Tutorial
Winboard-Polyglot-YaY-Yahoo
The purpose of this page is to explain how to make a chess engine that works to play games automatically in yahoo chess servers using YaY, winboard, Polyglot.exe .
These instructions won't work at all if your IP is banned from yahoo games. If you are trying to log in a profile, for some reason YtoICS will log in the main ID and not the profile.
You will need:
-A basic knowledge of windows on how to create folders, create batch files, create shortcuts, rename directories, etc. You might also need to know and understand your way around the command prompt.
-Winboard. Go to the section "Winboard - For 32-bit Microsoft Windows (95, 98, NT, 2000, ME, XP)" and download the latest stable version.
-Winboard_X.exe , this is an modificated winboard from Scotti, has adapter program that allows winboard to communicate with polyglot. It can be found here .
polyglot 1.4.exe this is an
There are some other little files needed but I will give you the link to them when it becomes necessary.
Now you need to unzip the file YaY-1.0-Ultimate.rar and extract its contents to c:\program files\winboard . You have change Winboard.exe and put winboard_x.exe on winboard directorio.
Later on we going to need to launch Winboard in a especial way, to do so is necessary to create a shortcut to winboard.exe with especial instructions. Again, for some reason some people find it difficult do this, so instead just go ahead and download a zipped shortcut here , unzip it and place it on the desktop.
For a list of yahoo chess rooms, download this text file, or this excel file.
OK folks I think we are all set now. The pictures I will use to show you how to do this might be a little be different from what you will see in your screen because I am using FRITZ 8 and you might be using something else, but they should be close enough.
-Launch your chessbase program. Click on tools then on "Connect Hardware" as shown in the next picture:
-The next screen will pop-up:
Select "Auto-232 1.0" , Check "Server name" and un-check "Unload after autoplay". The window should look like this now:
Now click on OK and a small window will pop-up stating that the program is waiting for a connection:
Now, quickly do a double click on the shurtcut created for Winboard.exe. After few seconds( depending in your connection and how good/bad yahoo is lagging) you will get a window similar to this:
Note: The first thing the script asks for in the next picture is the test word. This is happening because I am launching YaY with a special batch file that feeds to the script my username, password, room and port to be used. In your case, you are going to have to manually enter the username, password, room and port. If you did not change any parameters in the winboard shurtcut downloaded and placed in the desktop previously, the port should be 6000.
If you get an error message or if the window closes by itself then you did something wrong and you have to verify everything. If the window does not close, then read it and verify there are no errors displayed. Note: In case you get an error and the command prompt windows closes right away, try again but instead of double clicking in YaY.exe( or its shortcut), launch the script from a command prompt, this way the command prompt window wont close and you are going to be able to read the error description. Also, at this moment YaY can not detect if you entered the test word correctly, if you did entered incorrectly, you will get a "Protocol Error" message.
Ok, now you need to double click on the winboard shortcut you had previously placed in the desktop. Again, if you get errors, verify everything( also read the red note above). If you don't get errors , congratulations you are almost there. At this point you will get two new windows: One will be the winboard interface window that looks like this:
And the other window will be the ICS Interaction window that looks like this:
Finally, go to your chessbase program, and click on File, New, Two Computer Match as shown in the picture:
( or you can just hit Ctrl-Alt-J keys at the same time) and the next window will pop up:
Un-check "Master" and leave "Opponent save" checked as shown in the picture and click OK.
That's all my friends. You should be ready to go and play. You need to learn how to chat, create tables, start games,, leave tables, set timers, etc , etc, etc. There is enough information in the oldcommand.html file you unzipped earlier.
I almost forgot, I don't remember exactly when, but if you don't have the endgame table bases you are going to get a window stating that you don't have them or that they are incomplete. Just go ahead and click ok and continue with the procedure.
Piece of advice, save and back up this page and the files you downloaded because they won't be available for ever.
Thanks a lot to the authors of winboard, winboard232d.exe, ytoics and Active Perl for making them available to the public for free, and to the guy or guys who figured out how to use all these programs/scripts together to achieve the goal of making chessbase programs to play automatically in yahoo chess servers.
This page was updated last on Aug. 14, 2007.