ArcMaster overview

ArcMaster

ArcMaster is a competition and member register management system. The development started in 1995, and since then the program has undergone many changes. Now it is almost too big and would need rewriting, but that would require years of work, so maybe it can wait. There may still be some bugs in the program. Hopefully that does not prevent evaluating it. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

From the very beginning the main goal was to create an user-friendly system, where the most important phases of running a competition would be as easy to handle as possible. These phases include

adding the participants of the competition
assigning the target order
printing score cards
score entry
printing results

The first competitions, where the predecessor of ArcMaster was used, showed that the program worked, but needed many fixes and new features. During the next years the program was developed further to contain elimination rounds, team competitions, HTML output etc.

Parallel to the competition management program, a member register application was created. It used the same database, so later it was easy to merge it with the competition program. The member register is very country specific, so you probably do not have much use of all it's features.

During the last year, an import/export system was created. This enables the program to be used nation-wide. Each club runs the program on a local database. When an competition is over, the results are sent via email as an XML file to the national federation office. There the file is imported to the central database, and a HTML file is generated. The HTML and XML files are added to the 'official' web pages. All clubs download the XML files prior their own competitions to get the national records updated.

Some of the best features of ArcMaster:

multilingual user interface, all texts are user customizable
versatile output; most reports can be directed to screen, printer, text and HTML files
statistics
automatic record update
reliable and automatic elimination round management

For reference, you should also check out the italian SpeedList III. In Italy they seem to have had the system for many years already, since the DOS-age. The Windows version installs nicely, runs fast and produces beautiful reports, but may take even more time to get accustomed to than ArcMaster, at least until they get it translated into english :)

SpeedList also manages multiple-turn competitions, which ArcMaster does not even try. This may be handy in bigger competitions, when the size of the field or the number of butts is limited. On the other hand, almost the same result can be achieved by creating multiple competitions, one for compounds and one for recurves, for example.

Anyway, if you are responsible of arranging archery competitions, you really should try both ArcMaster and SpeedList.