About

DroidFish is a feature-rich graphical chess user interface, combined with the very strong Stockfish chess engine.

Features

Hints

Opening books

DroidFish contains a small internal opening book. If you want to use a larger book, you can configure DroidFish to use external polyglot or CTG book files:

  1. Copy one or more polyglot book files to the DroidFish directory on the SD card. Polyglot books must have the file extension .bin. Note! The Android file system is case sensitive, so the extension must be .bin, not .Bin or .BIN.
  2. Copy one or more CTG book files to the DroidFish directory. A CTG book consists of three files with file extensions .ctg, .ctb and .cto. You must copy all three files.
  3. From the program menu, activate the Select opening book function.
  4. Select the opening book file you want to use.

PGN files

DroidFish can load games from PGN files.

  1. Copy one or more PGN files to the DroidFish/pgn directory on the SD card.
  2. Long press the chess board and select Load game from PGN file.
  3. Select the file, then the game within the file you want to load.

To edit game headers such as player names, long press the move list and select Edit Headers. To edit comments for a move, long press the move list and select Edit Comments.

To save your edited game, long press the chess board and select Save game to PGN file. Select the file to save to, then select the position in the file where the new game will be saved.

Note! If the OI File Manager is installed, any directory can be used to load/save games.

To add computer analysis to the game tree, long press the analysis information when the computer is thinking and select Add Analysis. The current principal variation is added as a variation in the game tree.

In analysis mode, it is possible to add null moves to the game tree. Be aware though that null moves are not included in the PGN standard and may not work in other PGN reading chess programs.

Scid files

If you have Scid on the go installed, you can read Scid database files directly from DroidFish. Long press the chess board and select Load game from Scid file.

FEN/EPD files

DroidFish can load positions from FEN/EPD files.

  1. Copy one or more FEN/EPD files to the DroidFish/epd directory on the SD card.
  2. Long press the chess board and select Load position from file.
  3. Select the file, then the position within the file you want to load.

You can also load positions from external programs, such as ChessOcr (non-free), which will let you use the camera to take a picture of a chess diagram and automatically set up the position in DroidFish.

  1. Long press the chess board and select Retrieve Position.
  2. Follow the instructions in the external program.

UCI engines

DroidFish can use third party UCI engines.

  1. Copy one or more UCI engine binaries to the DroidFish/uci directory on the SD card. Note! The binaries must be compiled for Android.
  2. From the program menu, choose Manage Chess Engines and Select Chess Engine and select the engine to use.

UCI engines on a remote server

DroidFish can use UCI engines that run on a remote server.

  1. Install chess network server software on the remote computer.
    1. For windows, install server software from the Computer Chess Utility page.
    2. For linux, mini-inetd from the tcputils package can be used.
  2. Select Manage Chess Engines in the program menu, create a new network engine and enter the host name and port number for the remote engine.
  3. From the program menu, choose Manage Chess Engines and Select Chess Engine and select the engine to use.

Gaviota endgame tablebases

To use Gaviota endgame tablebases:

  1. Copy .gtb.cp4 files to the DroidFish/gtb directory on the SD card.
  2. Use the Endgame Tablebases preferences screen to control how the tablebases are used.

License

GNU GPL v3

Developers

Translations

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