Another Useless Geek Achievement

And of course I had to bring my IBM Think Pad along with me on vacation. Been tinkering with geek stuff. And last night I finally managed to get a Shogi program for Linux to compile successfully.

Okay, Shogi: that's Japanese chess, not to be confused with the not-quite-as-obscure-in-the-West game of Go. Here's a Go board:


And here's a Shogi board:


I've been into the game of Shogi, more or less, for thirty-odd years now. Long story— some other time.

Anyhow, I found a tarball which contained the source code for both gnushogi (the game-playing engine) and xshogi (the graphical front end). Downloaded it, and then the damn source code wouldn't compile. Searching through the error messages, however, I managed to dope out the problem. Went in and edited one line in one file. And abracadabra (Linux translate: "./configure, make, make install"), I have a working Shogi program for Linux.

What, you may ask, am I going to do with a Shogi program? Well, I'm the dude who once spent hundreds of hours writing up a program to play Jetan, alias Barsoomian Chess, from Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel, The Chessmen of Mars. (Available here, source code included.) You begin to get the picture. ;-)