Belgarath is a program inspired by Apprentice and MTGO. It is written in Java. My goal is to improve handling and user-interface of Apprentice AND enable playing with the generated cards from this wiki.
May2008: Project reanimation after ~2 years of silence. Lots of work has been in the last weeks. I have moved the project presentation to my private webspace, you might want to have a look at [this site]. Beta testers still welcome, just drop me a note here or send me an email (mail adress can be found on the project page.
MagicTheGathering.com Card of the Day theme is "Appentice" this week. [Voices in my head] keep telling me they are doing it because of my Apprentice update ;)
I can't believe it! I got an answer from Wizards. I got an official license *jumspintotheair
Wow, excellent! I'm very impressed - good luck with this ^^ - SunKitten
I just sent an email to WotC, requesting the permission to use the MtG concept and official graphics (cards, tap and mana symbols etc). I'm really curious how or if they react. Apprentice and Magic Workstation got some kind of official license, i hope they grant me something similar. Wish me luck :)
Finally found a name for the project: Since the program is (imo) already better than Apprentice, i am going to call it Belgarath (after a famous wizard from my favourite fantasy novel "The Belgariad")
Constructed formats support, card-highlighting, magic-help links and an Options.ini file. The database now includes all sets way back to Homelands. Ice Age Block Constructed with Coldsnap, anyone?*g
New Token-Creation dialog, Flip-Card-Support, Sideboarding, resizing cards and much more. I am making progress :) Check [the version history] and the screenshots.
After some days of testing and bughunting, a first (nearly) bug-free version exists.
Any player (at least any Windows user) should now be able to act as a server by including the card database (available on request) as a system-ODBC-Source.
Since i don't know much about licensing and the legal stuff, i might need some help with releasing the program. The program should be available for free. And there is still this thing about using the original card images from wizards. Should i contact them? What is the correct contact at wizards for this kind of questions?
Discussion
In the last weeks, the focus of the project has shifted from trying to make a "general virtual cardtable application" to beeing more and more MtG focused. This has helped me to somewhat reduce the complexity (and bug-liability) of the code and allowing some of the changes you can see in the new V1.0 version. Sorry, Vitenka - Grumpf 17-5-08