Anyway, just a couple comments:
Ari -
That's right, the A2000s used hardware demodulators that were manufactured in the form of ISA cards. The A2000 motherboards' ISA slots by Commodore's design weren't active (no data bus connectivity) and only provided power to whatever ISA cards were plugged into them. So UV just took advantage of that by building demodulators for the A2000s in the form of ISA cards, so the A2000s wouldn't need outboard ones. If you want additional details, I posted about this while still editing Wikipedia after someone nudged me about getting a couple details wrong re: A1000 and Atari hardware:It's possible that the Amigas also have some sort of hardware demodulator in some sort of card that decodes the Prevue feed into the same format, but it's also possible that the demodulation is done in hardware, in which case it would work a little differently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:TV_Gu ... _equipment.
Have you considered that it's not the strings specifically that are compressed or obfuscated, but that the entire binary might simply be packed with some Amiga equivalent of PKLITE or UPX? Given the 2400 baud payload delivery method, executable binary compression would have made a lot of sense to UV. I doubt they would've developed their own binary packer, either. Surely they just used some off-the-shelf Amiga equivalent of PKLITE. That said, for all the popular binary packers (and even for many of the obscure ones), you can almost always find utils to unpack them (restore them to still-executable, uncompressed form). On that note, you might ask around in the Amiga world if there's any Amiga equivalent to Ben Castricum's UNP (a universal unpacker that understands many PC DOS executable packing formats). Or ask them to look at the PG executable files directly, assuming any of them would know how to identify and undo whatever packing method is being used on them.The strings present here must be compressed or obfuscated inside the binary
Tin -
FYI: Prevue Guide's analog C-band feed was shut down and replaced with a digital (MPEG) feed when the yellow grid/WinNT stuff replaced the Amigas. Since there's no analog VBI in digital video, that left only WGN's analog satellite feed to feed the EPG Jrs' (and any surviving EPG Srs') demodulators with.I think Atari EPG Jrs were still in operation a long time after the introduction of Amiga Prevue Guide, and it would make sense for the both to use the same data.
What effectively killed off the EPG Jr. units was WGN itself deciding to no longer offer an analog satellite feed about 5 years ago. When that happened, the company had three choices: find some other cable network that was still analog (and planned to stay that way for a long time), and pay its asking price for carriage ($$$$$$); build new add-on hardware for an entirely new (non-TV-based) method of delivering data to the Jr's ($$$$$$); or decommission the Jr's. Considering how few people were still using the Jr's by the mid-2000s, the more economical decision was the last one.
Can't remember where I downloaded it from, but I'm attaching a decommission report that came with someone's Jr. Shows several of its past users. Looks like the last two were SMATV providers (i.e. penny ante private cable service crap).
Correct. To run Prevue Guide properly, a real A2000 with authentic genlock and switcher cards would be needed. Just so the software would see them and not choke (at least), and (at most) so you could feed them real video and audio.I am however sure that the Prevue Guide version will look for and need to see the genlock and audio switcher hardware at least, as the code will definitely control them both. I'll have to find one that I can buy and get imported to the UK!!
The only alternative would be to patch the Prevue Guide software so it made no calls/inqueries to the genlock and switcher cards -- and (just for cosmetics) possibly further patch it to just show graphical/text ads in the top half all the time.
Obviously, no actual hardware is needed to run the EPG Sr. or Jr. softwares. They just need to be fed the expected data via serial. If you have two PCs each with real serial ports, you could feed data to them with a serial cable that way as well (one PC acting as source etc.). Or, one PC, with a PCI card offering COM1 and COM2 ports.
Oh. P.S., for anyone interested: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=BJ1982SH