Play Chess in a floating window [revisited]

Apr 05, '04 09:28:00AM

Contributed by: kuwan

This lets you enable the floating/transparent board in Apple's Chess application without modifying the app at all. I originally posted this to Slashdot here. After taking a look at the source, I found out that the floating window can be activated without making any modifications to the application. Here's how to enable the transparent window. Open Terminal.app and set MBC_DEBUG as an environment variable to 16. With bash:

set MBC_DEBUG=16
With tcsh:
setenv MBC_DEBUG 16
Now, open Chess.app from the Terminal:
open /Applications/Chess.app/
There will be a new menu item (Floating Board) under the "Game" menu. Selecting this menu item will toggle the floating board on and off. There seems to be a bug with the mouse behavior (I can't move any pieces), and I assume this is why this feature was removed. I found that you can get around this bug by doing the following:
  1. Start a game with the normal window.
  2. Play at least one move.
  3. Switch to the floating board.
  4. Select "Take Back Move" from the "Moves" window.
  5. You should now be able to move the pieces as normal.
[robg adds: We ran an older hint about modifying the Chess app itself to activate this hack. This method is much quicker, safer, and easier, so I've chosen to run it as a new hint, and I'll add a pointer from the old one to this one...]

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040330160753686