Mobile Chess Board

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A portable chess board to run on Java cell phones

MobileChessBoard is a mobile chess board to run on a Java enabled cell phone. It can be used like an ordinary chess board, it is neither a game server nor a client and it does not communicate with other cell phones running the same software. A screenshot

You can use MobileChessBoard to play chess with a friend. You can undo/redo an arbitrary number of moves and you can enter positions.

MobileChessBoard will always remind the last position including the game's history, so closing the program is no problem and you can restart the board and proceed your game.

MobileChessBoard 1.0
  • Play chess with a friend according to FIDE rules
  • Step through the game's history
  • Remind your game/position including history
  • Turn the board
  • MobileChessBoard is open source software (MPL 1.1, GPL 3, LGPL 3)
MobileChessBoard 2.0
Additionally:
  • Enter a position and play starting with that position
  • Language support for English, Deutsch, Français (thanks to Gérald for the french translation)
  • Help on keyboard layout
  • Permanent backlight on/off (depends on platform and your personal settings)
  • Show coordinates
  • Comes with four different aspects of view, e.g. players vis à vis or turn the board automatically after each move
  • Tested to run on
    – Nokia: 3600, 6230i, 6630
    – Sony Ericsson: K510i, K750i

By the way... the screenshot on the right shows a challenging problem:

        "White to move checkmates black in two (yeah, really two!) moves."

Try out and have fun! Note: Don't forget that black may castle...

Requirements

MobileChessBoard is written in Java, it is a J2ME MIDlet suite. Therefore, your cell phone must come along with the following features:

JSR 30
Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) 1.0
JSR 118
Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) 2.0
Display
170 × 170 pixel color or gray scale display
Program memory consumed
  • MobileChessBoard 1.0: 17 kByte
  • MobileChessBoard 2.x: 47 kByte

Downloads

To install the software on your cell phone, load the MobileChessBoard.jar into the cell phone. If you have any questions concerning that topic, please refer to your cell phone's user manual.

You cannot install verion 1.x and version 2.x in parallel, so you must take a decision. Installing version 1.x will overwrite an installed version 2.x and vice versa.

MobileChessBoard 1.0
MobileChessBoard 2.0

The sources are arranged as a NetBeans project. However, to use the projcet in your environment, you probably will have to change some settings like the paths to your JDK or WTK.

If you intend to develop on your own, you may be interested in the following software:

This software can also be found at SourceForge.net as MobileChessBoard. However, the most recent version lives here.

Moreover, at SourceForge.net you will find a similar projcet called MobiChess written by Sergey Romas. That software implements some artificial intelligence in a chess engine. If you like that software but prefer my design, then just replace MobiChess' /res/sprite/pieces.png by pieces.png and /res/sprite/back.png by back.png

 

 

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