Prevue Guide Forums

Hi all,

I have something exciting to share today! It's another version of the Amiga Prevue software (aka "ESQ"). Specifically, this is version 7.8.3, and appears to have been built in fall of 1996. For comparison, the version that we already have is 9.0.4, from late '99 or early 2000.



Unfortunately, this software did not come from an actual system disk like the copy we already have, so I don't have any of the resources that would have been used alongside it - no banners, no graphic ads, no brushes, no logos, no fonts, no curday.dat, etc.

There are two variants of the software: "ESQ21.REL", and "ESQ13.REL". Presumably one is aligned with AmigaOS 1.3, and the other with AmigaOS 2.1. Perhaps the 1.3 one was meant to run on Amiga 1000? As we know, some Prevue machines were powered by 1000s rather than 2000s. Also, I believe these versions may be PAL rather than the NTSC versions we currently have - but I could be wrong.

Here are the links - check it out, enjoy, and let me know what you find!

http://prevueguide.com/Amiga/ESQ13.REL
http://prevueguide.com/Amiga/ESQ21.REL

AriX wrote: ↑Thu Nov 14, 2019 8:20 pm Here are the links - check it out, enjoy, and let me know what you find!

http://prevueguide.com/ESQ13.REL
http://prevueguide.com/ESQ21.REL

Links do not work. Both of them redirect to "404 Not Found" pages.
EDIT: Read AriX's reply

PajamaDarkness wrote: ↑Thu Nov 14, 2019 8:35 pm Links do not work. Both of them redirect to "404 Not Found" pages.

Sorry about that - fixed!

Some interesting things I've discovered so far:

1. SHIFT + F puts the guide into a full-screen format (covering up the top portion), however not cleanly, as some redraw glitches occur.
2. SHIFT + H puts the guide back into its original format, however there's a lot more visual glitches here, sometimes may lead into a Guru Meditation/Software Failure message.
3. CTRL + B changes the listings' default color palette. This doesn't set it as default, however.

It's not Y2K compliant. I am getting a year 19119, which 19 concatenated with number of years since 1900 would be 19"119"

Couple of things so far,

From what I can see, the ESQ13.REL file is corrupted at the very end of the file. Not sure if this was edited, etc.


I was able to run the ESQ21.REL file. When you retitle it as ESQ, you can actually copy this file into our current disk (for version 9,) and it will try to run.

I am able to send some of the commands (like Reset Machine command, and the clock command) through serial and it works. The listings and channel lineup is a bit different though and I will need to re-work my program.

I do know that if you were to go into the menu and select Special Functions and then select Save All to Disk, it will rebuild the files on the ADF disk for Qtable, Curday, Nxtday, etc. This is a good way to see which files are required for the data to run.

When doing this, you can unpack the files and see the default curday file.
AE3366N6YYNNYYNNl 0 DREV 3 63 0 0 0 - is what is displayed in the file.

The DREV 3 is the most important thing here. This is Data Revision #3, which means when the Channel Lineup and Listings information is built, it must take a few different parameters than the DREV 5 (Data Revision #5 - from our 9. version,) Once this is established, then we can write listings and lineup information to it.

Hopefully, this will help anyone working with version 7.

I got ESQ21.REL working:


Here is the full-screen format:


Here is the palette thing:


Boot information made its way into the scroll after switching to full-screen:

Great finds! I hadn't seen the full screen mode thing and it certainly does the trick.

Here's another thing I found... if you send a "little f" command (so not mode "F", but mode "f", which has a different format and is probably best documented here), and you set the 7th argument to "S" rather than "G", it will use the "scroll mode" rather than the "grid mode", making it act more like the older EPG/pre-grid Prevue Guide. This is unlike the newer (9.0.4) software, which does have that option, but it doesn't work at all.

Here's a screenshot: It looks just like what we saw back in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeolMiEP1Yk

(Also note I got some CTRL data working there... more to come!)

Arix,

Since you have some listings that built, is there a way that you could upload the curday that builds off of it?

I would like to see if there are any differences that may appear in curday from version 7 and version 9,

nwgatwcfan wrote: ↑Sun Nov 17, 2019 9:07 am Arix,

Since you have some listings that built, is there a way that you could upload the curday that builds off of it?

I would like to see if there are any differences that may appear in curday from version 7 and version 9,

Sure thing!