Tim Mann's Chess Pages

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GNU Chess

GNU Chess is a chess program from the Free Software Foundation. GNU Chess can use XBoard or WinBoard as its graphical user interface.

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 was not involved with the development of GNU Chess 5 and am no longer the GNU Chess FAQ maintainer.

For information about GNU Chess 5, see the GNU Chess page on the GNU web site.

Old versions

I had an extremely small role in the development of GNU Chess 4. I maintained a FAQ (now outdated and no longer available), and I made sure the program remained compatible with XBoard and WinBoard.

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 Unix-compatible operating systems to work with XBoard, or for Windows to work with WinBoard. The "Windows ports" below use their own custom graphical interface, not WinBoard.

• Source code
  • GNU Chess 4.0 patchlevel 80
  • GNU Chess 4.0 patchlevel 79
  • GNU Chess 4.0 patchlevel 78
  • GNU Chess 4.0 patchlevel 77
  • GNU Chess 4.0 patchlevel 75
  • GNU Chess 3.1+

• Windows ports
  • GNU Chess for Windows 4.15 (Conor McCarthy)
  • GNU Chess for Windows 4.14 (Conor McCarthy)
  • GNU Chess for Windows 3.21 (Daryl Baker)

• Macintosh ports
  • GNU Chess for Macintosh 4.0b5 (Dan Oetting)
    README file / executable / source