Russian translation (from Sergey Nikolaevich Koyankin) and updated German one (from surrim).
• Enforce all tags (eg Event names, etc) to be less than 256 chars.
• Tweak Scid's Linux installer is to properly allow custom SHAREDIR.
• Windows drag and drop file open wasn't being init properly.
• Better handle language translations/encoding.
• Crosstable: bump max-player limit, tweak menus and bind right-click to menu, fix occasional allignment bug, and dont' automatically update (fixing busy cursor bug).
• Bump Opening Table limits, and minor bug-fixes.
• New (Skak) Latex export-games feature (author Mark Dennehy).
• Update Xfcc to handle secure connections (thanks to Andrew Hunt).
• Fix minor memory leaks, and dont slow game file compaction (we now reset filter).
• Bestgames has a game load menu instead of 3 buttons.
• Refine docked window drag and drop.
• Many minor OS X tweaks.
• Trim whitespace from name fields in game save dialog.
• Add whitespace corrections to spelling.ssp, and also tweak Event spelling corrections.
• Tooltips for the obscure buttons in main buttonbar.
• Analysis add move as 'New Mainline' was broke.
• Always get confirmation for sorting via gamelist.
• Enforce illegalilty of saving Event Date without Game Date.
• Phalanx updates and minor tacgame, sergame fixes.
• Make a few windows have small font buttons.
• Shift+Wheel(/ left-right wheel) scrolls a few widgets horizontally.
• Break up the long Book Tuning button menus.
• Many minor bugfixes and further tree-only filter fixes.

Scid vs. PC 4.12

• Gamelist/Filter fixes. Filter works better with Tree.
• New Crosstable tie-break options and reorder Crosstable menus.
• Game-result is now shown alongside Player names, at top of GameInfo window.
• Middle button in main board toggles game info.
• Databases open faster (Linux/OS X only - "avoid the time consuming file locking". Windows is in testing).
• Allow dragging Docked Window tabs to alter their order.
  
  Gamelist button/menu changes:
• Flag button is now context menu, Gamelist Save is moved to tools->export, Find button removed (use enter in Find entrybox)
  
  Spelling changes:
• Update spelling file to a custom version of Franz's Jan-5-2014 spellling.ssp.
• Spell-checking can now remove GM, IM, FM, CM, WGM prefixes from player names.
• Doing player-name replacements, show how many fail due to age/date considerations.
  
  FICS changes:
• Add user-configurable init commands.
• Board size slider is now a menu.
• Game Offers pack over buttons (making it less crowded, use escape/button-2 to cancel).
• New find entrybox to search the console.
• Remove Clear button (as getting crowded).
• Remove the never used big clocks.
• Add start, end sounds (and minor sound fixes - though still buggy).
• Dont save FICS aborted games.
• Disable engines when playing a FICS game.
  
  Analysis and Annotation changes:
• Make 'scoreToMate' work better and faster, which stops occasional incorrect Mate-in-N lines showing up, and works better at near-mate positions.
• Make the Annotation config window fit on small displays.
• Stop engine at end of annotating a single game.
• Try a new approach to Depth-based annotation, which works better, but still needs fine-tuning.
  
  
• Spanish translation update from Igor Sosa Mayor.
• Polish translation update from Adam Umiastowski.
• Add a find entrybox to the splash window
• Strip PGN Tags improvements
• Right-clicking toolbar Game-Save icon quick saves game.
• Sound devices can now be selected; mainly useful for Linux systems
• Dont insert newlines into PGN copied to text buffer... Some web PGN browsers don't work with newlines following movenum. eg "10.
  Nxc3"
• Save game history when Scid quits
• Remove tree status bar. Same info avail in switcher and tree text widget.
• Booktuning nextmove is now highlighted (same as Book), and padding has been tweaked a bit.
• Move Maintenance menu from File to Tools menu
• Remove the annoying " from myPlayerNames.
  
  Bugfixes:
• When saving PGN to file, disable translating pieces. (Export to PGN was already this way).
• FICS Digital clocks didnt appear under some circumstances
• Undo/redo refinement/fix for when buffer has been full
• Fix import issue - Sometimes first tag is lost (If UTF byte order mark is present)
• MSWindows - Board keyboard bindings are were getting lost after Variation window popup is dismissed.
• Some tooltip refinements, including removing tooltips with board update (mask tooltips were erroneously persistent).
• Tablebase window: Results Board was not getting packed (is now below Results Frame). Change the damn awful red, update help, give tbWin the widest paned window.
• With wish8.6, we cant close undocked windows with a Close button. Fix
• Some fixes for javascript and html game exports
• Correctly handle plain text crosstables.

