How to play Stockfish Chess on Mac
Game summary
Stockfish is a powerful chess analysis app. Play two-player games on the beautiful chess board, or get instant accurate analysis of any game. Stockfish will tell you who's winning and calculate the best move.
Features:
INTERACTIVE, IMMERSIVE BOARD
Stockfish has a gorgeous board that looks fantastic on Retina Displays. It's full of nice touches: when you click or drag a piece, its destination squares are highlighted in yellow, and the best move is shown with a red arrow. Plus, you can go full screen for the most immersive chess experience.
TOP-NOTCH CHESS ANALYSIS
Analysis is powered by the Stockfish chess engine, the strongest free chess engine in the world. You're getting top-notch analysis that surpasses the strongest human chess grandmasters.
ADVANCED FEATURES
Stockfish has many enhancements for advanced users. You can browse through multi-game PGN files, copy and paste FEN strings, utilize Syzygy endgame tablebases, and use MultiPV.
FREE AND OPEN SOURCE
Stockfish is completely free, and the source code is available on our website (stockfishchess.org) under the GPLv3 license.
First released: Jan 2014
Play Stockfish Chess on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)
The easiest way to play Stockfish Chess on a Mac is through Parallels, which allows you to virtualize a Windows machine on Macs. The setup is very easy and it works for Apple Silicon Macs as well as for older Intel-based Macs.
Parallels supports the latest version of DirectX and OpenGL, allowing you to play the latest PC games on any Mac. The latest version of DirectX is up to 20% faster.
Our favorite feature of Parallels Desktop is that when you turn off your virtual machine, all the unused disk space gets returned to your main OS, thus minimizing resource waste (which used to be a problem with virtualization).
Stockfish Chess installation steps for Mac
Step 1
Go to Parallels.com and download the latest version of the software.
Step 2
Follow the installation process and make sure you allow Parallels in your Mac’s security preferences (it will prompt you to do so).
Step 3
When prompted, download and install Windows 10. The download is around 5.7GB. Make sure you give it all the permissions that it asks for.
Step 4
Once Windows is done installing, you are ready to go. All that’s left to do is install Stockfish Chess like you would on any PC.
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