Utilities for gshogi:
Gshogi is a program to play Shogi - japanese chess. It was created by John Cheetham: see http://johncheetham.com/projects/gshogi/index.html
I found it is a nice graphical representation and is very useful to play agains engines and learn to play Shogi by using games and literature from the internet.
I publish here some routines which I found useful. They do some translations tasks and are just what I managed to piece together for private purposes. They are by no means error free and you may still have to edit the resulting files by hand in some cases. Unfortunately there is no standardisation in psn-files so many authors use them as a kind of symbolic notation. These programs create a format which is readable by gshogi.
These programs need Python3 and the tkinter-package.
Python 3 is required. If you are using a system that uses python 2 as default (do python -V to check) then you need to use python3 for commands and package names. For example the package name will be python3-cairo instead of python-cairo and the build command will be python3 setup.py build.
You need to install these packages first:
gcc python python-devel python-cairo python-gobject gtk3
psn2psn reads a lot of psn-files and tries to put them in a format which can be read by gshogi.
The package PosX.pyw3 needs the python package pyperclip and xclip on Linux. Copy the ASCII-Representation of a shogi-position and press the button of the program: under Edit-> paste position you can now paste the posititon to gshogi - comes in handy sometimes when replaying positions from publications - doesn't work in all cases since there are a bunch of ways to represent shogi-boards this way. Works e.g. for "Quest of the lost systems" http://www.shogi.net/quest/ A second part translates Mr. Anono's kifu notation in the translation of his endgame-book on the website of the german shogi society and translates it into an alphanumeric psn-notation.
USL-translator will translate files e.g. from the Shogi-Maze website http://shogimaze.free.fr - actually from BCM-Games USL-format. If you are running Linux there is no way to run BCM-games under wine to my knowledge so this may be useful.
Kifu-translator will translate games in kif-format. Handy to pick recent games from japanese websites. The new version will also translate a number of formats created by 81shogi.com. Files with multiple variants are translated. Old shogi notation with kanji for forward sidewards etc is not yet handled. I haven't found time to test the routines and I have not found sufficients kifu files in this format to test.
ShogiQuest translates the file exported by ShogiQest.com
have fun!
Bernd Wille, August 18