Scid vs. PC 4.11

• Maximum board size is now twice as big
• Gamelist context menu (right-click). Less button crowding
• Annotation improvements: Depth based annotation, and cut-off features
• Dock a few extra windows (graphs, tablebase)
• Computer tournament stability/speed fix
• Locked Analysis Engines now show the locked position (not the working line) , and bug-fix the engine lock, which didnt work properly
• Add a low CPU priority check box to Engine Configuration window (especially important for MS Windows - where engines can kill GUI)
• Engine configuration window now repsonds to keystrokes to quickly find any engine
• Display "(altered)" in statusbar is game has been changed
• Fullscreen menu item (Options->Windows->Fullscreen)
• FICS tweaks, including over-riding takeback/abort request dialogs when game ends
• Remove some wasted space around FICS, main button bar, and other widgets
• New Greek translation
• Read custom chess pieces from /.scidvspc/pieces
• Docked tabs/menu refinements
• OS X - Clicking on URLs will open the link in a browser
• Add a command console to the start-up window
• Bug-fix: Fix main board rendering anomoly in docked mode with MS Windows
• Bug-fix: When tree is open, gamelist filter operations didn't work properly
• Bug-fix: Search in variations never matched positions at end-of-line
• Bug-fix: Opening Table favourites werent working properly
• In Export PGN dialog, add an option for "Space after Move Numbers"
• Keyboard short-cuts changes. Control-L (etc) no longer open/close, but open/raise
• Tweak Comment Editor and Player Info buttons

Scid vs. PC 4.10

• When sorting databases, don't reset filter and remember current game/gamestate
• Game history menu
• Implement (and bugfix) SCID's more comprehensive NAG framework
• Change a couple of field orders in the gamelist, remember field widths, and remove the icon context menus from the switcher (middle click now toggles show/hide the database icons)
• FICS: Allow use of alternative URLs (used during FICS outage) and other minor tweaks
• Window focus improvements (mainly for MS Windows and OS X)
• Computer Tournament: add 'Engine Scores as comments' option, and make some minor global/:: var changes
• Add Book Tuning to dockable windows
• Automatically flip board (if applicable) in game browser and analysis miniboards
• When diffing twin games, ignore newlines in the comments, which make diffing impossible
• Add undo points for user generated addNag events
• Bookmarks: add a few key bindings (delete/up/down), and shuffle the gamelist bookmark button up one row
• Drag and drop hardening
• Windows 7 bugfix: PGN export and Progress bars weren't working in undocked mode
• Translation framework updates. Overhaul Dutch translation, and remove (broken) Russian one
• Convert braces '{', '}' to '(',')' when exporting PGN comments (against PGN standard). Also tweak various PGN help topics

Scid vs. PC 4.9.1

• Fix promotion bug in non-docked mode
• Small pictures allign top/bottom in game info
• Clickable crosstable columns
• Make an undo point with Setup Board, and disable undo for Trial mode
• Add Tournament lookup to Player Info window
• PGN import window was not getting mapped

Scid vs. PC 4.9

• Window Docking feature - Different windows are docked/restored than Scid. Five layout slots with three custom layouts. Bug-fixes. F11 for fullscreen. Tcl-8.6.0 may have issues. Selectable Ttk themes (also for Gamelist)
  General
• Move search feature (eg 'h6 Bxh6')
• UCI: replace 'position fen ...' with 'position startpos moves ...' for general analysis
• Better Twin Games Checker - highlights missing comments and variations in duplicate games
• Windows has a MSVC makefile (Makefile.vc) and includes Stockfish 2.31 (JA legacy build)
• Fix windows stack problem (hopefully)
• Text Find widgets in help, crosstable, engine logs
• Game Save dialog remembers any custom tags you add to a game, making them easy to recall
• Restore drawing arrows and marks from the main board (also used by FICS premove)
• Arrow length/widths configurable via comment editor
• PGN Figurines now display in bold, and a different font, if applicable (from Gregor)
• Some new board textures (from Ed Collins)
• Automatically save "bitmaps" directory when exporting to HTML
• Player info window shows Photos in a scrollable canvas insead of stuck in top right corner
• Delete key deletes moves in game/variation after the current move
• Score Graphs are now bargraphs instead of lines
• Bind statusbar->middle button to 'switch base'
• FICS context menu, game offers now show more information, and premove
• FICS: deiconify/raise window when game starts (nodock mode only)
• FICS: stop clock when we make a move (even though we may not have acknowledgemnt from FICS about move)
• FICS: 'upload' command for uploading local games to FICS examine mode
• Allow the Name editor to glob '*' for Site, Event and Round fields (but not for 'All Games', too dangerous when used by mistake)
• The material board can display *all* taken pieces
• Gamelist button rows can be hidden by right-clicking the list, and it has a game save icon
• Right click V+ button adds the second variation
• Windows analysis engines no longer run at low priority
• When annotating the score on blunders, show the main score first, var second (eg: +1.00 / +2.50)
• Add programmers reference to the help contents/online doc
• Bind space-bar to engine start/stop
• Update twic2scid.py script
• Remember if .board is flipped for each open base


