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I have a Macbook OS X 10.6 and want to play chess against a challenging program. I'm not very computationally inclined but it seems that I need to download Stockfish and some UCI-compatible GUI. I also want to spend $0 to make this happen. I downloaded Stockfish 231 for Mac and also downloaded pChess 1.9.2 which is reported to have an update that:

Added a wholly new module — pChess.command — copy it into the 'Engines' folder of Sigma Chess or Stockfish, and you can play pChess as a UCI engine!!

I could not find the Engines folder for the Stockfish download that I have. What's more, I'm not even sure what I should do once the pChess.command file is in Stockfish in whatever location is appropriate. When I open the Stockfish-231-mac folder that I have downloaded, the only files are copying.txt (a public licence), logo.bmp, polyglot.ini, readme.txt. The folders are Logos, Mac, and src.

In the readme.txt file:

Stockfish is a free UCI chess engine derived from Glaurung 2.1. It is not a complete chess program and requires some UCI-compatible GUI (e.g. XBoard with PolyGlot, eboard, Arena, Sigma Chess, Shredder, Chess Partner or Fritz) in order to be used comfortably. Read the documentation for your GUI of choice for information about how to use Stockfish with it.

I looked through the suggested GUI's and most seem only PC compatible or cost. Any help would be awesome. Thanks!

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2 Answers 2

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I wrote a long post on how to do this for latest Macs:

Chess analysis on Mac Os X Lion 10.7 using Stockfish and HiARCs engine

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  • ChessX is what I use. It isn't perfect but it looks better than other free GUIs.
    – BlindKungFuMaster
    Mar 17, 2015 at 17:06
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    Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, it would be preferable to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference.
    – Glorfindel ♦
    Jun 18, 2019 at 20:14
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You can use ScidvsMac which is a fork of Scid (Shane's Chess Information Database) with Stockfish. I'm using stockfish as the engine within scidvsmac for analyzing my own games and it's fairly fine. It also has all the typical features of decent gui like variations, opening and ending databases and etc.

Setting it is also very easy. You just need to add stockfish as engine from Analyze menu and provide the address to binaries.

Links:

Direct link to DMG package

Homepage of the project

Scid for Mac

Original Scid

Useful links!

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