Installing a Chess Playing Engine

jose is distributed with the popular Crafty chess engine, but there are lots of other engines that you can use with jose.

For a list of available engines, have a look at: Tim Mann's Chess Pages, or UCI Engines. There are many more sites committed to Chess engines. Just search for them in the Internet...

Register the Engine with jose

Choose Edit/Options to open the Options Dialog. Choose the Engine Tab.
Here you will see a list of all registered engines.

Click the button to create a new configuration.

Select the executable file for the engine. Take care to choose the corrent file!

Edit the settings on the right. jose will fill in many fields automatically. For more details, refer to Engine Settings and to the engines documentation.

Note that you can install the same engine with different settings. Just use a different name to distinguish them.

Troubleshooting

There is an error message when jose starts:

make sure that your configuration file is a valid XML file.

The engine does not appear in the option dialog:

make sure that the DIR setting is correct.

When starting the engine, an error message appears:

make sure that the COMMAND and ARGS settings are correct.

Please note that we can not guarantee that all available engines operate correctly with jose.

In particular, engines that do not comply strictly with the XBoard or UCI protocol can get jose quite a bit confused, leading to strange output, or even error messages.

You can use the The Engine Console Panel to track down communication problems between jose and the engine program. The panel shows in detail all input and output of the engine program.