GUI Customizations

Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro Boards and Pieces

Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro (HCE Pro) is my favorite chess GUI. While its default boards and pieces look great, computers encourage continual tinkering, so I’ve customized its appearance.

Cherry Board and Vintage Pieces

I downloaded photos of light and dark cherry wood from the Internet, opened them in the Paint.NET image editor, and adjusted brightness, contrast, hue, and saturation. In my opinion, the end result is a board with pleasantly warm colors, realistic wood grain, but without harsh patterns that distract your eye from pieces on the board.

I noticed HCE Pro repeats the 1 (light) and 2 (dark) images for every square, if the images are small. However, if the images are large (I don’t know the minimum dimensions), HCE Pro uses the entire light image for the board, blended with the entire dark image into an 8 square x 8 square chessboard. Therefore, I did not resize the source photos so you see a consistent wood grain throughout the board.

After I edited the board images, I used the Edge web browser’s F12 Developer Tools to extract individual “Vintage” theme piece images from the chess.com website, opened them in Paint.NET, and assembled them into a single image required by HCE Pro.

This is the end result. Click the link below to download a ZIP file. Extract its files to the following directory on your PC:

C:\Program Files (x86)\HIARCS Chess\HIARCS Chess Explorer Pro\data\themes

Download

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