Hi all,
My Mephisto Phoenix arrived on Wednesday.
I’ve already had it apart to get access to the micro sd card, I now have a micro sd card extension and the card is now accessible outside the case, conveniently through the slot provided at the rear.
The sd card is split into 3 drives, a boot drive, an encrypted drive where all the menus etc are based and a data drive that contains the Engines, Books and some other interesting data.
I have access to the 1st and 3rd drives, but need root access for most of the 2nd drive.
The Operating system is 32bit Raspbian Buster and Stockfish 15.0 is a RPi binary compiled with gcc-8.3.0 on the 26th of July 2022:
“Stockfish 260722 by the Stockfish developers (see AUTHORS file)”
The other 3 Engines are not Raspberry Pi binaries, I already knew this as I had contacted all 3 authors prior to receiving my Phoenix. I don’t think they are Windows binaries, so probably Linux.
I noticed that out of the 5 supplied books, the fun book was exactly the same as our fun book on Picochess. So I added a Gambit book, which immediately showed on boot and is selectable. When I added another book, this didn’t show. However if I renamed the gambit or another book, it showed. So obviously the menu is set to show 6 books. I can’t change this without access to the encrypted data on drive 2.
So the books worked, so I set about adding another Engine. I compiled Stockfish 15.1 using the same gcc-8.3.0 and Buster that was used for v15.0. I noticed that some of the UCI options were changed in v15.0 so I matched these in v15.1. There is also a file named ‘pcs_dat_engsandr‘ that contains the uci options for all engines, Stockfish v14 was also in there, so they must have changed to Stockfish v15 quite late in the day. I added Stockfish 15.1 to this file and rebooted. It didn’t show, so the menus must only allow 4 Engines. I altered the name of the Stockfish 15.0 engine and renamed my 15.1 to 15.0 and rebooted.
As I don’t have access to the menus the engine still showed as Stockfish 15.0, but I knew it was 15.1 and it runs faultlessly. So theoretically I could add any Engine but it would have to show as Stockfish 15.
Here’s a few pictures …
(Click on a thumbnail for a larger image)
Cheers,
Al