What is FICS?
FICS is the acronym for Free Internet Chess Server. Run by volunteers FICS is
completely free. FICS can look back on a long and eventfull past. It started its service as early as 1995. Beside chess FICS
offers a variety of chess variations like Losers, Suicide, several 'wild' variations, Crazyhouse and Bughouse.
If you don't have an account you can always play with a guest login. But I recommend to register and create
an account. FICS will track your rating, you can stay in contact with other players and join tournaments.
You can register here.
About
When I bought my MacBook Air I was disappointed that my favourite FICS client
Babaschess would not run on OSX. So I decided to program my own
client, learning Haskell on the way.
Macbeth is still a work in progress! A lot of functionality FICS offers is not (yet) implemented, ie. playing
Bughouse, chatting with your oponent, but Macbeth will store your games automatically!
Macbeth will create a folder in your home directory: ~/Macbeth. All your games will be automatically stored
here. Currently Macbeth writes to a log-file there as well.
If you tried Macbeth and like it, please write me an email! If you don't like it or your favourite feature
is missing or you encountered a bug, please write me as well! <tilmann@macbeth-ficsclient.com>
You can find the code on github.
I am indebted to Eric de Mund. He is so kind to offer chess piece sets in perfect quality under Creative Commons.
I rejoiced when I found them! So, the piece sets are the work of Eric De Mund, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.