Python Chess GUI

For my Year 3 dissertation I was working with a Linux based chess engine called m2chess, this engine was a simple terminal based chess game for the user to play chess against another player or even against a simple AI opponent.

My dissertation was to build a graphical user interface for this chess engine with python as a complete standalone module that did not alter the base engines code in any way, this was achieved using pExpect in order to use the terminals inputs and outputs to pass through the GUIs instructions through the terminal based engine.

With many options I eventually settled on the Tkinter graphical user interface toolset in order to build my GUI as this takes its general look and theme based from the standard OS design meaning that it will look natural on any distro of Linux and also look great if ported to Windows or MacOS.

This was my first major use of the python language and the dissertation ended up becoming as much about learning python and module use as it did about building the chess engine GUI.