> a) one person is running winboard with an engine as a robot on FICS and > he wanted to know if it is possible to run winboard without opening any > windows, so that he can run it as a daemon in the background
I added an option -noGUI to 4.4.0, which suppresses all display updates. But it still opens a window. I figured this would be useful to still give you access to the menus, e.g. to easily kill the process. Making the window iconic is as good to me as having no window. There does not seem to be an option though to make WinBoard iconic at startup. > b) do we have documentation about the book-format for engines... never > use engines, so I'm a bit clueless here ;) WinBoard / XBoard uses books in Polyglot format. This is described in detail on Michel van den Bergh's website: http://alpha.uhasselt.be/Research/Algebra/Toga/book_format.html (But only for Chess. How to encode positions and moves for other variants is not described anywhere and would have to be read from the book.c source file. But I guess no one really cares about that anyway, as fo most variants opening theory is non-existent, or it must be xiangqi.)
