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Author Topic: NANY 2012 Release: Chess PGN File Processor  (Read 26705 times)

TaoPhoenix

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NANY 2012 Release: Chess PGN File Processor
« on: December 24, 2011, 04:34 AM »
((I seems I still get to be a NANY! Cheers to Mouser!))


NANY 2012 Entry Information

Application Name Chess PGN File Processor
Version RC2 / Final
Short DescriptionDid you ever look at the colossal waste of space PGN files take? You only want to take a 10 page printout with you, not 100! Plus you get to save Trees!
Supported OSes Windows XP (Unknown on Vista or 7)
System RequirementsOnly Tested on XP but I will try to test it on Windows 7 soon because I have one at work.
Commissioned by TaoPhoenix
DescriptionPGN is Portable (Chess) Game Notation, which is an overgrown text file with certain conventions. It's supposed to let programs read in text files of chess games and display the moves and background info. The trouble is, it takes up a huge amount of space. I used to study chess in bars and I'd just want to take a nice batch of games on a printout to look at, and spill milk on, then throw it out afterwards, except for the one page with the good game on it that I'd shove in my pocket.

Ever seen a PGN file? Here's one.

[Event "It (cat.14)"]
[Site "Hastings (England)"]
[Date "1992.??.??"]
[Round "11"]
[White "Suetin Alexey S (RUS)"]
[Black "Shirov Alexei (LAT)"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[ECO "C78/11"]

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6
5.O-O b5 6.Bb3 Bb7 7.d3 Be7 8.c4 b4
9.Ba4 d6 10.d4 O-O 11.d5 Nb8 12.Nbd2 Nbd7
13.Re1 Nb6 14.Bc2 c6 15.a3 a5 16.b3 cxd5
17.exd5 Nbd7 18.Nf1 Qb6 19.Ng3 g6 20.Ng5 bxa3
21.Rxa3 Rfc8 22.Be3 Qc7 23.Bd3 Nc5 24.Bf1 Rcb8
25.h3 Bc8 26.Qc2 Rb7 27.Rea1 Nfd7 28.N5e4 f5
29.Nxc5 Nxc5 30.Bd2 Rba7 31.Ne2 Bd7 32.Nc3 e4
33.Nb5 Bxb5 34.cxb5 Bf6 35.R1a2 Be5 36.Be3 Kf8
37.Qc4 Ke7 38.b4 axb4 39.Rxa7 Rxa7 40.Rxa7 Qxa7
41.Qxb4 Qb6 42.g3 Kd7 43.Qa3 Kc7 44.Qa8 Qb7
45.Qg8 Kb6 46.Qd8+ Qc7 47.Qa8 Qb7 48.Qd8+ Qc7
49.Qe8 Kb7 50.Qc6+ Qxc6 51.dxc6+ Kb6 52.Bc4 d5
53.Bxd5 Kxb5 54.Bg8 h5 55.Bf7 Kxc6 56.Bxg6 h4
57.Kg2 hxg3 58.fxg3 Nd3 59.Bxf5 Ne1+ 60.Kf2 Nd3+
61.Kf1 Kd5 62.g4  1/2-1/2

Yeesh. Lucky to get three of those on a page, and the entire right side of the page looks like the Sahara.

How about this?

Suetin, Alexey - Shirov, Alexei : Hastings (England) 1992 1/2-1/2 C78/11
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.O-O b5 6.Bb3 Bb7 7.d3 Be7 8.c4 b4 9.Ba4 d6 10.d4 O-O
11.d5 Nb8 12.Nbd2 Nbd7 13.Re1 Nb6 14.Bc2 c6 15.a3 a5 16.b3 cxd5 17.exd5 Nbd7 18.Nf1 Qb6
19.Ng3 g6 20.Ng5 bxa3 21.Rxa3 Rfc8 22.Be3 Qc7 23.Bd3 Nc5 24.Bf1 Rcb8 25.h3 Bc8 26.Qc2 Rb7
27.Rea1 Nfd7 28.N5e4 f5 29.Nxc5 Nxc5 30.Bd2 Rba7 31.Ne2 Bd7 32.Nc3 e4 33.Nb5 Bxb5 34.cxb5 Bf6
35.R1a2 Be5 36.Be3 Kf8 37.Qc4 Ke7 38.b4 axb4 39.Rxa7 Rxa7 40.Rxa7 Qxa7 41.Qxb4 Qb6 42.g3 Kd7
43.Qa3 Kc7 44.Qa8 Qb7 45.Qg8 Kb6 46.Qd8+ Qc7 47.Qa8 Qb7 48.Qd8+ Qc7 49.Qe8 Kb7 50.Qc6+ Qxc6
51.dxc6+ Kb6 52.Bc4 d5 53.Bxd5 Kxb5 54.Bg8 h5 55.Bf7 Kxc6 56.Bxg6 h4 57.Kg2 hxg3 58.fxg3 Nd3
59.Bxf5 Ne1+ 60.Kf2 Nd3+ 61.Kf1 Kd5 62.g4 1/2-1/2.

