Shogi prospect

[rick7]

Somehow I have the impression that a lot of people are not aware of this excellent program although it is already available for a while. In the last couple of weeks I have tested it a lot and in my opinion it is an exceptionally useful tool to analyse your or anyone else’s games. In case you have not heard of BCM Shogi before and wonder what it is: BCM basically is a program which combines two elements. A viewer, which allows you to open games in different formats like kif, psn, esn, csa, etc. (This is nothing really new, as there are several programs already available which offer similar functions). Additionally, and that is the most interesting part, BCM allows you to add Spear’s or even Bonanza’s engine which then analyses the game you have loaded before. This way you get a pretty good impression of how “well” you played.

In a second window (additionally to the main window where the action takes place) you can see the engine’s evaluation of the position. Best of all, on each turn it makes suggestions for the next next couple of moves. This is a feature which I find extremely helpful. Moreover, arrows on the board immediately mark what the engine considers as the best next move. Furthermore, you don’t necessarily have to read the notation in order to replay Bonanza’s suggestions. A more comfortable way is to use the page up/down keys of your keyboard to rapidly play through the suggested moves in the second window instead.

In case you have played a game on playok or shogidojo 24, you can save the game to your hard disk, open it in BCM and let the engine do the analysis for you. It’s absolutely amazing what it finds out. By the way, in order to load playok files you have to save the .txt files and then change the file ending to psn (edit: I originally wrote esn, which also works but psn is the correct choice) as you won’t be able to load the txt file directly. So when your original file was named “game.txt”, changing the name to “game.psn” will allow you to open the file in BCM. For shogi club 24, you first have to copy the game notation and save it with the help of an editor (unicode). After changing the file ending to kif you should be able to load these games, too.

Once you have downloaded BCM you will notice that the Spear engine is already included but not Bonanza. To make Bonanza work in BCM, you first have to download it (of course) but additionally you need a file called “u2b.exe” which is a little bit difficult to find. After having downloaded and extracted these files you finally have to change the path in the settings.ini where Bonanza is located.

As I see it, BCM is both useful for beginners and advanced players. A beginner who for example gets in trouble early in the game and does not know what went wrong in the opening can simply replay his games move by move and take a look at the engine’s suggestions to find the moves which would have saved him. Similarly this is also helpful for the more experienced player. Again, BCM is a great help as you can play through all possible variants and see what happens. Apart from this, BCM offers several other interesting features, e.g. there is an audio function included which will read the game notation in German or Japanese for you. Those who know Hidetchi’s shogi lessons will probably feel familiar with his voice as he was so kind to offer his help by recording the Japanese audio part, which allows you to learn the Japanese game notation the easy way.

You can download it here:
http://home.arcor.de/bernhard.maerz/BCMShogi/Download.htm

[rick7]

Two video introductions can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzKg8YXsqOE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUeHsx5g7nc
(introduction starts at around 8:10)

[shogi4fun]

New Version available.

Changes can be read her: BCMShogi - Changes

[shogi4fun]

Oh, by the way:

I think it's no need to write all things twice, so I like to show you this site, where I wrote something about BCMShogi: BCMShogi at Shogi-L

Of course you can also write here, but at least you should know to read that page, too.