Pro Deo utilities

A stripped down version of the REBEL development inferface, now rewritten as an utility tool to improve chess programs.

Download Pro Deo 1.2 (DOS edition).

Menu F1 - Game Play options.
Menu F2 - File Settings.
Menu F3 - Utilities: YATS , Analyze PGN , Make Opening Book. So the need to have ChessPartner to run the utilities is no longer mandatory as it now runs in a standalone and free program.
Menu F4 - Levels.
Menu F5 - Book Editor for the open Rebel / Pro Deo format. Use the 4 arrow keys to scroll through the Book Tree. Add new moves to the Book Tree as either E2E4 (play)or E2E4- (don't play).
Menu F6 - Settings for YATS, Analyze PGN and Make Opening Book.
Menu F7 - Analyze Opening Book, Report and modify suspect opening lines, conversion external opening books to the open Rebel / Pro Deo format.
Menu F8 - Make and use EOC Chess Trees from REBEL or PGN databases. I was able to create a 88 million position EOC chess tree from a 2.5 million PGN database within an hour. EOC databases (for instance) can be used to expand opening books.
Menu F9 - Various good old REBEL database facilities. Import and export of PGN and EPD. Using the REBEL database format above PGN saves about a factor 2 in speed and factor 3 in size. Fast double game remover.

Installation

Unzip the archive preferable in C:\PROTOOLS in order that the distributed shortcut will properly initialize the DOS screen.

Blunder Check Opening Books

This has been made comfortable, steps:

Analyze a Book at a given level, see menu F7.
Make Book Report, see menu F7 and a report with suspect lines is generated.
Go into Book Edit Mode (menu F5) and type the number of the suspect opening line you want to investigate. The editor will move you to the right place.
Instead of typing the line-number you can also use F7 to move to the next suspect line, F8 to go back to the previous one and HOME to start again.
The long process of Analyze Book can be interrupted at any time and restarted later.
The download package contains the pre-analyzed MAINBOOK.BIN to demonstrate this.

Join the open format

There is a simple way to switch to the open *.BIN format. Write an utility that converts your opening books(s) to the easy *.RBM format, copy the *.RBM file into the RBM folder and convert it via Menu F7 -> Import RBM to BIN.

The data structure of the transition *.RBM format is as simple as possible, 5 characters for each move, the first 4 characters being a move, the 5th character either being a space (play) or a "-" (don't play).

Simple example:
e2e4 e7e5 g1f3 b8c6 f1b5
e2e4 e7e5 f2f4-e5f4
d2d4 d7d5 c2c4 e7e6
d2d4 a7a6-e2e4

All moves are played actively except 2.f4 and 1..a6

For a better understanding study the example file BENONI.RBM in the RBM sub-folder.

Source code

Get the source code of the open Rebel / Pro Deo format.

Remarks

The build-in chess engine is the latest Pro Deo version mainly included to cooperate with the Book editor as a blunder check tool while editing the Opening Book.

Analyze Book now saves every analysed position to a fast internal database in order that a position is never searched twice.

PGN files, Arena Log files and Opening Books each have their own separate folder.