scid vs pc

Scid and Scid vs. PC can only use the Nalimov tablebases. :-)

I hear talk of 7-piece and even 8-piece tablebase generators (https://www.chess.com/forum/view/endgames/7-8-pieces-endgame-tablebase-generator)

But do these actually qualify as "tablebases"?  It seems to me that they generate databases in real-time and should thus be called "engines".  But maybe I misunderstand what they do.

From what I remember about Finalgen, despite its given name, it was actually tablebase files. In order to solve 7 or 8-piece problems, it had to only address certain special piece combinations. It couldn't actually solve all situations for 7 or 8 pieces.

@EscherehcsE, I see, subsets of the full 7- and 8-piece tablebases, for some of the possible combinations of pieces.  I can see how that could be useful, e.g., K+B+2P+k+n+2p.

I just noticed that your handle is a palindrome.

I guess my memory *was* a little faulty. I played around with it briefly a number of years ago. Apparently you enter a position into the Finalgen GUI, then it generates the tablebase files needed for only that position. Here's a link to some info:

https://www.chessprogramming.org/FinalGen

The first external link in that article is for the Finalgen web site, which no longer exists. The web site *is* available in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The archived web site has a fairly detailed explanation of the GUI and tablebase generator. Unfortunately, I didn't find a working download link. (I only tried spot checking a few Wayback download links.) For info, I think I have the download on my retired Windows hard drive.

Edit - I just checked - I have Finalgen versions 1.1 and 1.3, but not 1.4. Rats...