Hmm, nope. I remember seeing it. There was a patent describing how the grid looked, how the banner bar (date | listing period time | current time) looked, etc. It even described the red/yellow/blue/green colors and so on. I clearly remember looking at the patent itself: it had crappy xerox-ish image representations of the grid and all that included in it. It's been so long now, though, that I can't remember where I saw it. Maybe a link we exchanged in some past e-mail, or that's buried in an old post here on the forum, or that I found on my own. *scratches head*AriX wrote:Actually, I have not found any patents relating to the EPG design. I am pretty sure that it is not patented at all, except for some aspects of the top half of the Prevue Channel (the "video promotion system").swest77 wrote:All I can add to this is that the basic design of EPG's grid was patented. Ari found some stuff on this earlier, if I recall. So if this was truly done with Texscan hardware, then it must have been through a deal. Because if it were just a knock-off, they would've been sued into the ground.
About the jerky video, that effect is definitely an encoding issue. I've managed to cause the exact same effect with mencoder while transcoding stuff... though of course now I'm drawing a blank on exactly what I did to make it happen.
Interesting. I thought we had determined from inspecting the ADF or talking with sources, though, that 9600 baud was only something provisions had initially been made for within ESQ; that they never got 9600 actually working before the decision was made to abandon the Amiga platform. ?The Texscan hardware was programmable, so essentially they bought Texscans and reprogrammed them. One interesting thing I found out recently was that early early versions of the channel, without scrolling capability, ran on the Apple II and had listings delivered to them via modem. UVSG apparently bought the Apple II software and transitioned everything to a satellite and Texscan-based system, until 1985 when they transitioned to an Amiga and an Atari system. Additionally, a few years later, perhaps in the early 90s, they transitioned the Prevue Channel data feed to a 9600 baud stream, while maintaining the Atari stream (on the same transponder as WGN) at 2400.
In any case, I can tell you that EPG Sr., and the black grid version of Prevue Guide, both used 2400 for sure. In fact, in one of those "backfiring Prevue Guide" videos I tossed on Youtube (from 1992 or 1993), you can see 2400 baud indicated on the diagnostics screen when it was brought up by the cable technician.
If they did actually go to 9600, then my assumption would be that it would've been part of the black grid -> blue grid upgrade process... But even there, doesn't our ADF of ESQ show it's set up for 2400 as well?
). It's only rumour, (e.g) 