HACHU(6)

💖 HACHU(6) — like, the whole vibe 💖

okay bestie, sit down, we're doing a manual page and honestly? it's a good one. This is hachu, from the User Contributed Perl Documentation section of your friendly neighbourhood man pages. 🎀

---

✨ NAME ✨

hachu — an xboard-compatible engine for Chu Shogi and other variants. 👑

---

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

hachu

That's it. That's the whole synopsis. Iconic behaviour, no notes. 💅

---

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So hachu is a program that plays several shogi and chess variants, and right now that list is: sho shogi, chu shogi, dai shogi, makruk and shatranj. ✨

In the future it might play more, and still larger shogi variants, in particular tenjiku shogi. (manifesting it fr fr 🕯️)

HaChu uses the xboard/winboard chess-engine protocol to communicate. Which means — slay — it can use XBoard as a graphical interface for the variants that XBoard also supports. Quick compatibility tea ☕:

• Only XBoard 4.8 and later support chu shogi.
• sho shogi should already work under XBoard 4.7.
• Makruk and Shatranj work under <em>much</em> older versions. 💀
• Dai shogi is not supported by XBoard yet. 😭

See xboard(6) for instructions about how to use hachu through xboard. And to start up quickly, you literally just need the command:

xboard -fcp hachu

Then you can use XBoard's New Variant dialog to select the variant you want to play. 🎮

⚠️ okay this one matters bestie: to play chu shogi, it is essential that XBoard's show target squares option is switched on. Otherwise the two-step lion moves cannot be entered. Periodt. 🦁

Normally XBoard will use western-style chess symbols to represent the pieces. But — and this is the cute part — HaChu comes with a set of piece images in the shape of the Japanese kanji for the names of the chu-shogi pieces. 🀄 (yes the original spells it "Japenese", we're keeping it, it's part of the lore 💖)

These can be used in XBoard to get an oriental-style board display. A settings file for configuring XBoard to use these pieces is also included with HaChu, so you can use the command:

xboard @chu

to start XBoard with HaChu for oriental-style chu-shogi. Obsessed. 😍

---

💅 OPTIONS 💅

🎀 INTERACTIVE OPTIONS 🎀

HaChu supports some options that can only be set interactively, through XBoard's engine settings menu dialog. No CLI for these, bestie, it's a whole GUI moment. 🖱️✨

These include:

• an option for solving tsume problems — that's checkmate problems where the winning side is only allowed to play checking moves. 🧩
• options to adapt it to various versions of the chu-shogi rules, specifically:
  • whether you can only promote on entering the promotion zone, or
  • whether moves inside or out of the zone (after one move delay) can also be used for promotion, and
  • whether repeats should be strictly forbidden, or only avoided like other losing moves.

---

🌈 AVAILABILITY 🌈

At http://hgm.nubati.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi the source code can be obtained. go get it babe 🫶

---

🌟 SEE ALSO 🌟

• xboard(6) 👀
• game rules: http://hgm.nubati.net/rules 📜
• XBoard: http://hgm.nubati.net 🖥️

---

⭐ STANDARDS ⭐

• WinBoard
• xboard(6) interface — "Chess Engine Communication Protocol" 💬

---

👑 AUTHOR 👑

H.G.Muller <h.g.muller@hccnet.nl>. 🫶

This manual page was generated with pod2man(1). (the pod2man girlies ate, ngl 🍓)

---

k bye ily, this page was brought to you by perl v5.30.0 and dated 2020-04-03 — yeah she's an elder but she's still serving 💜✨