GoTimer for Palm PDA

A game clock written for the Palm PDA running PalmOS for the wonderful game of Go. Also known as Igo, Weiqi and Baduk.

It has support for canadian and japanese byo-yomi, and has configurable warning beeps.

Usage

See the screenshots below to see how the game clock works. The players look at a rotated Palm PDA and the game clock is displayed in the half of the screen closest to them. They use button 1 (player 1) and button 4 (player 2) to stop their respective clocks. Your time is displayed in a larger font size and your opponents above in a smaller size. A black square indicates who is the active player (the active player will press his button next).

The player which starts the game presses his button twice in the start of the game. Once to start his clock and a second time to stop his clock / start the opponent's clock.
    
Picture showing the buttons 1, 2, 3, 4 och page up/down. Player 1 is using button 1 and player 2 is using button 4 to stop their respective clocks. Page up/down is pause. Player 1 is viewing the left half of the screen, and player 2 the right half.

         

We see that player 2 has entered byo-yomi. If it's japanese byo-yomi it means that he has 5 periods left (each period being at least 50 s) and if it's canadian byo-yomi it means that he has 5 moves left to play within 50 s.

         

It's possible to set different time for the two players. Japanese, canadian and no byo-yomi are possible byo-yomi selections. You may turn of warning sounds or configure when they should beep.

It's possible to pause the game by pressing the page up or page down button. Press one of those two buttons again to continue playing. Note that a pause will in japanese byo-yomi reset the current period. The reason for this is that one should not have to loose a period after returning from a break and not remembering what move to make. However, in canadian byo-yomi the game clock will just be stopped.

If somebody loses on time a dialog pops up and indicates that the game is over. You may then press the continue button or press the "pause" hardware button to close the dialog and continue playing. The player that lost on time will receive an extra period in japanese byo-yomi and a extra period with the configured set of moves in canadian. In the case of no byo-yomi, the clock will be reset and must be started again.

The software has been tested on a Palm IIIxe with PalmOS 4.0.

Update 18-09-2004
New version 0.22 released: Added option to configure which hardware buttons to use

Update 23-06-2003
I tried to run the program using an emulator with PalmOS 3.51, it seemed to work fine.

Update 17-11-2003
New version 0.21 released: Added visual warnings and fixed some bugs.

Download

The software is freeware, you may freely redistribute the archive. It is distributed "AS IS", use at own risk.
gotimer-v0.22.zip version 0.22 (18 September 2004)
gotimer-v0.21.zip version 0.21 (17 November 2003)
The included "readme.txt" contains most of the information found at this page.

Installation

Unpack the archive and install the "gotimer.prc" file via the Palm Desktop software.

To be done in the future, perhaps

  1. Better warnings during canadian byo-yomi.
  2. Make it possible to add time to the opponent during play.
  3. Calc total time for the game, average time used for each player etc.

Known bugs/limitations

  1. The software does not work with PalmOS versions prior to version 3.5.
  2. The game clock will only display time up to 99 minutes correctly, as there only exists two digits for showing minutes. The minutes settings field in the "settings" dialog, has therefore been limited to only accept two digits. The easiest way to allow longer playing time would be to just draw the two least significant minutes digits and not display the most significant digits. If the 99 min limit per player turns out to be a problem I should probably change the graphics layout and include an hour digit as well.
  3. Sometimes there isn't any sound (when sound is enabled) as the player presses his button to stop his clock and start the opponents clock. Even if there is no beep, the game clock works correctly and the other player's clock starts. Don't know why the PDA doesn't beep though.
  4. Please report other bugs to me.

The software has been developed by Fredrik Sundström. Send questions and suggestions to me, email me at frocke at ludd.luth.se