add retro-engines

[Antonio Marques]

Hello to all participants of the Picochess project! First of all, I want to thank you for this initiative to preserve our beloved Chesscomputer engines! I would like to run the Fidelity Designer 2265 retro-engine. Besides having the engine in the corresponding folder (/opt/picochess/engines/mame_emulation/roms) and modifying the retro.ini file, what other modifications are necessary for the engine to run? Thank you!

[Randy Reade]

As long as it is an engine that is supported (has a module in mame_emulation/plugins/chessengine/interfaces) and a corresponding script and .uci file in engines/mame, that should be it. Note that the _art script files are used when artwork is enabled in the retro settings menu. 

Randy

On Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 1:09 p.m. Antonio Marques <acgma...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello to all participants of the Picochess project! First of all, I want to thank you for this initiative to preserve our beloved Chesscomputer engines! I would like to run the Fidelity Designer 2265 retro-engine. Besides having the engine in the corresponding folder (/opt/picochess/engines/mame_emulation/roms) and modifying the retro.ini file, what other modifications are necessary for the engine to run? Thank you!

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[Antonio Marques]

Thank you! It worked! I also installed Excel 68000 and Excellence.

But I only managed to get it working on version 3.2 (32 bits). I couldn't get it to run on 3.3.

[Randy Reade]

Fidelity Excellence (fexcel) should be working if you make a retro.ini entry and use a good rom set. But it looks like Fidelity Excel 68000 (fex68k) would need some fixing of the fex68k.lua file. I didn't run these in PicoChess, just on the command line on an x86 laptop with the same MAME version (0.279) and same chessengine plugin.

Randy

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