Software

From Libre Aquatics Wiki, the free aquatics reference

The software used to run aquatic competitions, the programs that manage meets and teams, drive the timing hardware, and put results on a display. A timing console measures a race and emits the result as data, and software reads that data to produce the scoreboard, the printed results, and the record of the meet. This section documents those programs and the file formats that carry information between them.

What lives here¶

Meet-management software, builds events, seeds entries, records results, and scores the competition.
Team-management software, rosters, best times, and entries on the club side.
Display software, the applications that push results from a timing console to scoreboards and video boards.
File formats, the interchange formats that move entries and results between team software, meet software, and timing systems.

The display software is the best covered of these, together with Hy-Tek’s Meet Manager and Team Manager; most of the other programs have stub pages only. The meet-management and team-management programs in common use are commercial products from other vendors, and the workflows they support are described under meet management and team management rather than here.

Meet-management software¶

Meet-management software builds and seeds a competition, scores it, and reads finish times from the timing equipment. The three programs below are the ones Colorado Time Systems names as able to read results from a Dolphin Wireless Stopwatch Timing System; each is documented here only as far as that timing interface goes.¹

Program	Vendor	Notes
Hy-Tek Meet Manager	Hy-Tek Sports Software, part of The Active Network since 2008	Advertised since 1986 and the program most American consoles were built to talk to; reads Dolphin `DO3` and `DO4` files as either the primary or the backup source
SwimTopia Meet Maestro	SwimTopia	Integrates with the Dolphin directly, and also sends event and heat detail back into the Dolphin software
Splash Meet Manager	Splash Software, Berne	Used chiefly by European clubs and federations

Meet Manager has had a research pass of its own; the other two are stubs. The Easy Meet, Championship Meet Management and Computerized Swim League pages cover rivals and predecessors the swimming press names, and Meet Mobile is the live-results application that publishes what a meet scores.

Several more meet programs have stub pages. Swimify, EasyWk and CPS-Schwimm are European programs that the Swimrankings wiki lists as supporting Lenex. SwimMeet Manager came from Hy-Point Software and was advertised in 2000 and 2001, and Aquabec was written in 1984 and spread to clubs across Quebec through the provincial federation. The Active Network’s web product, ACTIVEWorks Swim Manager, handles club and meet administration and hands a meet host its entries as an HY3 file. Hy-Tek’s The Interface, announced in 1988, was a disk and cable that connected Meet Manager to timing consoles.

Team-management software¶

Team-management software keeps a club’s roster, its swimmers’ results and best times, and the entries it sends to meets. Hy-Tek Team Manager has a full article; the other programs have stub pages.

Program	Vendor	Notes
Hy-Tek Team Manager	Hy-Tek Sports Software	Windows program for a club’s roster, results, best times and meet entries
Team Manager Online	Hy-Tek Sports Software	Web-hosted companion with online meet entry, advertised from the early 2000s
Team Connect Online	Hy-Tek Sports Software	Subscription service that holds a master copy of a club’s Team Manager database on Hy-Tek’s server
Pro SWIMMER	Hy-Tek Sports Software	Palm OS program for hand times, splits and stroke rates on deck; no longer sold
Workout Manager	Hy-Tek Sports Software	Builds interval sessions for a pace clock or console; announced in 1989, now a Team Manager option
Business Manager	Hy-Tek Sports Software	Club accounting, announced in 1989; no longer in the product line
Personal Swim Manager	Hy-Tek Sports Software	Training diary for an individual swimmer, announced in 1999
Team Registration	Hy-Tek Sports Software	Club sign-up and registration
Team Websites	Hy-Tek Sports Software	A club website
TeamUnify	TeamUnify	Web-based club management founded in 2007; owned by SportsEngine from 2016 and by PlayMetrics from 2026
SwimTopia	Team Topia, Inc.	Web-based team management begun for summer-league teams
Splash Team Manager	Splash Software	Club-side counterpart to Splash Meet Manager

Display software¶

Display software sits between the timing equipment and the board. It does not time or score anything itself: it receives scoreboard data from a console such as the Gen7 Serial Timer or System 6, places each value in the position a template defines, and renders the finished frame. Fonts, colors, layout, and any sponsor content are set in the software rather than on the timer.²

