Changes in Picochess V4. Happy new year testing 2026

[Johan Sjöblom]

Hi all brave testers of Picochess V4. Happy new year testing :-)

Some more steps towards a future with Trixie and standard Pi or Linux installations with Wayland and any audio setting. V4 no longer depends on X-window and pulseaudio. Wayland will be automatically detected for Mame artwork and the kiosk.sh. To stop using dependencies on pulseaudio you have to change one picochess.ini setting. This will later become default, but I thought its safest to keep the default sound system exactly like in Picochess V3 for now...

audio-backend = sox (same as V3 and needs pulseaudio, currently default)

audio-backend = native (with this you no longer depend on pulseaudio)

I placed the kiosk.sh in /opt/picochess so you can launch it from there from autostarts. The kiosk.sh had not been in the repository before. First I copied the V3, and today I changed it to detect Wayland and in that case it skips all the X-windows commands.

- You can control web speech settings with two new picochess.ini settings. Web-speech is not Christina or Al, its the synthetic speech in web clients.  In many Linux and Pi 5 there will be a web speech sound that you have not heard before in Pi 3, 4. To control the speech from the web client use these picochess.ini settings:

Example of default configuration:

## Enable speech synthesis in the web client when accessed from localhost
web-speech-local = False
## Enable speech synthesis in the web client when accessed remotely
web-speech-remote = True

Gerhard picked some code from V3 to V4 support Tabutronic Spectrum, and Chessnut Move eboards, thanks for that :-)

There was a scroll bar missing on the PGN move list if you are not in portrait mode in the web client. For long PGN games this was a problem as you could not scroll down the move list. This is now fixed.

I am sure I made some mistakes somewhere, so please post successes or failures here or open new issues in https://github.com/JohanSjoblom/picochess/issues

-- Johan

[Randy Reade]

Thanks for the continued development of PicoChess and Happy New Year as well. 

Randy

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PicoChess" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to picochess+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/picochess/351b5ab1-84c3-4f25-ab5e-ed7e4fc43977n%40googlegroups.com.

[Aldo Bleeker]

Happy New Year!

PicoChess is coming along nicely!

I tried to run install-picochess.sh again, just to make sure I'm picking up all these lovely improvements, but I got an error message, ydotool couldn't be found. It seems ydotool isn't available in the usual Trixie repositories, but it is in Trixie backports.

First I created file

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-backports.sources

It contains the following.

Types: deb deb-src
URIs: http://deb.debian.org/debian
Suites: trixie-backports
Components: main
Enabled: yes
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg

Then I updated the repositories.

sudo apt update

After this install-picochess.sh completed successfully.

Aldo

[Aldo Bleeker]

When I click on the Games tab, and select the first game (Nepomniachtchi vs S), the game is too long to fit in the top right window, so it should have a scroll bar. I do get a scroll bar on my Debian desktop, but it scrolls the entire display, showing blank space below the window, and not the game window unfortunately. When I put Chromium in 1280x720 mode, the game window doesn't have a scroll bar.

Aldo

[Aldo Bleeker]

When I click on the Games tab on my RPi5 with a 7" 1280x720 display, I don't get a scroll bar either.

Aldo

[Johan Sjöblom]

Good catch. I will take a look. It was missing for all resolutions until yesterday and I need to do something for >1024x. Probably easy to fix, lets see.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/picochess/83f233dd-bca9-443a-ad95-883dc8c95500n%40googlegroups.com.

[Johan Sjöblom]

Fixed!

Just pull in the latest master. I changed 2 characters :-) in master code... on desktop.css I had the max as 1100px and I raised it now to 1280px (line 69).

If there are any other resolutions that does not get the scroll bar on the PGN move list just let me know. Yesterday I tested down to 1024x600 but I forgot to test "upwards" so good catch!

-- Johan

[Aldo Bleeker]

That looks great on my RPi display. It also explains why it isn't working on my Debian desktop. I usually run picochess on the desktop in Firefox or Chromium in a window with a horizontal resolution around 1500 or 1600, and then resize the window vertically until picochess looks good. This isn't a fixed resolution, but it will be something like 1500x850. Or I use F11 to resize the window to full screen. This would be 2560x1440, and it looks a lot like kiosk.sh actually. I've tried it at these larger sizes with the max-width and max-height pushed to these numbers, and picochess not only looked fine, the scroll bar also was visible and working.

