Many chess playing programs also have provision for solving some kinds of problem such as checkmate in a certain number of moves (directmates), and some also have support for helpmates and selfmates.
[4] In 1993, Schach und Spiele magazine considered Alybadix to be six times faster than other playing machines including the RISC 2500.
Since its origin, Popeye was designed as a general-purpose, extensible tool for checking fairy and heterodox chess problems.
Elmar Bartel, Norbert Geissler, Thomas Maeder, Torsten Linss, Stefan Hoening, Stefan Brunzen, Harald Denker, Thomas Bark and Stephen Emmerson, converted Popeye to the C programming language, and now maintain the program.
[9] Winchloe not only supports classical problems — direct mates, helpmates and selfmates — but also many fairy pieces and conditions with different sized chessboards (up to 250 by 250 squares).
[citation needed] Jacobi is a program to solve fairy chess proof game problems by François Labelle.
A UCI adapter (written by Franz Huber) is also available, allowing Chest to be used as solving engine in any UCI-capable chess GUI.
Stelvio is a freeware program written by Reto Aschwanden devoted to solving orthodox shortest proof games.
[citation needed] The style was originally created by Thomas Brand and further developed by Stefan Hoening, both based on ideas of a TeX package from Elmar Bartel.