The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

Arena is a free Graphical User Interface (GUI) for chess. Arena assists you in analyzing and playing games as well as in testing chess engines. It runs on Windows XP or higher or on Linux with Wine 1.0 or higher. Arena is compatible to Winboard protocol I, II and UCI protocol I, II. Furthermore, compatible to Chess960, DGT electronic chess board & DGT clock XP, Novag Citrine, Autoplayer, ICS (chess servers) and much more.

Web : http://www.playwitharena.com/?Welcome_to_Arena
DL (Zip archive) : http://www.playwitharena.de/downloads/arena_3.5.zip

Arena is an excellent chess program. It comes with several engines pre-installed (AnMon, Hermann, Ruffian, Rybka, SOS, Spike) but it is very easy to add new engines. There are many free ones, but I would recommend the open-source Stockfish (it is one of the strongest engines and by the way it beat GM Nakamura):

http://stockfishchess.org/ - Stockfish web-site
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockfish_%28chess%29 - Stockfish at Wikipedia
http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/ - Stockfish rating
http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/404/ - Stockfish rating
http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/404FRC/ - Stockfish rating

Arena is rich in features and very customizable. Loading from and Saving to FEN and PGN files is very easy. Arena also shows the opening. It also can be used to connect to internet chess servers. However several of the menus haven't been translated from German to English. I recommend Arena to anyone interested in chess.

Link to Arena at Softpedia:
http://games.softpedia.com/get/Freeware ... -GUI.shtml

Yeah but good luck finding out what the license is. Even Softpedia left their entry blank on that one, which I don't think I've ever seen before.

I had a look at http://www.playwitharena.com/?Legal_Stuff and I would say that Arena is copy-righted freeware (I am not good at licenses and I do not know whether such a term exists):

You are allowed to download the program package and install it on as many computers as you like free of charge.

However, distribution or offering of Arena Chess GUI, SOS for Arena, Dragon, AnMon, Nejmet, Ruffian, Betsy, Chispa, Hermann, Frenzee, Spike, Aice and ELOstat on other webpages, newspaper, CDs, print and other media is only allowed in unmodified form and with the written permission of their respective authors Martin Blume, Rudolf Huber, Bruno LUCAS, Christian BARRETEAU, Jean-Christophe GABILLARD, Per-Ola Valfridsson, Landon W. Rabern, Federico Andrés Corigliano, Sune Fischer, Volker Annuss, Volker Böhm & Ralf Schäfer, Anastasios Milikas and Dr. Frank Schubert.

I suppose that the developer is careful with the licensing because as I mentioned in my previous posts Arena comes with several external chess engines which might be free but might not be open-source. Arena installer also uses Inno Setup.

About Softpedia- Arena is published in Games section of the site and bear in mind that in Softpedia Games there is no license information about the products.

For what it's worth, Project Invincible supports the Chess Engine Communication Protocol and can be used together with Arena: http://sourceforge.net/p/project-invinc ... ki/XBoard/

FYI, Arena's implementation of the protocol is buggy. I had to work around a couple of its bugs.

webfork wrote:Yeah but good luck finding out what the license is. Even Softpedia left their entry blank on that one, which I don't think I've ever seen before.

Based on that page I can tell that Arena is freeware. Anyone can use it for free, but redistribution is not allowed.

smaragdus wrote:I would say that Arena is copy-righted freeware (I am not good at licenses and I do not know whether such a term exists

It's something I struggle with as well.  I just don't want to add an entry when we have no clue what to put in the license space; we can't put "Probably Freeware".

SYSTEM wrote:Based on that page I can tell that Arena is freeware. Anyone can use it for free, but redistribution is not allowed.

We may have to go with that.

hi
why is not this great program in the calog ?
look portable and stealth

thanks

If you feel passionate about this program, please

1. Add it to the database

2. Provide us with the link to the new entry

We will upvote to make it public.