Here's another chess game based on Arasan, a chess engine that has been around since 1994 and is still under active development. It's designed now to work with Xboard, the front end gui. Xboard works with a number of different chess engines and now has international language support.
FYI:
Originally developed for Windows, Arasan is also now written for Linux based systems as well as for the Mac. I still play Arasan on my "cough cough" Windows XP laptop... ahem.... Aside -- I also have ChessMaster for XP but it's system requirements (graphics) are too much for the integrated video chip on my laptop as it turns out.Arasan means "king" in Tamil, a language spoken in South India and Sri Lanka. It is related to the Sanskrit word "raja." The Arasan website header has "Arasan" written in Tamil script.
Anyway... I spent some time trying to compile various versions of Arasan with little or no success.... too many warnings and errors of one sort or another. I was almost ready to give up when I noticed on the Arasan website that for some versions there are some pre-compiled binaries for Linux systems. So, I decided to work with those, and I put together a package. It's fairly minimal, without all of the extra bells and whistles but does include a bit of documentation. While my package is 32 bit, note that Arasan can be compiled for 64 bit systems and there are 64 bit binaries available for packaging at the Arasan website here.
While not the latest version of Arasan, my package is the most recent one available that includes pre-compiled binaries. However, I did combine it with the most recent and stable version of Xboard which compiled nicely...
Once you've completed the installation, you can start playing chess via the command line, or the menu. At the terminal type:
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xboard -cp -fcp /usr/local/bin/arasan-14.3.0/arasanx
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<Program label="Xboard" icon="mini-maze.xpm">xboard</Program>
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<Program label="Xboard-Arasan" icon="mini-maze.xpm">xboard -cp -fcp /usr/local/bin/arasan-14.3.0/arasanx</Program>
Cheers,
Monsie