3.1: Viewing Games
This section shows you how to move around within a game and see the entire contents of the game in a separate window. To follow the examples in this section, make sure you have the tutorial.pgn file (or the database of games you copied from tutorial.pgn) open as the current database.
Loading a game
The Game menu provides a number of commands for loading games of the current database, and there are also useful shortcut keys such as Ctrl+UpArrow to load the previous game, Ctrl+Shift+UpArrow to load the first game, etc. Try loading different games in your database now using the menus or shortcuts, observing how the game information area and main window title bar provide feedback about the current game.
Navigating within a game
Load the first game of your database now. You will see that that in the navigation toolbar (the icons just above the chessboard), the first two buttons are disabled since you are at the start of the game. Use the first four buttons to see how they let you move forward and backward in a game. Also try these keyboard shortcuts:
- Left/Right arrow: go back/forward one move.
- Up/Down arrow: go back/forward ten moves (five of each side)
- Home/End: go to the start or end of the game.
The next three icons (with the V symbol) on the navigation toolbar are for navigating variations, which are covered in a later section.
The PGN window
Sometimes, you may want to see the textual representation of the
entire game in a single window and be able to click on any move
in the window to navigate within the game. The PGN window
provides this functionality, showing the complete PGN-format
representation of the current game. You can open or close it using the
Windows / PGN window menu command, the Ctrl+P
shortcut, or the 
toolbar button.
You can click the left mouse button on any move in the PGN window to jump to it, or use the middle or right mouse button to pop-up a small preview of the position at that move without changing the current position in the game.
The PGN window provides several configuration options in its Display menu, some of which are especially useful when viewing games that have comments or variations (which are covered in a later section). If you change any of these options and want your choices to be remembered for future ChessDB sessions, select Save options from the main window Options menu.
Autoplay
It is possible to get the pieces to move forward automatically, with a time between each move. Select the time under one of the submenus of the Options menu (Options / Move / Auto timedelay. Then click the Autoplay button on the toolbar.If you would like to contribute to the tutorial or see anything that should be updated, corrected or improved, please contact David Kirkby. But please note David only speaks English.
Website administered by Dr. David Kirkby
This page was last modified: September 16, 2007. 10:41:41 am GMT