MacChess

Dedicated to chess on Mac

Information for Chess players, Chess programmers and Apple users

 Updated on : 13/04/2026
Version 1.62
En français

Special desires or other things than just chess games

This lists how to achieve special things. A list of useful chess software is listed here. Please refer to the downloads page for more information where to find them.

Store your games Study openings Play against weak engines
Analyse your games Study chess Play against engines of your strength
Publish your games Getting hints Elo calculation
Organise tournaments
Let engines play against each other Let engines play on the internet

Storing your games:

Storing your games so you can replay them later or throw away your paper copy. In order to validate, saving and loading ascii files is not considered as a good enough solution in order to qualify.

Studying openings:

Analysing your games:

In order to qualify, the application must be capable of doing an overnight evaluation of your game indicating where you missed a good move. As a secondary solution, displaying possible good moves while playing or storing games is acceptable.

Studying chess in general:

Getting hints while playing:

Almost all applications do not allow you to make illegal moves. A little more is expected.

Playing against weak engines:

Playing against engines of your strength:

Playing against an engine that is somewhat challenging but that you can still beat at times if you play well can be the best trigger to use a program over and over again. The program should adapt to you to keep it interesting. While weak programs can be beaten, good programs can be considered better than 95 to 99% of the chess playing population. For those programs, such a feature is a must.

Publishing your games:

Elo calculation:

Elo calculation is only a rough indication. Beware, most programs want to inflate their rating and thus inflate yours as well. Playing against a computer is not as comfortable as playing in real life. To conclude: do not stress too much the value of elo calculation. It is only an indication.

Organising tournaments and let engines play against each other:

Chess engines should provide an open interface so that they can play against any other chess engine with the same interface. Playing against itself is not considered a valid option in order to qualify in this criteria.

I did post some scripts in the tournament section that can be used to organise tournaments.
Right click and select download as tournament.command Use XBoard executable with some startscripts and an Crafty engine. You need X11 on your system in order to run. You must also run from the command line. Following instructions will help you: Unstuff by double-clicking on the downloaded file, mount image, create folder named chess on your disk and copy the content of te image in this folder, open terminal, type :
cd /chess
./x11.command
./startchess.command

Let chess engines play on the internet:

The program should be able to play against an open server. FICS or ICC are both considered open servers because they are not tied to only one program but to a multitude of interfaces of different platforms. Please have a look at the other solutions listed on this site.