Ok, @jremington, I have re-read that how-to post as you seem to feel I had not.
Now, armed to the teeth with the knowledge from it I have still little idea where you are finding fault with my post, but, in the interest of getting a little guidance as I stated in my original post let me recap on my project in case I was expecting too much understanding from too little explanation.
I am making a sport countdown timer.
The timer needs to count down from a number after a 10 sec lead in - the count down time has to be settable to be any one of 240s, 120sec, 80sec 40sec or 20 sec, depending on the current game being played.
The players are either in one wave or in 2 waves for each of these time sessions, each of which is called an END. i.e. the counter will either count (ignoring the lead-in for now) from 240 to zero once for the one wave of players or from 240 to 0 twice if there are two waves per end.
There are 6, or 12, or 24 of these ends in a full tournament.
During finals or playoffs there are other time periods:
Two players having alternating 20sec play periods, each one terminating the current count when he has played and commencing the count for the other at that moment.
or
two players having to share the same 20 or 40 sec period, playing simultaneously.
During team play there are even more options.
Now, my cry for help is not related to the timer function of the code, but how to best do the following:
Implement a card based setup, using an RFID reader, to take over from a standard menu so that non-technical users can easily set the right parameters without even thinking about it.
The reader should be able to fix the necessary variables in the console so that the timer functions as the card promises.
I need a little guidance in the approach I need to take in getting that to happen.
I hope this is a clearer explanation. 