DisplayLink

DisplayLink is a Windows program from Colorado Time Systems (CTS) that drove the company’s matrix displays before DisplayLink Plus replaced it. It composed what appeared on the board from three kinds of content: frames and slide shows built in the program itself, graphics and animation files imported from disk, and templates that placed live timing and scoring data at fixed positions. The data came from a CTS timing console, or from meet-management software running on another computer, over serial ports the operator assigned.¹²

The program is the 3.x generation of a product line that CTS advertised from 1996, when every Mercury display was sold with it.³ Its aquatic-sports features are not in the program itself but in AquaLink, a module reached from the same menu bar, with GameLink as the team-sports counterpart.⁴¹

Naming and versions¶

Two releases are documented in full: 3.6, whose guide is written for the Myriad and Mercury16 lines by name, and 3.7, whose guide covers matrix and video displays without naming a product. Both guides carry the same revision, 0404, and a 2004 copyright, so the two releases were being documented in parallel.⁵¹ Beyond the title page the differences are small: 3.7 accepts JPEG files as well as bitmaps and GIFs, and its upgrade procedure replaces a different set of display-driver components.⁵¹

Earlier versions are attested only in passing. Template Editor will not open a template from DisplayLink 2.0 directly; the file has to be opened in a 3.x release first, which offers to convert it.² AquaLink’s guide dates multiple-timer support to AquaLink 1.2, so that module also had a history before the releases documented here.⁴ Neither CTS document gives an introduction date for any of them.

Version numbers are paired across the two products. AquaLink 1.6 requires DisplayLink 3.6 and AquaLink 1.7 requires 3.7, so a facility upgrading one had to upgrade the other.⁴

Role in the display system¶

DisplayLink ran on a computer CTS supplied, usually preloaded, which sat between the timing equipment and the board. The display itself held no content: the software rendered each frame and transmitted it, and a coaxial run from the computer to a wall plate carried the data to the first Ethernet card inside the display.⁶¹ CTS treated that computer as part of the display system rather than as a general-purpose PC, and warned that installing other software on it would void the warranty.¹

Only a few kinds of device could fill a template. CTS names the System 6, System 5 and Swim IV sports timers, meet-management software running on another computer, an external GameLink console, and plain ASCII sources.¹² Serial ports were assigned in a COM Port Interfaces window, one for the timer and one for the meet-management computer, and only one meet-management computer could be attached at a time.¹⁴

Program structure¶

Work is split across three windows opened from the main toolbar. Frames, text and slide shows are built in the Designer window. The Library holds what has been saved for reuse, in folders the operator creates: templates, typed text, imported graphics and animation, and finished slide shows, and it is what the operator works from during an event. The Active Display mirrors the board, and content reaches the board by double-clicking an item in the Library or dragging it onto that window.¹

Above those sat a menu bar. File closes the program, saving Library changes on the way out. Settings holds the COM port assignments, the live video options, and a switch that stops the program transmitting so that content can be prepared on a computer with no display attached; in 3.6 it also holds a display intensity control that adjusts the whole board or an individual 8x8 segment, with separate red, green and blue adjustment. Template installs templates and sends quick messages. Meet and Game open AquaLink and GameLink. Windows reopens the three main windows, and Help reports the running version and the size of the attached display in pixels, which is the figure a template has to be built to.⁵¹

A slide show in progress is stopped from the Active Display with the right mouse button, either at once or when the current loop finishes.¹

Frames, slide shows and animation¶

The unit of content in the Designer window is the frame. A frame holds an imported graphic, one or more text boxes typed into a text editor, or an imported animation, and a series of frames shown in turn is a slide show. Graphics are imported as bitmaps or GIFs, with JPEG added in 3.7; animation is imported as AVI or QuickTime. Slide shows are saved as .SLD files and a single saved frame as a .DLG file, either to the hard drive alone or to the hard drive and the Library together.⁵¹