(Look! I can modify the characters per line to fit forums!)
FeaturesWhen you want to study an opening, often you only want 1 side's wins. For example, if you are studying the King's Indian Defense, you want Black Wins to know what to do right. You can then look at the other results to know what goes wrong. I also threw in some silly UI themes, like the Green & Black Matrix colors and Commodore 64 (called Blue & White). Others: Old Macintosh, Midnight Hacker. : )
InstallationIt's just an .exe file, so you run it. I like Simple.
Using the applicationCheck out the Move Filters. A lot of chess files have silly broken fragments, so you can specify "minumum 20 moves" etc to filter out the junk. Also, Draws annoy me, so you can delete those too! (Yes, my example is a draw! The long draws are okay. It's the 18 move Grandmaster Draws that suk. So you can remove those either by Draws or by Move Count.)
UninstallingJust delete all the original components in whatever folder you put them in.
Known IssuesThis seems to be "RC2" according to my notes, I think I lost the Final copy, so I think there are minor bugs left, maybe with player names processing, and elsewhere. I think there's a bug with long names like De La Bourdonnais.
ScreenshotsSee Below for the Screen shots.

« Last Edit: December 24, 2011, 05:30 AM by TaoPhoenix »

mouser

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Re: NANY 2012 Pledge/Release: Chess PGN File Processor
« Reply #1 on: December 24, 2011, 04:39 AM »
nany apps are meant to be posted by the authors.
if the author has asked you to post on their behalf that would be one thing -- but otherwise it's not appropriate.

TaoPhoenix

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Re: NANY 2012 Pledge/Release: Chess PGN File Processor
« Reply #2 on: December 24, 2011, 04:54 AM »
Okay, we can move this to the "Announce" section if you like.

I just wanted to get in on the App Providing Spirit. It's a fully paid Work For Hire I commissioned over at Rentacoder 4 years ago.

mouser

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Re: NANY 2012 Pledge/Release: Chess PGN File Processor
« Reply #3 on: December 24, 2011, 05:04 AM »
Oh well if you own the rights to it and it's not been previously released, then it would qualify.

TaoPhoenix

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Re: NANY 2012 Pledge/Release: Chess PGN File Processor
« Reply #4 on: December 24, 2011, 05:05 AM »
Oh well if you paid for it and it's not been previously released, then it would qualify.

Aye, it's not swiped, it was coded from scratch to my specs. Yay! I can still be a NANY!

TaoPhoenix

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Re: NANY 2012 Release: Chess PGN File Processor
« Reply #5 on: December 24, 2011, 05:32 AM »
Okay, I think I'm done posting!

Holler with comments!

kyrathaba

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Re: NANY 2012 Release: Chess PGN File Processor
« Reply #6 on: December 24, 2011, 10:12 PM »
Cool, Tao! That brings us to 37 or 38 apps, I'll have to check...

kyrathaba

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Re: NANY 2012 Release: Chess PGN File Processor
« Reply #7 on: December 24, 2011, 10:13 PM »
38 :D

TaoPhoenix

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Re: NANY 2012 Release: Chess PGN File Processor
« Reply #8 on: December 25, 2011, 01:42 AM »

Hooray! Glad I could help! I am amused though, like they say of artists, that dated from my "dark colors" period. It was a fun app to commission though. We put some clever features in it.

TaoPhoenix

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Re: NANY 2012 Release: Chess PGN File Processor
« Reply #9 on: December 28, 2011, 07:04 PM »
Heh Repasted from a Wrong thread is Wrong (rhymes with Long Cat is Long!)


I'm going to be funny and "Donate" what would have been the costs of my gift back to DC! I operate a bit like a comet in that I swing in with fanfare only to achieve that month's goals, then I swing out again, so I wanted to leave some goodwill rather than Top-Keyboard characters!


So I don't need DC gear, y'all just pay a bill with it!

