Unlike many of the programs I have ported to the Cygwin environment, WinBoard, written by Tim Mann, was written specifically for the Win32 environment using Microsoft's Visual C++.

Those wanting simply to use WinBoard, can download Tim Mann's freely-available binary from his URL, or can download his source and compile it with MVC++. Those wishing to download his source and compile it using Cygwin's gcc or Mingw, will find my port useful. The port compiles using the "-mno-cygwin" option so that the resulting binary will run on any Win32 PC, not just those having Cygwin. This is useful for those wishing to develop or make changes to Winboard using the free Cygwin (GNU) compiler.

It has been said, jokingly, that a bug, once documented, becomes a feature. In that case, this port has one strange feature. I believe that when run with the appropriate command line arguments, this port runs identically to the original Win32 application. The only difference I have noticed between the two is when winboard is run without any command line arguments. The original application always pops up a dialog box asking you what you want to do. For reasons I have not yet been able to figure out, this port will bomb if at least a minimal WinBoard.ini file is not in the same directory as winboard.exe. To compensate for this, the port includes a satisfactory WinBoard.ini file, even though this is not included and not necessary in the original distribution.

People wishing to use Winboard to play chess over the Internet should download the appropriate helper files into the same directory as Winboard. These helper files are timestamp for the Internet Chess Club which is available by anonymous ftp at ftp.chessclub.com (file /pub/icc/interface/WIN3/tmstampg.exe), and timeseal for the Free Internet Chess Server, available from ftp.freechess.org as time95.exe. Those wishing to play against a computer also should put the appropriate computer program (gnuchess.exe or some crafty engine) in the same directory as WinBoard.