Each frame carries a time and three transition attributes. The time is either indefinite, a duration in tenths of seconds through hours, or a rate of up to thirty frames per second for animation built out of still frames. The three attributes govern how the frame arrives, what it does while it is up, and how it leaves. Arrival and departure offer a straight cut, a drag, a reveal, a louver effect that works in stripes, a sparkle that fills in random pixels, a radar sweep and a cover, most of them with a choice of direction and a speed of slow, medium or fast. While the frame is up it can simply hold, blink, invert, or toggle every pixel between its two states.⁵¹ An imported animation cannot use any of this: its attributes are fixed, and only the sound switch stays available.¹

Templates¶

A template is a .tpl file that names the data items a board should show and fixes where each one sits. Templates are installed into the Library through DisplayLink’s own Template menu; the editor cannot install them.² Sending a template to the Active Display switches the board to live data, and the operator moves from one kind of content to another, a template to a graphic to a slide show, by dragging the next item out of the Library.¹

Templates were designed in Template Editor, a separate program sold alongside DisplayLink and documented in its own guide.² The editor works at the pixel dimensions of the board, with a color palette matched to the display type, optional splitting of the design area in half for two-timer layouts, and a properties window that reports the height, width and corner coordinates of the selected item so that items can be aligned exactly. Alongside any TrueType font installed on the computer, it offers fixed-width DisplayLink fonts in five sizes from 3 × 5 pixels to 15 × 17, each a fixed size that cannot be scaled.²

The data items available depend on which modules are installed. Across the sports the editor covers the aquatic side with swimming, diving, water polo, synchronized swimming, team scores and a pace clock, and baseball, football, basketball, hockey, volleyball, wrestling and soccer on the team-sport side, with a small set of items available to every template: static text, the computer’s time of day, a quick message area, a graphic and an animation.² Items that normally repeat, such as a lane number or a team name, are placed as a group: the editor asks how many are wanted and what number to start at, and lays them out.²

Two features work around the fixed nature of a template. A quick message is a reserved region that the operator fills at any time from the main window, with saved messages kept in a history and each line either static or scrolling.¹ A standalone template, written from the editor’s File menu and requiring Template Editor 1.3 or later, is downloaded into the display itself, so that a board can show data from a CTS timer or a GameLink keyboard with no computer in the path at all. CTS treated this as a fallback for use when that computer was unavailable, and required standalone templates to be designed in yellow whatever the board’s own colors.²¹

AquaLink¶

AquaLink is the aquatic-sports module, reached from the Meet menu, and it covers swimming, diving, water polo and synchronized swimming. It holds the names, affiliations and scores that a template displays, and decides where the current event and heat number comes from.⁴

Names reached the module four ways. The operator could type up to ten swimmers per heat during the meet, or enter a whole meet in advance and step through it heat by heat. Where meet-management software was in use, the entire event and heat list could be transferred in one pass, either from a floppy disk written on the meet-management computer or over the serial link, or the module could request each heat as it came up. CTS discouraged the last method as the slowest, and noted that a serial transfer of that kind returns surnames only, which in turn restricts how names can be formatted on the board.⁴

Event and heat numbers ran in one of two modes. In automatic mode the timing console advances them, so the names on the board change when the console changes what it is timing. In manual mode the operator holds that control, which is what allows names to be typed or corrected during the session.⁴

Divers’ names were typed in diving order into a single list, or downloaded from the diving program on a CTS console, which required moving the serial cable and reassigning the COM port for the transfer.⁴ Team scores were entered for up to ten teams and sorted by name or score, and from Hy-Tek Meet Manager 8.2 or later they could be downloaded instead.⁴

Two features connect the module to the race itself. Auto Template Switching nominates a template to appear when the start system fires or the operator presses start, and another to appear when the console is reset at the end of the race, which suits a board too small to show everything at once.⁴ Multiple timer operation, from AquaLink 1.2, takes the output of two consoles at once, whether a matched pair or one console of each generation, onto a template designed for two; swimmer names and affiliations remain available for the first timer only.⁴

