Marc Benford wrote Today at 00:22:24:

Documentation that assumes you already know all the lingo. But not hopeless, because you can make a decent guess and get detailed error messages from make about what went wrong. When there are no more error messages, you will have a working Popeye.

Marc Benford wrote Today at 00:22:24:

You would uncomment exactly the way you tried, by removing the leading #. Bad it was a bad instruction on my part. What you want to do is go to line 105 which begins DEFS= and at the end of that line add a space followed by (translate the following to all-caps)  $(definemacro)sharing

Marc Benford wrote Today at 00:22:24:

For a Makefile, the separator is the TAB character, which takes some getting used to. make saw 8 spaces and asked if you meant TAB instead. Don't worry about it on line 63 because you don't want either one, you want to edit line 105.

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I read them, but I didn't understand them. It's like reading Chinese. It's hopeless.



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Step 1: Open the command prompt.

Step 2: I must either type "cd C:\Users\Name\Desktop\popeye-develop" or "cd C:\Users\Name\Desktop\popeye-develop\popeye-develop". I already don't know which one of these two things I must type. Because, after I downloaded Popeye from GitHub, I now have a file (maybe "file" is not the right name, maybe it's called a "folder" instead, I don't know) called "popeye-develop" on my computer, and inside this file there's only one file and it's also called "popeye-develop", and inside this file are all the very many files. So when I want to try something, I first type "cd C:\Users\Name\Desktop\popeye-develop" and then I try the thing, and if it doesn't work then I type "cd C:\Users\Name\Desktop\popeye-develop\popeye-develop" and then I try the thing again to see if it works this time...

Step 3: And so on step 3, you want me to then type "make -f makefile.unx"? Is that right? It gives me the following error:
'make' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
Perhaps I should instead type "mingw32-make -f makefile.unx"? This seems to give slightly better results, but it still doesn't work.



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The line with the word "SHARING" is line 63.
How exactly do I "uncomment" it?
I tried removing the #, but then the command prompt gave me the following error message when I tried make:
makefile.defaults:63: *** missing separator (did you mean TAB instead of 8 spaces?).  Stop.
So I removed all of the whitespace characters, but then the command prompt gave me the following error message when I tried make:
makefile.defaults:63: *** missing separator.    Stop.
What even is a "separator"?

Okay, so I downloaded all the Popeye files and I edited them to add a new piece. This is done. What now? I think this is the part where I need to compile the Popeye files, after which I will obtain a .exe file. I have never compiled anything in my life, so I need some help on that. I don't even know what "compiling" even means, but apparently this is what I must do.

I installed the following three things on my computer:
- MinGW (GCC for Windows) (I needed to watch a Youtube tutorial to figure out how to install this one)
- Git
- Node

In the command prompt, I type "cd C:\Users\Name\Desktop\popeye-develop" to navigate to the location of the Popeye files. Then, I type "gcc popeye-develop" to compile the Popeye files, but it just gives me the following error message:
c:/mingw/bin/../lib/gcc/mingw32/6.3.0/../../../../mingw32/bin/ld.exe: cannot find popeye-develop: Permission denied
collect2.exe: error: ld returned 1 exit status

Unironically sounds like a job for vibe coding.

If you are looking to define a new piece via the GUI, that would be a heavy lift. I sincerely doubt anybody has made that possible. In Popeye you could (in principle) add a new piece in the c code. Instead I suggest you check out the FairyMax engine, which uses a file fmax.ini to define the variants and the piece movements. It's still complicated, but if your piece combinations are simple you might be able to figure it out. For example look at the Queen, look at the Knight, look at the Amazon, and see in what way the Queen and Knight were combined there. Then try the same thing with your desired piece combination.

For resizing the board, both Xboard(Winboard) and Popeye can do it. In Xboard you can change the size of the board _larger_ on the fly by providing a larger FEN. But if you try to make it smaller with the same trick then it will complain. There are command-line options as well which you can read up on. With Popeye you can change the size of the board by editing board.h and compiling. In board.c the defined files go from a to z, so it should probably handle up to a 26x26 board this way.
 
Lines in board.h to change:

  nr_files_on_board = 8,
  nr_rows_on_board = 8,