OthBase 1.8.1 review

As an Othello player I have used since 1988 several tools and programs for improving my game play

License: Freeware File size: 0K Developer: Fabrice DI MEGLIO

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As an Othello player I have used since 1988 several tools and programs for improving my game play. The most often used tools have been: Thor, Cassio and WZebra. Those programs are very interesting tools for studying Othello but they have all the same drawback: you are locked to one OS platform.

The OthBase project has started beginning of November 2002 based on the following constatations:

there was no cross platform Othello database program that was available on several platforms; you needed for example to use Cassio for MacOS 9.X, or use WZebra for Windows if you wanted to study tournament level games
there was no Othello database program available on the Java platform nor Linux (sorry LZebra was not very well supported on Linux)
there was always the need to update manually the database when using Cassio or WZebra; this task should have been done automatically via the program itself

Ajax and Cyrano, two good Othello programs written in Java, have shown that we can have strong and interesting Othello programs written on the Java platform

As an early Java adopter (since the first JDK 1.0 beta release in 1996!) and Othello addict, I decided on November 2002 to start this project as the Java platform is now very popular and really more mature than a couple of years ago. The JFC/SWING GUI library is now at a good level and JVM performances are increasing each year. Check for example infos about HotSpot. Moreover the Java developers community is really alive and responsive. You can check at Apache Jakarta Project and at JavaDesktop.

My main goals are:

to promote Othello thru the use of a database program for studying games of tournament players
to develop an Othello database program in Java that will be the same on Windows, MacOSX or Linux
to support the Thor database format and other popular game file formats (e.g. XOF, SGF, PGN, Cassio)
to implement a database feature set identical at minimum to Cassio's one
to allow an easy installation and update of the program
to allow an easy update of the FFO game database available in the Thor database format
to add new cool extra features that are needed by Othello players in a responsive way
to allow developers to add some plugins into the program to add new features

Here are some key features of "OthBase":
Database Formats Support

XOF database files
Thor database (.WTH / .JOU / .TRN files)
PGN database files (Kurnik and VOG)
GGF (old GGS server)
Yahoo! Japan logs from Uniyma (text export format)

Database Management

Create / Read / Import / Save XOF database files
Read / Import Thor database directory
Clean Thor database directory
Synchronize manually / autimatically a Thor database directory with a FTP server
Read / Import PGN database files
Read / Import GGF database files
Read / Import TXT database files from Uniyma logs
In memory Database Merge thru import
In memory Database export to XOF
Add game to In memory Database
Delete game(s) from In memory Database
MRU support (most recently used database files)
In memory Database filtering on Tournament (name, date), player name with support of complex boolean filters
On the fly computed statistics for In memory Database depending on the moves played and filter
Set / Unset Games bookmark
Manage Games bookmarks
Go to bookmarked game


Game Management

Play game with backward/forward/go to start/go to end
Mouse wheel support for fast move forward / backward
Enter game as sequence of move on board
Enter a game as a diagram
Copy move list / position / diagram
Paste move list
Drag and drop a game from game list to Othello board
Show game diagram
Goto Move: by clicking on a move in diagram mode