GameLink¶

GameLink is the team-sports counterpart, reached from the Game menu, and opens a window for entering the statistics a game board shows, such as the clock, the score, the team names and the period.¹ CTS also applied the name to hardware: an external GameLink console and keyboard listed among the devices that can feed a template, and named again as the source a standalone template reads when no display computer is attached.²

Displays it drove¶

The 3.6 guide names the displays directly: Myriad, Mercury16 and Outdoor Mercury16, with an allowance for whatever CTS built next.⁵ The separate display manual covers Myriad, Mercury16 and the Mercury16 Sun Series together, and describes a board assembled from 8 × 8 pixel modules in module boxes, each row with its own controller and Ethernet card.⁶ The 3.7 guide drops the product names and describes its targets as matrix and video displays.¹ Shared background on how those boards are built and powered is on the scoreboards overview.

Installation and system requirements¶

DisplayLink 3.x runs under Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3 or later, or Windows 2000, and installs to C:\DisplayLink3.⁵¹ A single initialization file, DSPLYNK.INI, holds the local configuration, including the Library folders and their contents, and CTS advised keeping a copy of it against a rebuild.¹

Upgrading was a manual procedure. A specific list of program and system files had to be deleted before the new release was installed, because the installer would not overwrite them, and a mismatched set produced errors at run time. Version 3.6 could also be upgraded from floppy disk, by copying five files into place by hand and rebooting.⁵¹

Compared with DisplayLink Plus¶

DisplayLink Plus is a different program rather than a later version of this one. It folded the separate pieces together: the sports modules and the template editor are reached from a single toolbar, where 3.x split them across menus and a second application. The template format changed with it, and a 3.x template cannot be opened in DisplayLink Plus.⁷ The DisplayLink Plus release notes record 4.0.10 as its first public release and date 4.0.22 to October 2010, which puts the changeover around then.⁸ CTS catalogues bracket the same period from the other side: neither the 2008 display catalogue nor the 2011 general catalogue mentions DisplayLink or the Myriad and Mercury displays at all, and by 2015 the catalogue is selling DisplayLink Plus under its own name.⁹¹⁰¹¹ A catalogue prints what is on sale that year rather than recording what has been withdrawn, so this dates the disappearance loosely at best. CTS no longer lists a manual for either program, so the 3.x guides survive only in copies already distributed.¹² Template Editor returned as an optional separate program in 2020, as the Standalone Template Editor.⁸

See also¶

• DisplayLink Plus: the program that replaced it
• Scoreboards: the boards it drove
• System 5 and System 6: the consoles that supplied its data
• Software: the software section overview
• Colorado Time Systems: the vendor

See everything tagged Software.

References¶

Footnotes¶

1. Colorado Time Systems, DisplayLink 3.7 Users Guide (F888 Rev. 0404, ©2004). CTS no longer publishes it. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹ ↩²⁰ ↩²¹ ↩²²

2. Colorado Time Systems, Template Editor v1.5 Users Guide (F855 Rev. 0404, ©2004). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

3. Colorado Time Systems advertisement, Swimming World, April 1996 (Mercury LED full-matrix displays, each supplied with DisplayLink). ↩

4. Colorado Time Systems, AquaLink v1.6 & 1.7 Users Guide (F854 Rev. 0404, ©2004). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

5. Colorado Time Systems, DisplayLink 3.6 Users Guide, for Myriad and Mercury Matrix Display Systems (F837 Rev. 0404, ©2004). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

6. Colorado Time Systems, Myriad/Mercury16 Display Manual (F853 Rev. 0100). ↩ ↩²

7. Colorado Time Systems, Display Link Plus Help (help file shipped with the software). ↩

8. Colorado Time Systems, Display Link Plus Help, Release Notes topic. ↩ ↩²

9. Colorado Time Systems, Making Time Count: High Impact Visual Display Systems (2008 catalogue). ↩

10. Colorado Time Systems, Complete Timing, Scoring, Training and Display Solutions catalogue (2011). ↩

11. Colorado Time Systems, Complete Timing, Scoring, Training and Display Solutions catalogue (2015), DisplayLink+ section. ↩

12. Colorado Time Systems, Manuals (no entry for either DisplayLink program). ↩