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| Xboard Tourney Manager  |
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My favourite working and developing platform is Linux. However, there is
(to my knowledge) no program that automatically runs a complete chess engine
tournament, like WBTM. So I wrote my own, simple tourney manager, basically
to test my chess engine HoiChess. Although initially developed for Linux, the
tourney manager, which is written in Perl, now also runs on Windows.

The current version can be downloaded at:

	http://www.hoicher.de/hoichess/tourney_manager


If you have any questions or problems, feel free to ask me.
Any feedback is welcome.

Holger Ruckdeschel <holger@hoicher.de>



Installation
~~~~~~~~~~~~

The tourney manager is written in Perl, and consits of two Perl scripts,
as well as two Perl modules:

	tourney.pl	Tourney manager front-end (main program)
	crosstable.pl	Utility script to print a crosstable from a set
			of .pgn files.
	Tourney.pm	Perl module that implements the actual functionality
			of the tourney manager.
	Crosstable.pm	Perl module to generate a crosstable from .pgn files.

To run the tourney manager, make sure that the two modules are in a place
where Perl can find them, i.e. either in the current directory or somewhere
in Perl's include path. Look at the documentation of your Perl distribution
for more info. You may need to set an environment variable like PERL5LIB or
similar.

The tourney manager requires one additional Perl module, that is not part of
the standard Parl distribution:

	YAML		This module is used to save and load the tourney
			state. This allows to interrupt and resume a tourney
			without having to replay all games.
	
			Download:
			http://search.cpan.org/~ingy/YAML-0.39/lib/YAML.pod


For Windows, I have had success with the PXPerl distribution
(http://www.pxperl.com/?pxperl). This distribution also contains the above
mentioned YAML module and is pretty easy to set up.



Running Tournaments
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. Create a configuration file. Look at example.conf which is supplied along
   with the tourney manager. It is rather well commented.

2. Start the tourney manager (tourney.pl). 
   The tourney manager uses an interactive command shell. To start up quickly,
   the following sequence of commands should be enough:

   	create
   	print
   	start

   Help about commands is available by 'help' and 'help <command>'.

