The BeholderBoard Virtual Chess Set
The BeholderBoard was a Perl script that let you play chess with your friends (if you had a webserver). It was released as unsupported freeware in 1999. It’s been superseded by a variety of (better) chess servers, so it is no longer available and certainly no longer supported.
- See some example output from the BeholderBoard
It featured:
- up to 999 boards on the go at any time
- password protected boards
- rather lovely graphics for their time
- illegal moves rejected
- scalable, flippable board
- e-mail notification of moves
- output notation in SAN (short-form)
- hide/show labels, captives, moves
- HTML with or without JavaScript, no cookies
- no new games without administrator’s say-so
- playful multi-king/multi-anything non-8-by-8 “deviant chess” mode
The script is no longer available, but if you want to use the graphics for anything, download them as a .zip and off you go: available under a CC-BY 2.0 license.