Introduction to thief Part 1
Start up Thief to play a chess game on FICS
Ok you have registered at FICS, you have your handle and
your password, and you can log on to play some games,
but you wonder which graphical interface you should use?
You have heard about Winboard, Slics, Chess Machine etc,
but asking on FICS, there will always be some recommendations
for Thief. So you may want to go to
Tecumseh's website
or to
SuperGrover's website
for all bughouse players and you download the latest
version Thief.0.521. Before doing so though, you should
make sure your computers satisfies the following
requirements:
-
You should use Thief with a pentium or equivalent
processor. You can try to use thief with older
processors, for example a 486 processor but in this
case you will probably need lots of RAM.
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You can run Thief on any win32 system such as:
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Win 95/98
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Win NT
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Win 2000
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Thief is not supported for Mac or linux machines.
After download and installation there should appear the
following screen:
It becomes now obvious that Thief was written for the
typical bughouse player, who needs to see 2 boards on the
screen at the same time. But during the last year, the
programmers have added a lot of features, which made Thief
also a good interface to play all chess variants. Even Suicide is
implemented now. If you are not interested in a bughouse game
you can change the entry screen to the following:
by selecting
Option->Window layout->Restore layout #1
or by using the hot-key CTRL-1. You can switch
between this kind of screen or a full telnet window at any
time using the hot-keys CTRL-B and CTRL-T.
Now that we have set the standard chess layout as entry
layout, we are ready to login to FICS. By selecting
>Connection->New Connection you are shown
this box.
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The Connection name is a
free parameter so you can choose anything e.g. FICS_handle.
If you use a firewall, modify the server port from 5000 to
23 in the Server field. You can the insert yor
handle and password you and leave the Script file
box empty. Once you click OK you are finally
logged on FICS and you can start playing games with Thief.
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Before leaving here are a few hints to customize the Thief
interface:
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ACTION
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COMMAND
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True Premove
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Option->General->Move Input->True Premove
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Suppress channel tells while playing and get them
after a game.
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Option->General->Telnet Window->
store channel tell while playing
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You want to be informed by a pop-up window, that you
get challenged?.
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Option->General->Miscellanous/Apply
challenge pop-up window
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You want to be informed by a pop-up window, if your
opponent wants to abort the game.
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Option->General->Miscellanous->Apply
abort pop-up window
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