You can use WinBoard/XBoard. It supports almost any chess variant, and certainly Chess960. (But it is called by its older name FRC there.) It also allows you to play out the analysis PVs on the board, and exclude moves from analysis (with engines that support that).
Chess GUI for analysing 960 chess
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HGMuller schreef:
You can use WinBoard/XBoard. It supports almost any chess variant, and certainly Chess960. (But it is called by its older name FRC there.) It also allows you to play out the analysis PVs on the board, and exclude moves from analysis (with engines that support that).
I have tried winboard and it isn't convenient. First I couldn't find any option to pause the engine and go through the engine line. Either it doesn't have the option to pause the engine which is really weird or it is very user-unfriendly. I only managed to input the engine moves one by one in the move list rather than view it without changing the movelist of the maingame.
Why would you want to pause the engine? That is just loss of time.
To go through an engine line you just right-click on that line in the Engine-Output window, and move the mouse vertically while keeping the mouse button pressed. The engine can go on calculating deeper lines in the mean time, so that they are already waiting when you are done with the line you are currently viewing.
HGMuller schreef:
Why would you want to pause the engine? That is just loss of time.
To go through an engine line you just right-click on that line in the Engine-Output window, and move the mouse vertically while keeping the mouse button pressed. The engine can go on calculating deeper lines in the mean time, so that they are already waiting when you are done with the line you are currently viewing.
Thanks for responding. There are lots of reasons why you may want to pause the engine. For example you may want to try to find the best move yourself or you are doing other things on the computer. I have already figured out that you can do that with the edit game option.
I do prefer how arena, chess.com and lichess.org implemented analyzing with engine, but this can definitely be used and the depth of engines on websites is disappointing.
Well, Edit Game would indeed stop the analysis, but when you wanted to 'resume' it, it would in fact start again from scratch. (The engine might still benefit from what it has left in its hash table from the previous analysis, though, and sometimes this actually speeds up things, when the analysis appears to be 'stuck'.)
The problem is that most engines do not support a true 'pause' feature, that just suspends their execution, and later resumes from that point like nothing had happened. And if the engine does not support it, there is not much you can do from the GUI.
What I do when I am doing a long analysis, but need the computer for a heavy load in the mean time (e.g. for running an engine that participates in an on-line tourney) is that I use the Windows task manager to assign all 'background' analysis tasks I am running to a single hyperthread (by setting the affinity), so that all the rest of my computing power is not disturbed by it. Then when I am done using the computer, I remove the affinities.
Atm I am using arena to analyse standard chess and it works well. However it doesn't work for 960 chess, because castling isn't properly implemented in arena. So I am looking for a chess program for 960 chess. It only needs to be able to do very basic stuff similar to the chess analysis function on chess.com. I want to be able to install an engine and look through the computer variations on the chessboard. I couldn't find any chess GUI which supports 960 chess and allows you to do this basic stuff. For example some didn't have the option to see the computerline on the chessboard which makes it much harder to understand the computer. They got a lot of options but fail completely to implement basic stuff properly.