Information for users of the chess program Queen ================================================ By using a text editor, such as Windows Notepad, you can specify some data for Queen: 1. The hashtable size. 2. A directory containg the Nalimov endgame table bases (egtb) files; 3. The path of an opening-book file (wbqbook.bin). 4. A resign threshold. 5. An indication not to use an internal book for openings. For example, queen.ini can have the following contents: ht 16 egtbdir d:\tb bookfile c:\mychess\wbqbook.bin resign 1200 nointernalbook In this example, the directory \tb of drive d: is searched for the Nalimov egtb files, and the external opening book wbqbook.bin will be used if it is found in the directory c:\mychess. The lines in the file queen.ini can appear in any order, some of them may be omitted, and the text is case insensitive. If no opening book is specified, the the file wbqbook.bin will still be used if it is found in the current directory. If that is not the case either, only a smaller internal opening book will be used. General format of the file queen.ini: ht egtbdir bookfile resign ' Optional: nointernalbook If you omit the last line, Queen uses its internal book, possibly in addition to the external book already mentioned. Note that 'egtbdir' is followed by the name of a directory, while 'bookfile' is followed by a complete path name, including the file name (usually wbqbook.bin). Here is another example: ht 64 egtbdir nalimov With this queen.ini file, 64 MB will be used for the hashtable, the subdirectory nalimov of the current directory will be searched for egtbs, the current directory will be searched for the file wbqbook.bin, and the default resign threshold of 1000 will apply. If the file wbqbook.bin is supplied either in the current directory, or in a directory specified in the file queen.ini, it will be used as an external opening book; otherwise, only the more limited internal book will be used. (This internal book will also be used if the external book is available but a probe into it failed.) It is recommended to use the external opening book. Download the file wbqbook.zip from my website and unzip it to obtain wbqbook.bin. This file is in binary form. I am grateful to Carlos Pesce, who sent me some files on which this external opening book is based. The defaults are as follows: ht 8 egtbdir tb resign 1000 In other words, the default hashtable size is 8MB, the subdirectory tb of the current directory will by default be searched for egtbs and Queen will by default resign if it is at least 1000 points behind (both in purely material and in overall score). Leen Ammeraal http://home.hccnet.nl/ammeraal/