TaoPhoenix

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Re: NANY 2012 Release: Chess PGN File Processor
« Reply #10 on: February 20, 2012, 08:18 PM »
Funny comment on the much appreciated video:

The Narrator went for a "Scoresheet" approach, which certainly this program can do. I went for more of a "How few pages can I fit this file into so I can take it to the bar" style. If I recall it went from 2.5 games per page to like 8 games per page, turning a crushing 200 page file into something like 40 after I played with the fonts and nuked draws. : )

TaoPhoenix

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Re: NANY 2012 Release: Chess PGN File Processor
« Reply #11 on: July 27, 2013, 10:13 PM »
Haha Shameless Bump!

Paraphrasing Linus Torvalds:
"Wimps make backups. Real men submit NANY entries and get DC to host your file for you!"

I am getting back into some chess. But I quickly desperately needed some random games to look at in a bar this week! Rather than a particular opening, I wanted something general as an overview. So I decided on the games list from the "Amber 2011" tourney which specializes in quick and blindfold games.

"Stupid PGN files... Oh wait a minute..."
:Thmbsup:

Tip: I forgot last time I made this that you often end up with dead space on the right side. The way you fix that is you change the font to Arial, which is skinnier than Courier, and then change the Character Count and then you get more text per line, and more games per page.

Wordpad tells me it chopped one particularly bad file down from 25 pages to 4!

« Last Edit: July 27, 2013, 10:23 PM by TaoPhoenix »

TaoPhoenix

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Re: NANY 2012 Release: Chess PGN File Processor - Alive in Windows 10!
« Reply #12 on: April 17, 2019, 04:47 AM »

Hooray!

After a few attempts, each months apart, to re-invigorate this little utility, I was sad when it seemed not to be working on my new (happens to be) Win 10 box.

Turns out, there was one of those aging problems where a couple of the old .Net files were missing from some versions of Windows, and probably many people collected them over the years, but each time I had tried, I was either too tired or else discouraged.

But it's up and running today, both on my main machine and an ancient ultra backup laptop!

But one day it may be interesting for someone to try a Version 2.0. Most notably, in the last couple of years, Chess.com has added automated downloads of games, but they come with timestamps that confuse this program!

Of course, for "serious" studying, the heavy duty players have either Chessbase or something else, but this was always meant for a quick dash of a few games to look over at lunch or dinner.

I ended up just playing after looking at a couple of the test games, but a quick fix might be something like a regex on the Chess.com or even a coding snack to slice out the timestamps.

More interesting as a Version 2.0 feature would be it can't handle commentary text, which simply vanishes. But I have no idea what specs from what or where I'd even want yet.

I'm just glad it's still usable with even my thin skills after all! So apparently it was fairly cleanly written after all! It has a .src file, which looks like source code.


TaoPhoenix

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Re: NANY 2012 Release: Chess PGN File Processor
« Reply #13 on: November 24, 2020, 09:30 AM »
And after some irritating losses in games, I'm back to my Nany!
We've learned by now after all the Windows versions, a few background files have come and gone on people's computers.
Depending on people's setups, I think it's the following two DLL's that tend to cause trouble if missing:

Msvcp71.dll And Msvcr71.dll
[though I'm never sure if these things are case sensitive]

For some other day, Chess.com in particular, haven't yet checked Lichess in detail, produces timestamps that mess the program up.
That might call for a coding snack to nuke the time stamps, since they are surrounded by double brackets - sorta {{    }}
At heart this is a Poor Man's tool, when you don't want to spend five hours learning and/or buying bigger software.
Chess Mentor seems to do a really good job of the Fremium model - there are some two hundred thousand games, and they offer for sale their own lightweight analysis program, yet the game files are real, do with them as you like.
More in a bit ...

Chess.com also seems to double number moves -
1. e4 1...e5
So those would have to go too. Maybe the coding snack works in layers. Delete the time stamps, then look for 3 dots and the numeral adjacent to it on the left until it hits a space.
Though something is still off ...


« Last Edit: November 24, 2020, 09:53 AM by TaoPhoenix »

TaoPhoenix

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Re: NANY 2012 Release: Chess PGN File Processor
« Reply #14 on: December 19, 2020, 06:27 AM »

Before I forget, this site looks pretty good:

I think it's run by a Swedish company - I wasn't aware of those folks at the top of hacker lists [I know, exceptions].
Multiple versions with checksum hashes - I presume a better tech than me can hunt down and verify those if they're legit - it would be a bold move to checksum a corrupted version!

Here is one of the pages. I went with both of the newest versions, [usually a good starting policy], and they seem to work for two copies of Windows 10.

https://www.dll-file...com/msvcr71.dll.html