GNU Chess
GNU Chess is a chess program from the Free Software Foundation.
Version 5
The GNU Chess 5 series is a completely new chess program that shares no code with versions 1-4. GNU Chess 5.00 was announced by Stuart Cracraft and Chua Kong-Sian on 10 October 1999. Here is the announcement that Stuart posted to Usenet.
I'm not involved with the development of GNU Chess 5 and am no longer the GNU Chess FAQ maintainer. The new program looks nice, and I hope the authors continue to develop it.
For information about GNU Chess 5, see the GNU Chess page on the GNU web site. See also the gnu.chess newsgroup.
GNU Chess 5 works with XBoard and WinBoard. The current version of the WinBoard self-installer has both GNU Chess 4 and GNU Chess 5 bundled in with it.
Old versions
Although GNU Chess 4 is no longer being developed, it is still of some interest to folks who like to study and compare chess engines. Here is a small collection of old versions that I've kept. The "Source code" versions can be compiled for Windows to work with WinBoard, or for Unix to work with XBoard. The "Windows ports" use their own custom graphical interface, not WinBoard.
- Source code
- Windows ports
- Macintosh ports
Also see Dann Corbit's FTP site for versions of GNU Chess 4 that Dann has patched to fix some bugs.