🚀 go-pugleaf

WinBoard communicates with a chess engine by creating two anonymous
pipes and setting them up to be the standard input and standard output
of the engine.  It then writes commands to the first and reads
responses from the second.  The tricky aspect of this is that WinBoard
has to do the reads (and writes) in a non-blocking fashion so that the
GUI does not freeze while waiting for the engine to do something.
This can be done using either multiple threads or polling.  WinBoard
uses multiple threads.  Most of the Windows primitives you mention
have to do with polling, which can work too, but (in my opinion) is
messier.

I can't tell you whether the necessary primitives for doing threads or
polling are available in Visual Basic.  I rather doubt it, but as I
know nothing about Visual Basic, I'm just guessing here.

Once you've figured out what Windows primitives to use and how to get
at them from Visual Basic, you then still have a challenging
programming problem to implement the UI side of the WinBoard UI/engine
communication protocol.  It sounds like you may not have enough
expertise to tackle this yet.

	--Tim

In article <7828cf$r3p$1@mailusr.wdf.sap-ag.de>,
Ulrich Kreichgauer <ulrich.kreichgauer@sap-ag.de> wrote:
>Hi,
>I have a question concerning the communication between Winboard and the
>chess engines (no matter which one...).
>I want to start a chess engine and communicate with this engine not using
>Winboard, but a self written program (using VBasic). I read lots of help
>files but don't know  how to do it - seems that you have to use some WinAPIs
>like PeekNamedPike, GetNumberOfConsoleInputEvents, WaitForSingleObject or
>whatever.
>I think the information is hidden in the Winboard coding, but in the C
>training classes I dropped out after the malloc command...
>
>Does someone know how to do it and would give me a brief example (e.g. first
>you have to use Alpha with parameter Olga to get the information..., then
>start WinAPI Omega with parameter Boris, at the end you can leave the engine
>using Omicron Delta...)
>
>Thanx
>Ulrich
>
>


-- 
Tim Mann <mann@pa.dec.com>, Compaq Systems Research Center
http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/personal/Tim_Mann/