Accessing help
HIARCS Chess Explorer supports many levels of help:
· tool tip help - as you pass the mouse pointer over the icons a short textual description of the icon will be
displayed in a tool tip which will pop up and in the status area in the bottom left hand corner of the
screen.
· context sensitive help - this gives help appropriate to the window or dialog you are using.
· a full detailed manual with contents, search and hyper-linked navigation
Help menu
On most dialogs within the GUI you can access context sensitive help by pressing F1 or choosing the Help>Context help. This will then bring up a window which will display the help for the window or dialog in focus.
Open database of games
To open a PGN database you can click the open database
toolbar icon or choose the File-
>Open... menu item to locate and open a PGN database. Please see the Open database section for details
on how to locate a PGN database file to open.
If your database is in a non standard format, for example, CBF, CBH, you should first convert the database
to PGN format using the software which produced the non standard format.
Making moves
To move a piece simply move the mouse pointer over the square of the piece you wish move, click the left
mouse button to select the piece. You can then hold the mouse button down and drag the piece to the
destination square and let go to make the move.
When Guess move (Preferences->Board tab) is off you can select the source square with a click/release of
the left mouse button and then select the destination square. However we believe most people will prefer to
use the much faster Guess move approach which is on by default.
You can read about more advanced move entry capabilities in the Game Board section.
Guess move
If you have guess move enabled you will notice as you move the mouse over a square of a piece you can
move, the best expected destination square is highlighted. You can select that recommended move simply
by clicking the mouse button and releasing it.
Alternatively with the mouse pointer over a piece, if you then click the right mouse button guess move will
highlight what it thinks is the next best destination square for the piece highlighted. Repeatedly pressing the
right mouse button will cycle through the moves in order of quality. Click and release the left mouse button
to select the currently highlighted guess move.
Also if you move the mouse pointer over a square which a piece can move to you will see the best source
square for that move highlighted. If you want to select that move simply click and release the left mouse
button.
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