ChessBase @ Linux

Goal

Note: ChessBase (ie. the Database from ChessBase) is not covered in this document. I use scid and Fritz is enough to convert a *.cbh-Database to PGN to feed it to scid.

The Setup

Unfortunately, ChessBase till now did not port any of their products to Linux (or any other operating system) and additionally they did not even document their file format so it could be imported by other applications so there is some need to be able to run ChessBase-programs like Fritz in a Linux environment. Also the additional products like the training cd's of ChessBase might be of some interest.

For that reason it is worth to have a look wether it is possible to run these tools without the nasty necessity to waste several hundrets of MB for a never really used runtime environment (Microsoft Windows in that case). Especially as booting into DOS is a possibility of course but requires to keep an other OS up to date, patch it and so on. (Besides the tendency of all the flavours of DOS to selfdestruction, and the point that DOS cost's real money.)

Fortunatley the wine project made some good progress in recent years so it is now possible to run some real world applications (actually quite a lot of them) on the systems supported by them.

The goal of this document is to describe how to set up Fritz 8 in this environment. As this is a real world example and no theoretical "what should be done and what should be possible"-scenario: the system used for this setup is Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (sarge) running on an IBM ThinkPad T41p. On the ChessBase side Fritz 8 is used, though it was also possible to run e.g. Shredder classic and Arena in a similar manner.

As for Shredder the reader is strongly encouraged to support S. Mayer-Kahlens efford to have a native version of the program, so consider it just as a "it is possible", but get the real stuff. :) There is also some additional information on Shredder for Linux available.

Before going into a more detailed description it should be said what was the final result here. First of all I got all basic functionalities of Fritz working. That is: the gui starts up nicely, it is actually possible to play Fritz, use it's analytical features also with several engines, and use its database interface (actually the main reason to set it up; to be able to export ChessBase Files to PGN and then finally import them into scid). Additionally the basic multi media features worked here well, that is sound for the board, move announcements and the commentator. Also the simple 3d-board view is working.
Not working here is the more advanced mm-stuff, that is videos wthin the Chess Media System (this requires a working version of Windows Media Player which till now refused to install here (though it should be possible to run it), the context sensitive online help (not supported by wine yet), and the photorealistic 3d-features which require DirectX.

So in short: the usefull stuff is working, the pretty useless one not.

The easy way: CrossOver Office

Installing wine

		libwine        0.0.20050310-1 Windows Emulator (Library)
		libwine-alsa   0.0.20050310-1 Windows Emulator (ALSA Sound Module)
		libwine-print  0.0.20050310-1 Windows Emulator (Printing Module)
		wine           0.0.20050310-1 Windows Emulator (Binary Emulator)
		wine-utils     0.0.20050310-1 Windows Emulator (Utilities)
		winesetuptk    0.7-1.1        Windows Emulator (Configuration and Setup
		

		aptitude install wine wine-utils winesetuptk libwine libwine-alsa libwine-print
		

Wine from Source

			ChessBase/ChessProgram8/ChessBase/ChessProgram8/GUI8.ini
			ChessBase/ChessProgram8/ChessBase/ChessProgram8/Shortcuts.ini
			ChessBase/ChessProgram8/ChessBase/ChessProgram8/Default.lay
		

			fake_windows/Windows/ChssBase.ini
		

Configuring Wine

Installing Fritz

Running Fritz

			wine /opt/chess/DOS/ChessBase/ChessProgram8/ChessProgram8.exe 
		

As this is a bit a long typing I made up two short scripts. The first one (winesetup) just takes care about the fact that some DOS-Program gets executed. For my testing I install wine to /opt/wine so in case I want my selfbuilt version I just set the variable $addwine properly then this wine version is used. Additionally I placed my fake_windows directory in /opt/chess/share/wine/fake_windows and also store a generic set of regestry files there. Most people know about the stability of Windows' registry so I feel it is good not to work on a working copy of these files. So winesetup first checks wether a $HOME/.wine exists. If so, it believes the user set up all properly. If not, it creates it and copies the necessary files and links.

Though winesetup is probably nice as such it is just sourced by Fritz which actually fires up Fritz. After sourcing the winesetup it also tries to mount Fritz' CD-ROM. For one thing this CD can be handy if you did not copy all files to your harddisk (speach, databases, books) on the other hand Fritz is quite annoyingly asking for this CD-ROM. Besides the Fritz script also passes all given commandline parameters to the program.

