Chess for Android 2.6

Version 2.6 of Chess for Android adds some choices of board colors and piece sets. To change, press menu, then options, and select either board color or piece set. This brings up another dialog with the choices in colors or piece sets.

Improving Graphics

I got a couple of requests to improve the graphics in Chess for Android, especially now that tablets are becoming more widespread. I found a public domain chess piece set that looks nice and increased the resolution of the wood texture (really just a picture of my coffee table!). I also added a few more board colors.

This is how it looks now (click for the full resolution picture).

And this is how it may look soon (again click for the full resolution picture). Comments welcome, of course.

Chess for Android 2.5.5

Version 2.5.5 of Chess for Android introduces the following new features.

• Ability to save games to SD card. Games are appended in PGN format to file /sdcard/games.pgn on the SD card, so that users can examine these later, for example, in a chess application on the desktop.
• Ability to define common UCI engine options in a pop-up window:
• hash table size
• ELO strength restriction 
• endgame tablebases formats (Nalimov, Gaviota, or Scorpio) and cache size
The options are populated with the engine's defaults.

Chess for Android 2.5.1

Version 2.5.1 of Chess for Android simplifies installing third party UCI engines quite a bit. Most importantly, it is no longer required to install the Android SDK in order to push binaries to the Android device. Instead, UCI engines can simply be copied to the SD card and, from there, installed into internal memory.

A few important links:

• Updated instructions on installing UCI engines
• Chess for Android manual 
• List of UCI engines that can be imported 

A big thank you to Michel Van den Bergh for inspiring me to simplify the installation process in Chess for Android!

Chess for Android 2.5

I just released version 2.5 of Chess for Android at the Android market. Besides a few minor improvements, this release introduces the ability to play engine-engine matches automatically.

To perform a match:

(1) Long-press, import UCI engine, and select primary engine (or skip this step to play against the built-in Java engine),
(2) Long-press, engine-engine match, and select secondary engine to start the match.

This will play 10 games from random openings at the moves-per-second level selected. During the match, current standing is displayed and engine analysis output is shown at the bottom of the window. Afterwards, the full match annotated with engine analysis is stored in a PGN file.

UCI Engines for Android

I have setup a webpage with UCI engines for Android. Each entry is either a link to the engine's website, or a direct download of a binary that I compiled myself, posted with explicit permission of the engine authors. Please drop me an email if you know about other UCI engines that have been compiled "natively" for Android.