EVTIMER - Running Event Timer (ALPHA version) - FREEWARE

I had some spare time over the holidays, so I sat down and wrote a little
program which might be of use to race directors. It's an event timer for
an IBM PC or compatible. I'd like to hear from you just how much interest
there might be in a piece of software like this. I will send out C source
code to anyone interested but please read further before requesting it
immediately.

Jack Berkery, GE Research, Schenectady NY
berkery@crd.ge.com, "The Common Sense Coach"

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I kept it as simple as possible in order to make it useable on the lowest
common denominator, so it runs in DOS text windows on any monochrome or color
screen. My intent is to have it work on a portable (most of which have
monochrome screens) at a race site in much the same way that the little hand-
held printing timers (which cost $300) are used except that there is no roll
of paper and the numbers are recorded in a PC file ready to be merged with
some spreadsheet file for full results.

This version is an ALPHA release. It is NOT currently in a reliably useable
form. What I want is to have some PC hackers take a look under the hood and
see what might be needed to shine it up and make it a bit more robust. I've
never written any code in the DOS environment before. I've always done VMS
and Unix stuff. So, after a couple months of hacking we may have a useable
program. (Never mind commercial quality, race directors are not very fussy
but we certainly are cheap.) Then we can post it to alt.sources or whatever
on the internet for global free use.

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NOTES:

I have Turbo-C on my home PC. I don't know to what extent it might be
compatible with Microsoft-C or anyone elses C compiler.

For windows and menus I used a freeware library called PC-Windows by Stan
Milam and borrowed heavily from his demo examples. PC-Windows is available
in the archives as pcw-c.zip (full source included).
i.e. ftp to: wuarchive.wustl.edu and look in mirrors/msdos/c

The input routines are very rough and do no data checking at all yet. You
could, for instance, tell it to begin timing at "0:BZ:00" minutes and lord
knows what it would do. I put in some minimal option menus like counting
up or counting down before the start. Perhaps you can see a need for
different ones or embellishments on these. Help text is rather sparse but
could be made more extensive with little effort.

The output file format is nothing special. It might be nice to have it in
some form which is importable by most of the popular spreadsheets. The
comma-delimited format would be easy to do.

I have a joystick stashed away somewhere and it might be just the thing to
use as a trigger device on-site but I haven't gotten around to trying that
yet either. I could even imagine constructing a simple and CHEAP triggering
device from parts readily available at Radio Shack that would plug into a
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mouse or game port. Maybe I'll check that out at some later date too.