The min-width and min-height sound like a sensible precaution, but I'm wondering if max-width and max-height are necessary. I've deleted them, and the display looked great. Maybe this fixes this issue for all window sizes?

Aldo

[Johan Sjöblom]

Good improvement you found. I now changed master and the line 69 in desktop.css now looks like this. No max values any more!

@media (min-width: 800px) and (min-height: 600px) {

The reason for these min values is that 800 protects the portrait mode which kicks in at 768, and the height is according to my testing not reasonable below 600. But yes, I used your great idea and removed the max totally so now all desktop resolutions should work. I tested it on my QHD display with 2560x1440 and I also resized it to 1500x850 and I can still see the scroll bar. We are now closer to a fully working any-screen-any-Linux.

-- Johan

[Johan Sjöblom]

OK, so the master code now always shows the PGN-move-list scroll bar. But there has a long time been an issue with resizing the web client if you have a bigger desktop screen. After a few hours of testing I finally found a solution that required only two lines to be added to desktop.css. I have created a new branch for this to test:

157-web-client-resizing

This PR link will show you how small change it is. As usual we need to test the branch first. I tried different resizing on my QHD screen and it looks nice. Added one line after line 5 and another after 15 in desktop.css. https://github.com/JohanSjoblom/picochess/pull/223/files

I think this takes one more step towards using a full desktop screen and running picochess in a window that you can resize anytime.

-- Johan

[Johan Sjöblom]

And Antonio has a new branch: 202-web-client-opening-book

This branch will allow the user of the web client to browse through all the opening books without any changes to the playing engine. It needs to be tested before we can merge it as it might change some resolution? Should be low risk though. We also have to check that the scroll bars for the move-list is still there. Resizing as mentioned above is in a parallel branch

-- Johan

[Johan Sjöblom]

I tested for a while and the "automatic resize" on desktop mouse-resizing is now in master branch (no need to test 157-web-client-resizing any more). I just need to resize with the mouse on a large desktop until I don't see a vertical scroll bar, then the ratio is ok.

I also made some improvements to the scroll bars in 202-web-client-opening-book, this one still needs more testing so its still in a branch, but it looks good on my test machines. See screen shot!

[Aldo Bleeker]

I've tried the 157 branch and now the latest master, and it's looking great! I've seen no issues with the display. I can resize the window to the size I want and then adjust it till the picochess window looks good. I can also run kiosk.sh to create a full screen 2560x1440 16:9 display, or alternatively hit F11 to do more or less the same. A large size window on a Debian computer is looking really good now.

I'm trying the 202 branch too, and so far that's looking good as well.

Aldo

[Johan Sjöblom]

Good news. I also tested the 202 and it looks ok. I need to merge it to master to be able to make one final "breaking change" in the github repository: The 202 branch no longer needs the obooksrv. But the books and gamesdb resources are still in the github repository and I need to make them resource files like we did with the engines. The main reason is that users should not get their resources overwritten when they do a picochess update. The picochess update will force the latest repository into /opt/picochess and anything that is in the repository will then overwrite. Next I will therefore remove the gamesdb and books folders from the repository and make the installer download them only if the folders do not exist. This could be the last "breaking change" .... I hope.

[Johan Sjöblom]

Done.

Important update: books and gamesdb are now external resources. If you update via the menu or install-picochess.sh, everything is handled automatically. If you only run git pull, you must also run install-books-games.sh (or install-picochess.sh) to download the books and games database.
Good news: after this update, your books and gamesdb resources will no longer be overwritten by future updates—unless you delete those folders, in which case the latest resources will be downloaded automatically.

-- Johan

[Johan Sjöblom]

What does "breaking change" mean in practice. It means a one-time bump. You need to do update twice to make this work. The first update will only bring the new updater and remove books and gamesdb folders.

Options:

1. two updates using menu,.... or by running sudo ./install-picochess twice!

2. git pull which brings the new install-picochess, and then run sudo ./install-picochess once

For those who can run commands on a ssh or local terminal I recommend the second option but both should work.

After this the books and gamesdb will no longer be overwritten, they are now resources like the engines. So its a one-time-bump!

-- Johan

[Johan Sjöblom]

If you get into trouble with the books and gamesdb folders this is the safest way to restore them:

cd /opt/picochess
./move-books-games-to-backup.sh
./install-books-games.sh
First command moves them to backup, second one fetches the resource files.