This is an interest of mine and computer programs have gotten to the point where they thrash me pretty regularly. I think the Chess application on the Mac is supposed to be a Apple front-end for gnuchess, and has worked for me just fine up until now. But either age is really catching up with me and my eyes aren't what they were or they've messed up the display a bit with the latest 3D appearances. Anyhow I tried to figure out how I could get something a little easier to work with. Play with? Most likely some alternative appearance for the board and pieces that would still work with gnuchess.
OK, to work with the old-school Unixy stuff, especially if it's X11 type graphics, I go to Fink and FinkCommander. So the parts you need would be X11 which for 10.4 is an optional install off of the first install CD. When I last got it at 10.2 for Jaguar it was a separate download off of the Apple site as I remember. Then you would need to download Fink and probably FinkCommander if you don't have them. This will reasonably automatically handle the remaining Unix type install. Then you can get into the chess related. I got gnuchess (version 5.07), crafty - not sure which version, and xboard for what you actually see. I briefly tried the glchess but that didn't seem to work too well for me. Also, the appearance seemed still a sort of difficult to follow 3D look.
I just default installed all of this so pretty much everything appeared to go to /sw/bin. It took a while but I figured out how to run gnuchess from xterm using xboard. Neat but the command was a little difficult to remember so I wondered if there were some way to alias it? There turned out to indeed be a slick way to do this. I went into my System Preferences for my user account and added the X11 application to my login items. Then I changed my .bash_profile by adding the following...
