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Dark Knight / Le Chevalier Noir
General Guidelines
---- Nous avons besoin d'un traduction français!
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Advice for free
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Scid is a database application to maintain collections of chess games, view graphical trends and produce various reports on players and openings. With Scid, you can analyze with the strongest free chess engines, consult endgame tablebases, or play on the Free Internet Chess Server. All its features make Scid the ultimate chess freeware.
Scid 4.1 is out! Compiled versions are available under Win and OSX; it is a breeze to compile under Linux. Go fetch it at:
Scid is a great bargain. It has just about everything you can ask for in a chess database program. I still use it almost every day despite forking out the money for chessbase.
Benoit, thank you for posting information about this program. I've installed and run it and I like it a lot, especially for generating FEN information. It's quite a nice little program, and I haven't even begun to look at the database functionality.
Oh, one thing, I did try rebuilding the source code on Windows, but it requires Tcl/Tk source for Windows, something that seems to not have been maintained for the past 5 years or so. I've got an old Tcl/Tk for Windows book in storage, can't really access it right now.
But the binaries are good enough, thanks again!
Only the rushing is heard...
Onward flies the bird.
If you like SCID you might also consider Chessdb which is one of the two forks in the SCID road. It has some additional features like allowing automatic download of games from TWIC and other sources plus it gives you the opportunity to download a large quality database. File formats are the same as SCID.
Yes, Chessdb is an alternative. But from what I can gather, it is a fork from a long time ago. Since the fork, Scid had many, many improvements. I could try to run a comparison if you like. For example, Scid 4 has a new format, retrocompatible of course, but not the other way around. So you can't work with both chessdb and Scid anymore.
The possibility to download from TWIC is sure missing from Scid. The main problem is that this functionality has not been authorized by TWIC... In any case, it's easy to get many, many TWIC files with one little wget script ;-)
There are other free chess database products that showed some promise, like the Jose chess product but the SCID family including ChessDB, the original SCID and the newer SCID-pg all seem to work much faster and have pretty much everything that you need in a database. The only area in which they come short is in printing and publishing the games.
Vlad
Last edited by Vlad Drkulec; Monday, 15th February, 2010, 03:03 PM.
For the longest time I was using the original SCID because I found it to be the most stable when using multimillion game databases. The newer versions of SCID-pg and Chessdb are forks in the road from the original program. It would be nice if the two people who are behind each version could get together and merge the features of the two products. Unfortunately they chose the path of bickering.
Changing the data format is a concern to me. It would argue against going with the new version. I suppose that you could still use the newer version of SCID and import the ChessDB data if the new version is able to use the old data.
I am sure that TWIC is not opposed to that functionality as they could easily block it if they so chose. It is probably more a matter of not being in a position to support users who have difficulties.
Yes, Scid-pg and Chessdb were forks. But nowadays, the official development is Scid. Shane Hudson gave his approval, so the case is settled. Only Chessdb is a fork.
I understand that this format thing is an annoyance. But that's certainly not the same kind of annoyance as with commercial format.
If you can convince Pascal that TWIC does not mind, I am sure he will put the functionality in Scid.
You should take a look at Scid 4 : there are lots of improvements. Chessdb is not as active. For all his quirks, Pascal is a real programmer.
Last edited by Benoit St-Pierre; Tuesday, 16th February, 2010, 08:47 AM.
You should take a look at Scid 4 : there are lots of improvements. Chessdb is not as active. For all his quirks, Pascal is a real programmer.
Hi Benoit,
I will take a good look at it. I have downloaded it from your link. I will probably continue to use it but will fire up ChessDB when I fall behind on my TWIC downloads. The other cool feature of ChessDB that is lacking in SCID is the feature of importing all the pgn files in a directory.
If Shane Hudson has endorsed SCID 4, who am I to quibble?
Look for "[Scid-users] News from Shane and Scid at SF" in the mailing list, around June 2008.
The most important proof of the pudding is that SF has mitigated in favor of Pascal. So Scid 4 is the Scid.
Thanks Benoit -- I eventually found it. As Alexander Wagner comments, that was certainly a minimal passing on of information (re Shane's wishes) by Pascal.
I used to use Scid a good many years ago, when my desktop was pretty exclusively running under Linux. Nowadays I'm in a mixed environment (Linux and Windows). I have ChessBase 9 and may go to v10 if I ever get around to moving from Win2k (not supported by CB 10). However, I still have a strong interest in open source software. I've downloaded and installed the Scid binaries for Windows; haven't dealt with the Linux side yet.
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