All the documented programs are from Colorado Time Systems, and each is connected to the others. DisplayLink Plus is the current program. DisplayLink is the earlier suite it replaced, and its templates cannot be opened in the newer software. The Standalone Template Editor is the DisplayLink Plus template designer packaged on its own. AquaSync runs on top of DisplayLink Plus and sends the same data to streaming software instead of to a board, and CTStream is an earlier overlay connection named only in the DisplayLink Plus release notes.²³⁴

Program	Vendor	Role	Status
DisplayLink Plus	Colorado Time Systems	Drives matrix and LED video displays from templates, sequences, and media files	Current; version 4.7.0, issued 16 December 2025
DisplayLink	Colorado Time Systems	The matrix-display suite it replaced, split across a Designer window, a separate Template Editor, and the AquaLink and GameLink data modules	Discontinued; attested from 1996; ran on Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000
Standalone Template Editor	Colorado Time Systems	The DisplayLink Plus template designer sold as a separate application, part number `R-470-121`	Current; shipped in DisplayLink Plus v4.3.14, March 2020, announced as a product February 2021
CTS AquaSync	Colorado Time Systems	Renders live timing and scoring as broadcast-style graphics over a video stream, reaching streaming software over NDI; part number `R-470-123`	Announced April 2026; requires DisplayLink Plus
CTStream	Not established	Video overlay software DisplayLink Plus gained a connection to in 2022	Stub; attested only in the DisplayLink Plus release notes

DisplayLink Plus carries the shared background on templates, sports modules, and the connections to timing consoles and meet-management computers that the other articles refer back to. ScheduleLink was an add-on for DisplayLink-driven matrix boards that CTS said scheduled advertisements and messages onto the display. It and CTStream are the display pages still at stub length, because little about either has been published: CTStream appears only in those release notes, and ScheduleLink only in archived product pages.

File formats¶

Two formats appear across the display software. A template is a .tpl file naming which data items to show, where each sits on the board, and how each is formatted. Swimmer and event name data is carried in .scb files, which DisplayLink Plus can import from disk or removable media, and which a Gen7 console can load directly from a USB drive.²⁵

SDIF, the Standard Data Interchange Format published by United States Swimming, is the open standard for moving entries and results between programs, carried in .sd3 files whose records are 162 bytes, the last two of them a line terminator. Hy-Tek’s own Commlink did the same job on a diskette and was treated as an alternative to it rather than an implementation of it. XSDIF is an XML form of the same standard accepted beside it, and Lenex is the European format that answers the same need in XML. Germany keeps a plain-text format of its own, the DSV-Standard.

Hy-Tek’s own formats sit beside that standard rather than inside it, and they come in pairs. Results go out as CL2 and HY3 together, event lists as HYV and EV3 together, with the older of each pair read by Team Manager releases before 4.0G and the newer by 4.0G and later. Hy-Tek has published a specification for none of them. Each line of an HY3 ends with a checksum the company never documented, which the program enforces on import; swimming volunteers worked it out and published it in 2010, and it has been reproducible ever since. None of the four extensions appears anywhere in the source collection held for this wiki, so those pages rest on external sources and say so.

Some tools work on these formats without defining them. WinSwim moves entries and results between teams and programs as SDIF, and its site distributes SDIFCheck, which checks an SDIF file against the published layout before it is imported. swimlib is an open-source TypeScript library that reads and writes SDIF, HY3 and EV3. Swimrankings is the results and rankings database that issues the meet, club and athlete identifiers carried in Lenex files.

References¶

Colorado Time Systems, Dolphin User Guide (F912) (Rev. 202412), which names the three meet-management programs. ↩
Colorado Time Systems, Display Link Plus Help (help file shipped with the software). ↩ ↩² ↩³
Colorado Time Systems, Display Link Plus Help, Release Notes topic. ↩
Colorado Time Systems, DisplayLink Plus. ↩
Colorado Time Systems, Gen7 Serial Timer User Guide (F1034), Appendix C (athlete name integration). ↩

Last updated September 25, 2026.