Curday.dat Data Format

[tin]

You running an emulator? Honestly spend a bit of time setting up a prevue hard drive, doing the changes to the startup sequence, and copying everything over uncompressed. It will save you buckets and buckets of time. There's loads of posts earlier in the forums on it.

As for powerpacking or not powerpacking, Prevue obviously had the same problem you encountered with running out of disk space. The powerpacking is done by a helper programme PowerData (special version for Prevue, it seems) that's loaded in startup-sequence. It's called PD and it's in the C folder. For this reason I surmise that powerpacking was only introduced due to running out of space, and the fix is a bit of a hack (although not that bad really, everyone used to do the same back in the day).

The prefs file that you can see a little bit of by just editing with text editor is called PowerData.prefs in the root of the disk. It has some config that if a powerpacked file is loaded by the Prevue Guide (or anything else for that matter) it will be invisibly un-powerpacked before the program gets to see it. There are a list of files/filetypes that are automatically re-powerpacked (again invisibly to PG) as they are written to disk. Because it is a special version for Prevue guide, you can't change the prefs (unless you know how to modify the prefs file directly).

What you can do is get the full PowerData from Aminet (http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/PowerData210), run that instead, and use its GUI to set it to unpowerpack the files, but not re-pack them. Hence any file PG reads will still get unpacked, and if it writes any they wont get re-packed (not a problem if you set up even a very modest sized prevue hard drive in your emulator). The files it never writes again you can read in with different (Amiga) programs - for example with PPaint for the graphics - and save them out, they will be magically unpacked.

Honestly once you have done all this, things get much easier for messing about, you can for example edit the text file in your Windows/Linux/Mac/whatever program live, even while the emulation is running, and simply get Prevue Guide to re-read the file with Shift-D, rather than editing, repacking, re writing the ADF and rebooting the Amiga.

[20CenturyFan]

The startup sequence is located on this page:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=67&start=30

You can find it on your prevue ADF in the "S" directory. Pretty much, anything in the Startup-sequence file, replace with the sequence that Tin used on this page, assuming you have created a virtual hard drive (or in my case, using a physical folder in windows to make it easily accessible) and have assigned it to dh2 (I assigned it to dh0 and it worked fine for me, just replace all instances of dh2 with dh0). Make sure when you do this, the drive you assign has all the contents of your ADF copied to it.

I would also like to note that after reading the post in the link above that I realize you have attempted this before. I have received ER005 once before as well, and it turned out it was caused by my ADF becoming corrupt from a failed copy of files to the ADF. My recommendation is to consistently make backups of your work to keep from ending up with a malfunctioning software. This is probably why it did not work last time. The Amiga software is not always 100% successful at copying files from one medium to another, and sometimes accidentally writes over (or corrupts) the formatting of the destination disk, creating unreadable "tracks" on the disk.

The best steps to take is to create a folder to mount as a drive in your emulator (it is easier to access for the host), preferably to an external drive such as a flash drive, etc so that you do not endanger crashing your PC. After you mount it (I used dh0), copy all contents from the ADF to this drive, and edit the startup sequence on the ADF (not the "hard disk"). You will still need to boot from the ADF, but part of the sequence transfers control to the hard disk, and many files, including the listings, can be edited on the fly. I think that the directions that Tin gave earlier in this forum are far more in depth than mine, however, and I recommend following the steps on that page. For the record, I didn't get it running in the first shot either (I would have been on here in 2010 had that been the case! ). However, I came back to it later and went all the way back to step 1, and because of how the hard disk setup is so much more convenient and less time consuming, I got more done in less time and my ability to manipulate and work this program has lead to me getting to this point:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhj39F1vX_8

The listings I have in that video would not have been possible if not for the ability to edit curday.dat during emulation, as it was made completely from scratch. I like experiementing with it seeing what I can add, modify, and remove over time and seeing if I can figure out features that we have yet to discover. I'd have to say though, you have a very good base to your listings upon which you can build it's complexity. Above all, however, it is important you backup your work frequently. Hope this helps.

[woddfellow2]

I eventually got the HDD thing working, but it involves following directions hen7713 gave here: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=188

I continued it further, but there is a problem: Something in WGN America's entry breaks KUTU-CA's entry:



KUTU-CA appears fine if I remove WGN America's entry. I even rewrote WGN America's entry.

curday.tar.gz

[20CenturyFan]

Look at timeslot 32 of WGN. At the end of "How I Met Your Mother" you have hex 0x0D separating it from TS33 rather than the normal "null" character (0x00). This fixed your whole listing on my end.

[woddfellow2]

I completed it: http://youtube.com/watch?v=KpE-JEOZPzI

curday.dat: http://ompldr.org/vYmZ4Mw

[20CenturyFan]

Cool! I "liked" your youtube video. The next thing you would want to do is customize, if you so desired. For example, ratings, closed captioning and stereo. Maybe you could even change the TV Guide banner to Prevue by overwriting the one on your ADF by one on available for download on this forum. Just some ideas. (For example, I chose to emulate the 1994/95-era Prevue Channel.)

[JFR_SneakPrevue98]

Is there an editor in the Microsoft Windows world to open and view and may be edit the curday.dat file? I tried Notepad and it gave a bunch of rectangles.


Jed Raybould
Sent from my iPod touch using Tapatalk

[AriX]

Is there an editor in the Microsoft Windows world to open and view and may be edit the curday.dat file? I tried Notepad and it gave a bunch of rectangles.


Jed Raybould
Sent from my iPod touch using Tapatalk

You'll want to use a hex editor for that. There are many available, but I don't know which ones for Windows are worth recommending. On the Mac I use 0xED. Good luck!

[woddfellow2]

I am normally a Vim user, but I use Emacs as a hex editor (M-x hexl-mode) to edit curday.dat.

[20CenturyFan]

Tin suggested XVI32 to me when I asked the same question several months ago. To this day I still use it and it has done everything I have wanted it to do.