Table Tennis

Ping99 is a MSDOS based program for table tennis league data. I wrote this years ago in GWBASIC so the interface is keyboard based and a bit dated see below: Having said that it works really well ;Ź)

Table tennis main menu

At the beginning of a season you will need to use options #1 and #2 to put in some new team names, and flush out any old results.
New results (#3) are entered by choosing from the list of teams: i.e home side, away side, home sets, away sets
#4 displays a sorted league table on the screen. If the printer toggle is on then it will attempt to print it to a parallel port printer in text mode.
'W' writes the league table as a Web page. Here is my league:
Bristol & District Table Tennis Association Division 5a league table as of 29th March 2000 when we lost a key player, and I lost interest in collecting the results. We eventually finished 5th.
Option #5 prints the form so far for any chosen team. Sorry this does not get displayed on the screen - this is because I am very lazy, and all I want is the piece of paper to take along to the match. So if you want it on the screen, this is open source software so modify it your self!
Option 6 allows a team to resign (this happens sometimes and all this teams results become void)
Option 7 is an undo for #6

Installing

Just copy everything into a single directory, (or you can even run it from a floppy disk if you want) then run the file Div5a.bat

Multiple Leagues

Because I am only interested in one league, and then the interest only persists while we have a realistic chance of getting into the top two positions. The program is hard coded to read a file called teamname (containing the names of the teams & league), and result (containing the numeric data). This deficiency can be overcome by making multiple copies of the following files: Div5a.bat, Div5a.tns and Div5.res. Just load them into notepad, edit each new copy of the batch file and save each file with a suitable name. I have commented the batch file to make this easy.

When writing a web page the program simply creates a file called League.htm in your program directory. So if you want to create more than one you will need to keep renaming this file to avoid it being overwritten. Its not a bad idea to rename it anyhow because some ftp programs will turn League.htm into LEAGUE.HTM which (depending on the operating system on your web server) might not be the same file name. I reccomend making everything lower case and adding the 'l' to the file extention. I.e. 'filename.html'. This is because some servers do not recognise '.htm' as being a web page, only '.html'.

Additional Considerations For 'Open Source' Developers

Sorry about the short variable names. Most of the original code for this was written on a ZX81. These only supported fairly narrow monitors.

Download ping99.zip (78KB) Modified version now writes your league table as a web page:

Some Pictures of us practising (Who let him have a digital camera?)