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Ericlock2.65 guide

Chess clock,, free software developed by Bersan Vrioni

Ericlock was designed and realized in response to the need for those who arbitrate chess games via Skype or telephone. Particular attention has been paid to its accessibility and ease of use by blind and visually impaired people. In fact, the interface is entirely textual and is managed exclusively from the keyboard. The software is light and requires no installation. The current version is available in Italian, English and Spanish.

What does Ericlock do besides keeping time

Checks the legality of the moves entered, gives the possibility to take backk them, to give bonuses or penalties, to set up to 5 alarms, save the game, etc. It shows all the information of the current game such as time control, position, last move, turn, clock status, castling rights, any repetitions, the ply counters (total and the reversible counter for the 50-move rule). In addition to the checkmate, it detects the draw when stalemate occurs, if no capture has been made and no pawn has been moved in the last 50 moves, by Threefold repetition, because of insufficient material or when one of flag falls and the configuration of the material on the board is such that the opponent can not win. Adjudicates the game for each scenario by filling out the pgn tags accordingly.

It detects the classification of opening, ECO code, its name and that of any variant, allows the consultation, construction and updating of personalized opening books.

Entering moves

To insert a move, if the menu is closed, just type its algebraic notation, wherever you are, the focus will automatically move to the "Move or value" field. Press enter to confirm. Ericlock signals the insertion of the moves with the clock stopped producing a triple beep.

You can also load a previously copied game to the clipboard with the paste function. Game menu -> Paste (CTRL+V). In addition to the moves, if present, Ericlock will also load the information contained in the tags: Event, Round, White, Black, WhiteElo, BlackElo, UTCTime, UTCDate, Termination and Result. Time control and remaining time for players will be loaded only if the following 3 tags are present and filled correctly: TimeControl, WhiteTimeLeft, and BlackTimeLeft.

The menu

You can open the Ericlock's context menu whith the APPS key (applications). It is a tree structured menu. With the up and down arrows you can explore the items that are of 4 types:

1. Head. For example: Clock (opened) ALT+O.
2. Submenu. For example: Adjudications (closed) ALT+X. To open a submenu Press enter or right arrow, to return to the parent menu, left arrow or escape.
3. Command or choice. For example: New game ALT+N or: A fixed time for the whole game. To confirm press enter.
4. Setting. For example: Duration in minutes of the second period 30. To change the value press enter, type the new value and press enter again to confirm.

To exit, press ESCAPE until all the menus are closed or ALT+F4 to close them all at once.

The assistant

Ericlock's assistant provides an extended description of the various information that is compactly annotated in the interface for formatting needs. Reads time remaining, time control, last move, alarms, etc. For example:

Annotation	Assistant's description
01:00:02	an hour, two seconds
40/5400:1800+30	a period of a hour, 30 minutes for 40 moves; plus a period of 30 minutes whith 30 seconds of increment to finish the game.
53... Raxe1+	black 53: rook from Alfa captures the qween in Echo 1 check

The description will be provided via a voice message or via a dialog box depending on the type of assistant selected.

1. If neither JAWS nor NVDA is present on your computer, make sure that the "Assistance type" is set to "Dialog" otherwise the assistant will not work.
2. If only JAWS or only NVDA is present on your computer, you can set the "Type of assistance" in the "Dialog" or the item corresponding to your screen reader.
3. If both JAWS and NVDA are present in your computer, I advise you not to change the "Type of assistance" during a game, the related libraries may conflict and crash the program. To prevent this, set the "Type of assistance" in the ericlock.ini file and before starting Ericlock, start the corresponding screen reader.

How to set the parameters via configuration file (ericlock.ini)

Open the ericlock.ini file with any text editor. It will not be difficult for you to identify the parameters you want to set up since this file is widely commented. Change the numeric value at the bottom of the line that begins with the "$" character. A once finished, save and close the file. The next time Ericlock is started, the new settings will take effect.

Saving the game

Ericlock saves the game in 3 formats (pgn, txt and html). The pgn file will be named with UTC date and time in which the "New game" command was given and will be saved in the "pgn" subfolder. You will find the "MoveList.txt" file in the Ericlock folder, and Ericlock.html in the "html" subfolder. The 2 latter mentioned files will be overwritten by the program when saving a new game. Ericlock.html makes use of Javascript to build the board dynamically. If your browser prevents it from running, it's up to you to tell it to allow it. You can do this every time you open an html page that uses javascript or change the setting in your browser options.

To avoid losing game data following a possible blackout, you can activate automatic saving: game menu -> Enable automatic game saving (CTRL+S).

Ericlock log file

In the "log" subfolder, for each game, you will find a text file with a record for each time one of the following actions has occurred:

1. new game
2. game pasted
3. clock started
4. clock stoped
5. time edited
6. inserted the move
7. taken back the move
8. game adjudicated
9. last save

For example:
after 5 minutes, 13 seconds: inserted the move Nxe4
after a minute, 9 seconds: clock stoped
after 10 seconds: time edited black: plus 3 minutes
after 13 seconds: clock started
...
At the end of the log Ericlock will place a 64-bit file signature (16 hexadecimal digits) so will be possible to verify its authenticity and integrity.
To view the log of the current game: Game menu -> View the log of the current game (CTRL+F5).
To validate an Ericlock log file:

1. Copy the file to validate to the clipboard.
2. Main menu -> Validate log file (CTRL+ALT+V)

Ericlock through a dialog will tell if the file is authentic and intact.

