The freeware program Chess Hero is lots of fun. You do, however, need to feed it pgn files, and some of those files return an error message when you try to load them in Chess Hero, even though they work fine in Arena and other programs.

Here’s how to fix them. Open the pgn file in a standard text editor. My current favorite is Ever Edit but any one will do.

Once you have opened the pgn file, open up the Find button in your text editor. Often its icon is a magnifying glass, or binoculars. Get to the Find and Replace area and type the following into the boxes:

In the Find box, type in: [FEN

In the Replace box, type in: [SetUp “1”] [FEN

Then hit the Replace All button.

What you are really doing is adding the phrase [SetUp “1”] before every game in the pgn file. My guess is that Chess Hero insists on having that written in for some reason.

Here’s a quote:

9.7.1 Tag: SetUp

This tag takes an integer that denotes the “set-up” status of the game. A value of “0” indicates that the game has started from the usual initial array. A value of “1” indicates that the game started from a set-up position; this position is given in the “FEN” tag pair. This tag must appear for a game starting with a set-up position. If it appears with a tag value of “1”, a FEN tag pair must also appear.



It may not work every time, but it works often.

Second way:

Download Fritz 5.32 from here [careful, it may take you away from this page. Make sure to come back, y’hear]: http://www.top-5000.nl/dl.htm?file=dl/fritz532.zip Yes, it seems to be freeware now.

Hit the New button to create a new empty pgn file, lets call it good.pgn

Hit the Database button and load that pesky pgn that Chess Hero refuses. Fritz will list all the games in the pesky file. Use the Shift button on your keyboard to select them all. Now hit the copy button and when asked where to save, tell it to save to good.pgn, that empty pgn file you just made.

Voila! Good.pgn will have all the games in the pesky one, and it will work in Chess Hero.