Bugfixes
• Make the database switcher icons/frames get smaller if they are cramped (so we can see them all)
• Half fix UCI game (sergame.tcl) time issues
• Corrospondence Chess now works
• Tree Mask bugfix: Checks couldnt be added to mask
• Fix Tree 'Fill cache with game/base' feature
• Try to handle shortened FENs with Paste FEN
• Crosstable: 'Set Filter' now includes deleted games if +deleted
• Crosstable: handle games with a year-only date differently for crosstable purposes (Instead of +/-3 months, match any other games in the calender year
• FICS: Stop clocks after a takeback request from opponent
• FICS: Games with move lengths greater than 1:00:00 would break parse
• Add missing FICSLogin translation
• New windows Phalanx build. It works better under win7, but has analysis polling issues
• OS X: pad out flag buttons in Header search
• base_open_failure was erroneously closing wrong base
• Windows Preview HTML for Reports is fixed

Scid vs. PC 4.8

General
• Drag and Drop file open(s) on Windows and Unix
• Custom background images (jpegs, gifs and pngs)
• Random sort pgn feature
• Crosstable now have +/-/= subtotals
• (and Player Stats format changed from +/=/- to +/-/=)
• General PGN search has ignore case option
• Board Search gets it's combobox updated when DBs are opened and closed
• Save game before PGN Import
• Save game: enable the use of 'prev game tags' for existing games. This allows easy addition of the same tags to consecutive existing games
• Remove the 'Scid: ' prefix from several window titles
• Update some translations
• Show Linux version/distro in the startup window
• Add a patch to make toolbar buttons raise only (instead of toggle open/shut)
• Add a patch for Chess960 support (from Ben Hague). Unfinished

Analysis
• UCI: properly handle UCI buttons. Previously they were invoked at every engine restart
• Right clicking 'Add Var' button adds Engine Score comment only
• Replace ponder on/off with hard/easy for xboard engines
• Super quick engine infos can happen before Scid's PV is inited properly. So we have to default to PV = 1
• Allow xboard engines to use lowercase 'b' for bishop promotion (eg a7b8b)
• Don't send an erroneous 'isready' (with 'uci') to quiet analysis engines
• Right clicking the widget allows to disable line wrapping
• Don't add a line to analysis history if moves are null

Tree
• Move ECO stats to the end of line
• Several Mask refinements - notably Searches are much more readable and previously clicking on searched lines didn't work
• Fix up minor bugs about castling moves (OO, O-O, O-O-O)

Computer Tournament
• Computer Tournament Book feature
• Dont' kill tournament if engine crashes
• Only pack the first 10 engine combos (which allows for big tournaments)
• Fix up Xboard time/move command order. Xboard engines should behave much better
• Various other tweaks

Gamelist
• Show altered games in red
• Control-wheelmouse scrolls up/down one page
• Switcher now has text on two lines (if icons are shown)

FICS
• Digital clocks now (optionally) on the main board
• Better integration of FICS "examine" and "observe" features
• FICS has it's own options menu
• bind F9 to xtell instead of tell
• Change the move.wav sound from tick-tock to a short click

OS X
• Filter graph bugfix
• Material Search properly shows the little buttons
• Copy and Paste text from disabled OSX text widgets (engines, help, gameinfo)
• Buttons 2 and 3 are swapped around

General Bugs
• Work arounds for wish 8.5.12 and 8.5.8 issues
• Analysis logs can badly break autoscroll, so use normal frames and scrollbars
• Handle PGN parsing of unspecified promotions (b8 becomes b8=Q , for eg)

Stevenaaus (email) is a uni graduate in math and computer science, who programs as a hobby in tcl/tk, bash and C. He lives and works in rural australia.

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