How it works
A native Windows chess viewer and analysis board, written in C. What ChessViz does, what it’s built with, and how far along it is.
The premise
Load games from PGN or FEN and step through them, move pieces around freely, and analyze any position with a UCI engine like Stockfish, lc0, Komodo, or Vizier, which was written alongside it.
It’s plain C on GDI with no outside dependencies. You get a green and cream board with Unicode pieces, coordinates, highlights for the last move and for check, dots for legal moves, and a board flip. Move by dragging or clicking, pick promotions from a menu, and step through a two-column move list with animation.
What’s included
Works with any UCI engine and draws MultiPV analysis arrows on the board
Loads PGN and FEN, with keyboard and mouse navigation through the moves
Pieces slide between positions as you step through the move list
Plain C on GDI, with no frameworks and no runtime dependencies
How it’s built
ChessViz is built on C, Win32, GDI and UCI.
It lives in a private repository, and its history isn’t published.
How the work is done
Every project here starts as a written spec, and the spec stays the source of truth once there’s code. The repository keeps a build plan with current status, an append-only decision log of where the code departed from the plan, and a handoff document that describes where things stand, including the unfinished parts.
That’s how one person keeps this many projects moving, and it’s what this page is written from.
Current state
In development. Being worked on now.
The source is private, so the way to check what this page says is to use the product.
Next
Get ChessViz
Ask about availability, a build for your platform, or a license.