The Custon Chess Replay Toolbar of OoChess

The Chess Replay Toolbar

The Chess Replay Toolbar allows you to select a diagram and play moves on it.
 
The icons, from left to right are: Diagram Registration, Start, Back, Forward, Play Variations, End and Flip. All the icons, apart from Diagram Registration, allow you to navigate through the moves to be played on the registered diagram. Their use is obvious and so no further details are required. This only leaves the Diagram Registration icon.

Before you can begin to play any moves on a diagram you must first register the diagram to be used. To do so, you place the cursor inside the diagram you wish to use, and then click on the Diagram Registration icon shown above. Once OoChess is satisfied that you have indeed placed the cursor inside a valid diagram, it then saves the current position of the diagram so that it can be restored when you have finished playing moves on it. If all goes well, the next thing that you should see is a dialog that will allow you to set some status information about the position in the diagram:

This dialog allows you to set up the game state according to that of the diagrammed position. For example, if the diagram is flipped, Black at the bottom, White on top, then you would check the first option, This is a Flipped Diagram. If you wanted to start to play out the moves on the diagram starting from the initial position -- the actual starting position of every chess game -- then you would check the second option, Set Diagram to Initial Position. To Move is obvious. You can also tell the move parser whether there is an En Passant capture possible in the position on the next move. You would just select the file that the En Passant pawn is on, that is the pawn that can be captured on the next move.


Once you have set the dialog options to whatever you wish, and have clicked on the OK button, the diagram will then be registered for move playback. If there were no errors in the registration, then the Diagram Registration icon will change its appearance to look like this:

This indicates that the diagram has been successfully registered. When a diagram is currently registered, no other diagram can be created in your document until you un- register it. You do this by simply clicking on the Diagram Registration icon again. It will then restore the diagram to its original position, and you will be free to make more diagrams as you wish.

In a later post we'll examine all the things that you can do with a Registered Diagram.