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Sep 26, 2019

Another chess game finds its way to AROS

A couple of days ago I've been contacted by Domenico Lattanzi, author of AmiFish, "a chess program made to play chess with the Amiga, exploiting the power of one of the most powerful chess engines of the world: Stockfish". The program was originally released for AmigaOS 4, but Domenico wrote it with portability in mind and wished to release it also for AROS. He successfully compiled AmiFish for x86 and its GUI popped up on his computer:


There was just a little issue, as you may notice above: the only way to play with AROS AmiFish was Human vs Human, since the chess engine used for the computer opponent, StockFish 5, was missing. So Domenico asked me for help: maybe I knew someone who would convert StockFish for AROS, and I decided that I would give it a go by myself, before asking to someone else. Luckily, I found that sources used for AmigaOS 4 version worked nicely for i386 AROS too. I only had to discover what compiler flags were preventing them to build correctly on our platform and, with great luck, I quickly found a procedure that worked. Once I got the executable, I ran some tests suggested by Domenico:

 
All of them completed successfully, so I sent the binary file to Domenico, who confirmed that AmiFish can now play against you on AROS, too:


And this also means that AmiFish for AROS will be published on the Archives and on Icaros Desktop. By the way, StockFish is free software released under the terms of the General Public License. This means that we cannot distribute the binary alone. No problem: I have already packed the binary with its sources and a brief explanation how-to build it. They will appear soon in the Archives