Chess UCI protocol tracer utility
I have this bad habit of starting coding on some application, bringing it to an alpha-ready stage, dropping it and moving on to the next one. Fortunately I don’t do this in my day job, else I’d have got the boot long time back.
Couple of months back, I was working on a chess application. I will not be able to discuss it further here, as I still think that app idea is a good one and is highly marketable. My chess GUI had to support UCI engines. UCI (Universal Chess Interface) is a protocol used by Chess GUI to talk to chess engines (see Figure 1). There are other GUI <-> Engine protocols, like Winboard, but UCI is an effort to create a standard. Since my software had to support all the existing UCI engines, I decided to understand the UCI protocol fully. I looked around for some way to capture the UCI transactions that go in between the GUI and the engine, but couldn’t find any tool to do that. So I wrote my own.
[Figure - 1]
In the attached file, you will find uciplug.exe, the main UCI tracer application. Tracer is a simple pump, which works as shown in Figure 2:
[Figure - 2]
It acts like a network repeater, by passing on everything it gets (either from the engine, or from the GUI) to the corresponding recipient, the only difference being it also logs that message to a file. Multiple instances can be used for running more than one engine simultaneously.
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