WHAT IS TIMESEAL?!
Timeseal is a program that has been developed to improve chess play timing on the Internet.
Netlag often causes players to lose valuable seconds or even minutes on their chess clocks. Transmission time is counted against you, unless the chess server can tell exactly when information is transmitted. What timeseal does is record your thinking time, so that transmission time is not counted against you. Timeseal will not prevent netlag but it makes the games fairer when lag occurs.
HOW DO I USE TIMESEAL?!
What you need to do is get a version of timeseal working on the computer that connects you to the chess server. The timeseal program will work as a relay station, and will keep track of transmission times.
DOWNLOAD TIMESEAL
Follow these directions:
If using SLIP, PPP or Winsock (on DOS/Windows(TM)-Machines) you should already know what kind of Operating system you are running (i.e. Linux, FreeBSD, DOS etc.).
On unix systems you may have to Type "gunzip filename.gz", on DOS Systems "pkunzip filename.zip".
To make the timeseal command available, rename the unpacked program to "timeseal". ("mv filename timeseal" and "chmod 755 filename" on Unix- Systems)
Here is an example for the case you have downloaded the version called timeseal.ULTRIX-4.3-RISC.gz on your Unix/ULTRIX system and your WWW browser did not already run the uncompressor automatically:
Now you are ready ... to go to the next step. ;-)
RUN TIMESEAL WITH YOUR INTERFACE
There are different procedures depending on which interface/system you are using. If you use Xwindows +Xboard / xics, then go to A); if you use Windows(TM)/winsock then go to B); otherwise go to C).
xboard -ics -icshost 131.246.89.4 -telnet -telnetProgram timeseal
The usual login sequence should occur as if you started xboard like you are used to do. If the output looks weird or if you cannot type anything, this method does not work for your system. If your xboard tells you something like "Cannot execute timeseal" then timeseal is not in your Shell's search path (check the $PATH variable) or it is not executable (fix with "chmod 755 location_of_timeseal).
timeseal 131.246.89.4 5000 -p 5555 & xboard -ics -icshost localhost -icsport 5555or, if using xics instead of xboard
xics localhost xxxx
You MUST use the string "localhost". Do NOT write the chess server host's address because then timeseal will NOT WORK. "localhost" is a perfectly valid address since it's aliased to 127.0.0.1 (loopback) which always means the machine you are logged in at, where the timeseal program is running on.
Modify your interface configuration to replace the normal telnet command with: "timeseal 131.246.89.4 5000".
DONE!
Questions? Ask channel 1 or an admin.