Chess Master

MATLAB chess GUI with UCI/PGN support

Chess Master is a fully-functional chess graphical user interface (GUI) for MATLAB.

Features:

1. Easily connect to any UCI-compatible external chess engine. I recommend Stockfish (see below for *easy* installation instructions!)
2. Read/write games in PGN format
3. Board editor GUI to easily create/explore custom positions
4. Move list GUI to navigate through games
5. Chess clock GUI for time-controlled games
6. Engine GUIs to configure external engines and setup auto-play so you (or another engine) can play against an engine
7. Analyze games with an engine and plot interactive graphs of the positional evaluations
8. Customizable board colors (with many built-in themes) and board layouts (file/rank labels, turn marker, move highlights, check text, etc.)
9. Flip board between white and black perspective
10. Beautiful chess piece sprites!

Getting started:

Download this submission and type "ChessMaster" to launch a GUI. Or, type "help ChessMaster" for a list of other calling syntaxes. Once a GUI is loaded, click the "Help" menu to read more about the main Chess Master features. Check out README.txt for more information.

Connecting an external engine:

Interfacing with any UCI-compatible chess engine is straightforward. Simply Click "Add Engine" in the "Engine" menu and supply (1) a name for the engine, and (2) the path to its executable. If Chess Master can successfully communicate with the engine, the engine is appended to the engine list of any subsequent Chess Engines or Game Analyzers.

*********************************************** Stockfish Installation ***********************************************

Stockfish is one of the top chess engines in the world, and, since it supports UCI, you can use it with Chess Master! To install:

1. Go to http://stockfishchess.org/download/ and download the "Engine Binaries" for your operating system.

2. (Windows) Unzip the download, navigate to the Windows/ subdirectory, and copy the .exe of your choice (current options below) to the ./engines/ subdirectory, where "." is the location of ChessMaster.m

stockfish_<ver>_32bit (CPUs running 32 bit Windows)
stockfish_<ver>_x64_modern.exe (Modern CPUs running 64 bit Windows)
stockfish_<ver>_x64.exe (Older CPUs running 64 bit Windows)

2. (Mac) Unzip the download, navigate to the Mac/ subdirectory, and copy the executable of your choice (current options below) to the ./engines/ subdirectory, where "." is the location of ChessMaster.m

stockfish-5-64 (Older 64 bit processors)
stockfish-5-sse42 (Intel Core<i> processors)
stockfish-5-bmi2 (Intel Haswell processors)

3. Open a Chess Master GUI and click "Add Engine" in the "Engine" menu, and enter the following information

Name: Stockfish 5 (this is arbitrary)
Path: ./engines/<name> (<name> = filename of engine binary from #2)

4. Done! Stockfish is now appended to the engine pop-up list of any subsequent Chess Engine or Game Analyzer GUIs