shogi game formats

[johnnymam]

There are various shogi game formats, such as kifu, csa, psn, pgn, etc.  The pgn format is an odd one, in that only the Winboard
or Xboard programs seem to support it natively.  It would seem difficult to convert a csa or kifu format to pgn, since Winboard and
Xboard do not seem to read these formats.  However, there is a way to convert the formats.  The program Shogidokoro for
Windows reads multiple formats of shogi games, such as kifu, csa and psn.  Shogidokoro can convert various shogi game
formats into psn files.  Winboard and Xboard can read psn files natively, and then can convert the psn files to pgn files.

This is useful since the Xboard program provides the ability to create customized graphical game sets, such as pictographic
game sets instead of japanese character game sets.  One can then view any shogi game in Xboard with an easy-to-read
pictographic game set.  The Shogidokoro program also has a pictographic game set, but it is a bit confusing to read, due
to somewhat unimaginative graphics design.  Interestingly, the Elmo/AlphaZero shogi game examples on the Alphazero
website are all in the CSA game format.  They can be read in Shogidokoro, but then, when loaded into Shogidokoro, they
can be saved into PSN format, which can then be read by Xboard or Winboard, and converted by those programs into
Xboard PGN formats. 

These open-access programs are useful for being able to read and interchange shogi games across platforms, which
helps to tame the "wild west" of shogi game formats.

[Gabriel Saavedra Morrás]

I think most games are in .kif modern software support that, I only saw one time pgn in a old (not sure) russian software, why pgn should be interesting? Maybe I lost something

[h.g.m...@hccnet.nl]

WinBoard / XBoard should read PSN and kifu, the latter both in UTF-8
unicode and Shift-Jis encoding. If that doesn't work it should be
considered a bug.

Op Ma, 13 juli, 2020 4:33 am schreef johnnymam:

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[captbirdseye]

According to my 'notes to myself', made some time ago:

Shogidokoro uses.CSA, .KIF, .Ki2 and .PSN formats to store games (I think .PSN is the default). 

ShogiGUI uses.CSA and .KIF formats to store games (I think .KIF is the default).

Winboard uses .PGN and .GAM formats to store games.

Phil Hollands program uses .SHO format to store games.

Steve Evans program appears to be unable to save games.

So for me, it's easiest to interchange between Shogidokoro and ShogiGUI

[h.g.m...@hccnet.nl]

The .GAM format used by WinBoard is a legacy format that was one day used
by GNU Chess, and has been obsolete for perhaps as much as 3 decades. I
guess the support for it should really be removed. I have been playing
with the idea to perhaps replace it with a variant-specific storage
format, or perhaps even one that could be user-configurable. So that major
regional chess variants like Xiangqi and Shogi have the option to use
formats that is more native to them than PGN. There are many regional
chess variants, though, and the native formats are often quite complex.

I didn't know that CSA format was actually used for game storage; I have
always thought it was exclusively used as an engine-server communication
protocol. Perhaps I should make WinBoard understand the format on input.

The design goal of WinBoard is that it should be possible to feed it
anything that remotely looks like a chess game, rather than just games in
a well-defined format. E.g. users should be able to copy-paste from a web
page that contains moves in a table, or even just embedded in a piece of
text discussing a game. Sometimes that is difficult, because the same
tokens could have different meanings in the various formats. KIF moves are
of course easy to recognize, because of the non-ascii characters they
contain. CSA moves look a lot like move numbers, though. But perhaps the
fact that the piece name is appended without spacing can be used to
distinguish them.


Op Di, 14 juli, 2020 10:15 am schreef captbirdseye:
> According to my '*notes to myself*', made some time ago:

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[johnnymam]

I like to use the XBoard program for Mac OS/X for playing shogi or xiangqi.  This is because Xboard is the only program where

I was able to create modified digital game sets for these two games.  I have trouble understanding the games if the game sets

are in the native oriental characters, so I edited the pictographic XBoard game sets for these games to make my own modified

pictographic game sets for these games, with pictures similar to western chess pieces.  It is important for me to be able to

import example expert-level or AI games into Xboard, so that I can view the games using an easy-to-visualize pictographic

game set.  This is why I am so interested in how to get games of various formats imported into Xboard.  It would be great if

Xboard could natively read all of the basic shogi formats.  I was able to view KIF format games in XBoardSG, which is a Mac

OS/X Xboard version specifically designed for Shogi.

Being able to edit a pictographic chess set and view it in Xboard was important when I was writing my book on Xiangqi or

Chinese Chess.  I was able to make a purely black and white digital chess set, partly derived from the digital Xiangqi set that came

with Xboard, and use that to create diagrams for my book that were good for screen capturing.  I was also able to view

high-end AI games using this understandable chess set.  I later uploaded the digital set I made to the Internet Archive as

a public domain set, that might be useful for other XBoard players of Xiangqi.  I also made a derivative digital Shogi game

set that I use in XboardSG to better understand expert or high-end AI shogi games.  The Shogidokoro game is important for

being able to convert formats into shogi games that Xboard can read.