Tournament Directing Software/ Discussion

It seems to be pretty obvious that this current page is a bit of a mess. Categorising the software by free or open source or commercial seems a bit of a waste of time to me. Anyone looking for a program to run a tournament is primarily going to want to know what the program can do, what it can run on and then what do they need to do to get it.

Would anyone object to just resorting into an alphabetical list and trying to give each a program a short paragraph summarising their main features?

Preview-Type-Thing

Software can be of great assistance when Organizing a Tournament/Discussion. Such programs typically manage a registry of players, manage the draw for each round, and allow match results to be entered. If you have no experience of performing the draw you would be well advised to use one.

• AccelRat

• EPM - only available in Finnish, an English Language version may well appear eventually

• Gotha of French origin, popular in Europe.

• GoMMTour? - Of historical interest only, one of the first draw programs ever written

• GoDraw Popular in the UK, can handle McMahon and Swiss pairings, runs on !DOS.

• GoPair perl program, you will need some computer experience to install this program.

• MacMahon - The Program written by Christoph Gerlach, runs on windows and comes with a thesis explaining its correctness.

• MacTD Jared Roach has written a software for Macintosh based on HyperCard?, called MacTD.
  

It works very well (the interface has very basic graphics, but who cares?) and supports many pairing algorythms, not only McMahon: Equality, Swiss, MM, Equality-MM, Swiss-MM, Sequential MM, Desperation, Pre-pairs Winner...
Despite his statement of not having much time to better his program, Jared is keenly available, and he has modifyed his software to meet my specific needs in running tournaments.
-- DJ

Bignose: I've been trying to find a free software program for directing a Go tournament, and have only come across Gotha; it has a text file that offers the source code if you email the author, though I've not yet received a response (as of March 28, 2003).

Velobici: Luc Vannier, the author of Gotha, send me a URL to the source the same morning that I requested access. Perhaps the request by Bignose was swept up in spam filters, a mailbox move, or some other unintended event. (30 May 2005)

Apart from that, there appears to be very little free software for running *any* kind of game tournament; there is some for running networked video games, but those aren't a lot of use for board games.

So I'd like to start a project to fill this gap; a free software library, and at least one application, for running board game tournaments (initially Go, because that's my present need). Please help me determine the Tournament Directing Software Requirements.

Old Content

Software can be of great assistance when Organizing a Tournament/Discussion. Such programs typically manage a registry of players, manage the draw for each round, and allow match results to be entered.

Free software

These programs are distributed under a free software license, and can thus be freely modified, shared, sold etc.

• Gotha

Non-free software

These programs have license terms that restrict the freedom of users more than free software.

Non-free, zero-cost

These programs are non-free but can be used for zero price.

• MacMahon - The Program
• AccelRat

Non-free, commercial

These programs are non-free and require payment to the vendor to use all or some of the features.

*

Don't know

• GoMMTour? - can't find a link
• GoDraw
• GoPair perl program

Bignose: I've been trying to find a free software program for directing a Go tournament, and have only come across Gotha; it has a text file that offers the source code if you email the author, though I've not yet received a response (as of March 28, 2003).

Velobici: Luc Vannier, the author of Gotha, send me a URL to the source the same morning that I requested access. Perhaps the request by Bignose was swept up in spam filters, a mailbox move, or some other unintended event. (30 May 2005)

Apart from that, there appears to be very little free software for running *any* kind of game tournament; there is some for running networked video games, but those aren't a lot of use for board games.

So I'd like to start a project to fill this gap; a free software library, and at least one application, for running board game tournaments (initially Go, because that's my present need). Please help me determine the Tournament Directing Software Requirements.

Christoph Gerlach: My pairing program MacMahon - The Program is not OpenSource but it is "Non-free, zero-cost", that means it is freeware until I renounce. And there are some more pairing programs available with the same policy.

Jared Roach has written a software for Macintosh based on HyperCard?, called MacTD.
It works very well (the interface has very basic graphics, but who cares?) and supports many pairing algorythms, not only MacMahon (McMahon?): Equality, Swiss, MM, Equality-MM, Swiss-MM, Sequential MM, Desperation, Pre-pairs Winner...
Despite his statement of not having much time to better his program, Jared is keenly available, and he has modifyed his software to meet my specific needs in running tournaments.
-- DJ