Actually the latter is a bit a dark point in Fritz as it is barely documeneted, so I know only of two parameters, which are pretty helpfull anyway. To get rid of the annoying "Start Fritz or Playchess"-Dialog at the programs startup one might specify either -engine to get right into the chess program or -login to connect playchess straight away. The last parameter is -database which will invoke Fritz' database infterface. Fortunately it seems that ChessBase noticed, that it would make perfect sense to add also a database file to the call of Fritz. Suppose (as it is usually the case) wine gives you your / directory as Z: and your database lives in /opt/chess/DOS/ChessBase/Bases/database.cbh. Then you can access it using the following call to Fritz:

			Fritz -database Z:\\opt\\chess\\DOS\\ChessBase\\Bases\\database.cbh
		

Note that you have to give the path like wine sees in as DOS-path. Also use double backslashes, otherwise your shell will most likely drop them. As this is pretty annoying and no tab expand works with nasty backslashes you could also use ChessBase which is a short shell script that does this substitution if passed a Unix-compliant file name. It also adds the Z: at the beginning of the path.

Chatter: at least my german edition of Fritz is pretty chatty, and likes to talk all the time. But to get this working I had to copy the talk.cht as well the directory TALK to my harddisk and set the writeble bit for the files and directories. Then after searching for talk.cht using Fritz' menues everything was fine. Till I switched it off ;)

Working/Not Working

Actually I found that Fritz runs very well in Wine. I got all major parts working, the engine is usefull for analysations or games, the coach and the training functions work very well, also stuff like "explain all moves", sound and chatter. The database is usable to open ChessBase Files and export them to PNG, do some searching and stuff as Fritz allows it.

Problems arrise in rare cases with the screen update. In this case I just shade the window and unshade it again (in my WindowMaker setup just a doubleclick on the title bar). The forced redraw fixes these problems. Additionally I found that the "explain all moves"-pane takes quite some time to build up (well Fritz has to calculate, right?) and one could get the impression this function is not working. Also if Fritz is told to analyse many lines at once I notice a considerable slow down in screen updates. I found that having more than about 3 to 5 lines in concurrent analysis makes it difficult to select a menu option as the redraw is very slow (see for my hardware setup). In playchess the Earth Globe is definitively broken, it causes the client to crash immediately. Using training cd's from ChessBase worked here very well except the video parts due to my not installed MediaPlayer. Probably one could get this working with more effords.

A minor inconvenience is given by the fact that Wine can not open M$ compressed html-helpfiles yet. For this reason the online help is not available. (BTW: if you are using Fritz 6 you are in luck here as it uses old style Windows Help-Files.) To view it anyway you can use e.g. xchm. Just open the ChessBase/ChessProgram8/Eng.chm for the english version or ChessBase/ChessProgram8/deu.chm. But sources on the web were almost right that it's not really worth the efford. The online help seems a bit outdated in some areas and also offers quite some missinformation. Clearly a point where ChessBase could improve, but the program is pretty easy to use. For the more advanced features ChessBase seem to prefer to publish them on the web anyway.

Though it would be pretty nice to have the Fritz eninge available as analysis or even playing engine in a native Linux GUI this is unfortunately not possible as ChessBase chose to deliver only DLL's. If someone could make a simple stub linked against them to turn them into UCI- or xboard-engines... Probably there is a way to use them in Arena or the Shredder Windows GUI? Then there would probably be a way to use the engine as such.

Conclusion

Notes

Similar programs

• Shredder Classic. I did no extensive testing there as there is a native Linux version. Support this efford to bring high class Chess Software to Linux!
• Arena works exactly the same as Fritz in wine. Just copy the Arena-Directory tree somwhere accessible by wine. Starting out with the Fritz script is it easy to set up the same for Arena. Note that Arena stores (other then ChessBase!) nearly everything within the Windows Registry. So keep a copy of your *.reg-files handy. (Arena sets them up correctly to it's defaults though if the settings are lost.)
• Queen 5 from DGT also seems to work, so one can use it to read out the DGT Electronic Chess Board. In case you want to use a DGT-Board on Linux please also have a look at the native driver available here. The latter allows you to use the board with every chess program that is capable of engine tournaments like e.g. xboard.
• ChessBase Reader works out of the box. It is a single binary, run it through wine. It can be used as a light weight alternative to Fritz for some of the ChessBase Trainings CD's.