Many years ago, in the days of Windows 3.1 and just as Windows 95 was coming onto the market, I bought a copy of a computer magazine, I seem to remember that it was PCW (RIP), that had a 1.44” floppy disk on the front and on that disk was a chess program called Waxman by Ivan Bacigal.
The name comes from the fact that ‘Waxman’ looks a bit like the Russian word for chess: WAXMATbI.
I got an email from someone this week asking me if I knew how to get it running on Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit). I had to email back to say that unfortunately Waxman was a 16-bit application and 64-bit versions of Windows can’t run them.
WinBoard
However, this evening I discovered that Waxman is still going albeit in a slightly different way: as a game engine for WinBoard. It’s pretty simple to setup too:
- Download WinBoard
Unzip it into a directory, e.g. c:\winboard - Edit the winboard.ini file in Notepad adding two lines beneath the firstChessProgramNames and secondChessProgramNames lines, i.e. /firstChessProgramNames={“waxman xboard -h32 -r-900” […] /secondChessProgramNames={“waxman xboard -h32 -r-900”
- Download Waxman 2010
- Unzip the file into the c:\winboard directory
- Run the winboard.exe file.
- Select the Waxman engine from the drop-down options
- Click OK.
What’s nice is that you can setup a position; a feature that is surprisingly absent from a number of versions of chess for Windows; including the built-into-Windows 7 ChessTitans.
