The Talent Show Scoreboard is a utility program designed to be used in conjunction with a "live public vote", familiar to all Eurovision Song Contest fans. It is recommended for use on a projection TV, where it can be seen by all members of the audience.

Your show should be set up so you have a number of acts with distinct names. These can be either different countries (e.g. SWEDEN, FRANCE, COLOMBIA) or the acts themselves (e.g. SMEG IN THE HEAD, PRINCE PHILIP, EAT MY SHORT S). You should then input these names into the data file creator program.

Your disc should be left write-enabled to allow the data file creator to save all this information for later retrieval by the scoreboard program.

Hold your show in the same order as the names of the act are input in the data file. Explain to each act that at a certain point in the evening, they will need to award all their fellow competitors a set number of points.

The 12 points should go to the act they liked the best. The 10 to the second best, the 8 to the third best and so on down to the 1. If more than thirteen acts are performing, some acts may not be worthy of any points. They cannot give themselves any points.

Whilst each act is deciding on the number of points they will award to each of their competitors, boot up the scoreboard program. It has no on-screen menu so as to correctly simulate a live television broadcast. It is therefore vital to familiarise yourself with the following controls:

The country giving points is highlighted in green. The points they can award are displayed in 'coins' at the bottom of the scoreboard. To award the number of points on the selected coin to a country, you type in the number of that country as shown on the screen and press RETURN.

For example: Sweden is highlighted. Sweden's representative declares that Sweden has given one point to Turkey. Look for Turkey on the screen. To its left will be a number (e.g. 3). Type in 3 and press RETURN.

The selected coin will fly up to the country and the next coin will be selected. The votes are cast in this method until the 12 points are awarded.

The stress of a show can lead to miskeyed votes. There are two ways of correcting them. The 'official' (and sometimes long-winded) way is to call for all the votes of the act again. So if you accidentally award 3 points to Denmark when you meant to award them to the United Kingdom, you key 999 and then press RETURN. This resets the points to how they were before a selected country began voting.

For example: Iceland gives its final twelve points to Finland. Finland is number 10 on the scoreboard but you accidentally key 19 and hit RETURN. The points are accidentally awarded to Russia. You key 999 and press RETURN. You need to ask Iceland for all of its votes again as the scoreboard returns to its state before Iceland began casting its votes.

The 'non-official' way is to move a cursor to the incorrect entry and manually correct it. This can be much easier but you need to be familiar with the code 888 and some further movement controls.

The movement controls are as follows:

For example: In the same scenario as above, Russia is now 12 points better off than it should be. You key 888 and move the blue cursor that appears to Russia, press the S key twelve times to subtract 12 from Russia's score then move to Finland and press the A key twelve times to add 12 points to Finland's score.

Press RETURN to return to the voting system.

To move onto the next country, simply press RETURN. The country which is currently leading is flashed after each set of votes are given.

After all countries have voted, the winner is displayed on screen.

This version of the Talent Show Scoreboard was written for use in Korea and features graphical headers and footers displaying information to that end. To remove these, simply delete the two lines in the file "CT_GAME" that *LOAD them.

Dave E, EUG #65