Font size and type

In the "font" tab of the "properties" dialog box (alt + space bar -> properties) you can set the font size and type. Be careful, do not set too large font size, it could compromise the correct display and functioning of the program. To avoid this problems, when you enlarge the font, make sure, in the "layout" tab, that the width of the window does not become less than 80 (characters per line).

If the alphabet of your language contains non-ascii characters and they are not displayed correctly, it means that the font of your console does not support them. Select the "Consolas" or "Lucida Console" font. The changes made in this dialog will take effect the next time Ericlock is started.

Inserting special characters and symbols (non ascii)

To insert special characters that may be present in the Event, White or Black tag value:

1. Type the corresponding ascii character.
2. Use the "page up" and "page down" keys to select the desired character.

For example: if you want to enter the "é" (lowercase e with acute accent), type the lowercase "e" and then move with "page up" or "page down" until you reach it.

Ericlok and the chess openings

Ericlock detects the classification of the opening of the current game, ECO code, it's name and that of any variant. In addition to being shown in the pgn file, this information can be consulted at any time by selecting Game info menu -> Classification of the opening or by pressing (CTRL+F11).

Personalized opening books can be consulted, built and updated. In Ericlock's folder you will already find a small book with approx 45 thousand lines extracted from grandmasters games .

1. Consultation of opening books.

The first four items of the Opening Book menu (ALT+B) are related to their consultation.

1.1. Book to consult.

Editable field where to specify the name of the book to be consulted without the extension.

1.2. Continuations from the book from the current position (CTRL+F2).

Command that through a dialog box shows the list of continuations in the book for the current position.

1.3. Book explorer (CTRL+E).

This command activates the "Book explorer" mode where you can explore the lines with the directional arrows. You can copy the selected line to the clipboard by pressing (CTRL+C). To exit from "Book explorer" mode, press (ALT+F4) or the ESC key. This mode can only be activated if the game has not already started.

1.4. Activate / Deactivate on-screen display of the book explorer (CTRL+ALT+E).

Switch that activates / deactivates the on-screen display of the book explorer. Blind people, who cannot manage their screen reader's output, can set this option to off.

2. Building or updating of opening books.

The remaining five items of the "Opening book" menu (ALT+B) are related to their building / updating.

2.1. Book to build.

Editable field where to specify the name of the book to be built or updated without the extension.

2.2. Minimum line length.

The minimum length, in half moves, of the lines to be inserted in the book. Games with fewer plies of this value will be ignored.

2.3. Maximum line length.

The maximum number of half moves in the lines to be included in the book, beyond which the rest of the game will be ignored.

2.4. Minimum elo rating.

If the related tags are not present, or if both players rating is not equal or greater than this value, the game will be ignored. To disable this filter set the field value to 0.

2.5. Build or update your opening book (CTRL+B).

This command starts building or updating the opening book with the specified criteria.

To build a new book or update an existing one, you must first copy a file containing a pgn database to the clipboard. Starting from the games present in it, filtered according to the specified criteria, a book of openings will be built, or updated if present, with the name specified in the field "Book to build" and extension ".eobf" (Ericlock's opening book format). If you only want to load lines that start with a certain sequence,enter the moves of that sequence on Ericlock before giving the command "Build or update your opening book". Be careful , the pgn database must be not larger than 2 GiB (gibibyte), otherwise the behavior of the program will be unpredictable. Even the maximum size of the book is 2 GiB (gibibyte). Once this limit is reached, Ericlock will tell you via a dialog box that will no longer be possible to add more lines in this book.

Ericlock and screen readers

Ericlock updates the time on the screen every second and could be very annoying if this were vocalized by the screen reader. With JAWS you can set the "Screen Echo" option to "none" by pressing INSERT + S. If your screen reader does not have this feature, you can disable Ericlock's "Auto refresh of the time" from the Clock menu -> Disable auto refresh of the time (CTRL+A). To manually update the time, press the "T" key. In addition, blind people, who cannot manage their screen reader's output, can Deactivate on-screen display of the book explorer (CTRL+ALT+E).

The following two features are available exclusively for users of JAWS and NVDA screen readers.

1. Chess board overview.

Allows the exploration of the chess board, through the directional arrows. In addition to the current one, you can explore all the succeeded positions in the game. To move from one position to another use the key combination (ALT + right arrow) and (ALT + left arrow). Your screen reader will announce the last move before the selected position. With (ALT + home) you reach the starting position and with (ALT + end) the final one. If you enter an alphanumeric character while in "Chess board overview" mode, this mode will be deactivated, the focus will go to the "move or value" field where the typed character will be added.

2. Interrogate the chess board.

Through this type of command you can know the content of a square or the location of the pieces of a certain type and color. To quickly know the content of a specific square, type "=" followed by its coordinate and press enter. To know the location of the pieces of a certain type and color, type "=" followed by the corresponding letter and press enter. Use uppercase letters "PNBRQK" for white pieces and lowercase letters "pnbrqk" for blacks.

Shortcut Keys

To set parameters via the shortcut Keys:

1. Type the value you want to assign to the parameter.
2. Press the corresponding shortcut Key.

For example if you want to set the second period increment in 30 seconds: type "30" and press CTRL+SHIFT+2.

For bonuses and penalties:

1. Type the number of minutes.
2. Reach the player's time line you wish to apply the bonus or penalty.
3. Press CTRL + the "+" (PLUS) button for the bonus and the "-" (MINUS) button for the penalty.

For example, to add 2 minutes to the white: type "2", go to the white's time line and press CTRL + the "+" (PLUS) key.

For a complete list of shortcuts see the following table.

Ericlock's commands table