Making picochess a "proper project"?

[Paweł Stołowski]

Hi,

Amazing work on enhancing PicoChess and keeping it alive RandyR! I've been using it for some time with DGT Pi and pretty happy with it (I immediately replaced the outdated picochess that DGT Pi ships with when I got my DGT Pi 2 years ago!).

I was wondering if making it a proper project with public visibility & ability to contribute is something you considered? By that I mean a github repository (or an equivalent elsewhere), issue tracker, ability for people to create pull requests (improvements/fixes), any scripts that you might have for building the images available in the repository, easy access to released images and so on. I think that would streamline maintenance and development a lot!

Thanks,

Pawel

[RandyR]

Hi Pawel,

The current images I provide are based on Dirk Mollmann's github repo which is a fork of the original (no longer maintained by the original devs) and contains all the enhancements we currently enjoy. Unfortunately, github does not have the (free) storage space available to hold all the files in the image so a script to build an image will only yield a very basic PicoChess system and many of the engines, voices, tablebases, MAME files, etc., need to be added manually. Also, if I can speak for Dirk, he does not have the time or desire to continue adding enhancements other than bug fixes in the current code or possibly adding plugin and artwork support for new MAME engines. Dirk can correct me if this has changed. :^) So, (ideally) someone who knows python (and has the time and desire) could fork Dirk's repo and take over the project, so to speak. If I knew python programming and had the time/desire I'd consider doing it myself, but I'm happy just providing final working images.

If you've been following this forum you will know that Johan Sjöblom has begun looking at the python code and is updating it to be compatible with the latest python version and modules. His repo is here. This is great news but also a lot of work. Perhaps once the code is at the release state, the Issues and Discussions tabs can be enabled and the community can contribute.

Randy

[Johan Sjöblom]

Hi Pawel.

Dirk and Randy (and others)  are the ones who deserve the credit for keeping it alive. I was thinking that we could make modernising it a project. I just recently joined. I noticed that the current code is using outdated libraries and does not run on the latest python either. So I started the long term job of working on that technical debt. The new chess library uses the latest uci interface so all of the engine communication had to be rewritten. The latest web module tornado also worked quite differently. These were the two libraries that prevents use on the latest python environment.

I have now only done some basic work to replace those libraries with their latest version and indeed I can now run a basic version of picochess in the latest python using said library updates.

Anyone who wants to contribute to the coding project is welcome to make a new branch and commit changes and make a pull request (PR). We can then merge the PR when it has been tested. So I warmly welcome anyone with python skills to join me on this journey. We are getting solid and good support from said gentlemen Dirk and Randy.

Start by setting up a dev environment by cloning my repo. Lots of things to test and fix. I am using a PI 4 as development and testing. Ialso have a DGT board and a DGT 3000 Pi 3. See the readme for details. https://github.com/JohanSjoblom/picochess.git

Disclaimer :-) everything is really alpha or beta! But its a good time to join from the beginning. I can at least already play stockfish 17 and leelachesszero and they are compiled into the repo. There are things totally untested yet, like the tutor…. And some screen text in some modes might not be working, but the basic stuff is there.

BR, Johan