This message is to announce the release of MSCP 1.2 beta.

The source distribution is available through
        http://combinational.com/mscp/
The beta version will silently be followed by a release
version in a month time. I will not provide binaries but
I am willing to link to binary distributions that are
reported back to me.

MSCP is Marcel's Simple Chess Program. Its main purpose
is to be a small, simple, yet complete chess engine. MSCP
features aspiration window tree search, quiscence search,
move sorting, position evaluation, hash tables, opening book,
standard algebraic move input and output. It works well
with both xboard and icsdrone and it should run without
trouble in winboard.

Release 1.2 fixes some bugs and adds a couple of
new functions:
- added configurable search depth (courtesy Dann Corbit)
- fixed bishop evaluation (courtesy Michael Engel)
- fixed move undo bug that corrupted the board
- cleaned some of the code

MSCP has played nearly 200,000 blitz games on FICS
(freechess.org) and 75,000 games on ICC (chessclub.com).
It wins most of its games against humans but it is not
overly strong: people do have a fair chance of beating it.

MSCP 1.2 is released under the GNU GPL (see file COPYING
or http://combinational.com/mscp/COPYING for details.)

Enjoy,

        Marcel
--  _   _
  _| |_|_|
 |_    |_     marcelk@bitpit.net
         |_|  Marcel van Kervinck