Ishi Format

During the early 1990s, Ishi was a file format to store Go games. It is possible to replay a game from reading the bare source of an Ishi file.

File example

EVENT old Chinese game
BLACK Shi Xiang-Xia
WHITE Fan Xi-Ping
DATE 1739
BOARDSIZE 19
RESULT W+15
KOMI -2
SETUP W D16 Q4
SETUP B D4 Q16
W 1 R14
B 2 R9
W 3 F3
B 4 L3
W 5 R7
B 6 O3
( ... )
B 58 D11
PRISONER  D12 D13
COM
B's situation is now worse.
ENDCOM

N.B.: the Ishi format doesn't use the "i" in the coordinates

Applications that can handle Ishi (.go, .prb)

• gGo (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) Will open Ishi .go files, but not .prb files
• glGo (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) Will open Ishi .go files, but not .prb files
• Go++ (Windows)
• GoGoD95 (Windows), one of the game file viewers on Games of Go on Disk
• Goliath (Mac, Win32)
• GoScorer (Windows, included in !GoGoD95, part of Games of Go on Disk)
• Goscribe (DOS) (defunct)
• GoSimulator (DOS)
• Hibiscus (Windows, a bit old-fashioned)
• Many Faces of Go
• Nemesis (DOS, Mac) older version claimed it could export to this...
• SmartGo
• TurboGo reads them (no, doesn't write)
• Yago (Windows) ( download Yago)

Applications that can save to Ishi (.go, .prb)

• Many Faces of Go (version 10, 11, and 12)

Specific tools

• Steve Baileys's Procishi

See also

• Utilities

Links

• http://www.britgo.org/tech/ishispec.html -- Ishi specification by David Fotland