Discuss the reverse engineering and emulation (as opposed to simulation) of any sort of Prevue hardware, including Atari-based and Amiga-based EPG channels and the Amiga-based Prevue/TV Guide channels.
broken580 wrote:I know from experience (at least from what I have seen) that my logos will not work unless they are on the ADF. It does not matter if they are compressed or not (I never compressed mine)
That part should be obvious to anyone with some Amiga experience, lol. The tool that decompresses the images on-the-fly works completely separate from ESQ, and should actually make it possible to use PowerPacker to compress any file loaded after the tool (which I forget the name of off-hand and I'm not at my house so I can't check my copy of the Prevue disc), whether it be binary code, graphics, or other data. Since this happens completely transparently to ESQ, it stands to reason that it will also open uncompressed files. Incidentally, this also invalidates something I had speculated on before when I said that ESQ might take over the system - it can't possibly, as if it did then this transparent decompression would not function. This also means that on every single EPG Sr and Prevue system that ever existed, that little tiny CLI window is still in the background taking up memory.
Also, just wanna say that I find it funny that ESQ is so crappy and unstable in certain ways, yet it has an unexpected (to us) feature of being able to convert specific text strings into the value needed to display the graphic with PrevueC
I had a post from well over a year ago where I had posted my results with what did and did not work between modifying the contents of the ADF and the contents of the HD image, but it seems to slip my grasp at the moment. I know that all the INI files and all DAT files appear to be able to be modified right from the HD image, but all UV files (both the graphic ads and the banner) only show up when moved to the ADF (curious as to how the logo.lst responds, but I believe it ignores anything that it cannot find on the ADF and leaves a black screen). I also note that mine are also uncompressed.
One thing I am curious to learn more about is the program flags on the channels. For example, I know how to hilite an entire channel, but I have seen it where one program would be the normal color and the next hilighted. Does anyone know how to set a hilite flag for a single program? I've also been curious as how to turn the "Movie Summary" on and whatever triggers it (unless this has been replaced by the general "summary" flag used by the 96 hex)
Some of the code in ESQ (because it is of such high quality) expects some of the files to be on disk (specifically DF0: which is like the A drive on a PC).
My startup sequence previously advised dismounts DF0: (kind of removing the drive logically from the system) and assigns DF0: to the prevue drawer (directory) on the hard drive. This fixes the problem you mention about some stuff working on HD and some stuff only working from the ADF.
Actually, I have used that startup script for nearly a year and it has always done that (using an 8mb CF card as the virtual HD with a dump of all the ADF's contents so that I can edit on the fly). Then again, I am not very good a scripts/code at all, so I probably did something wrong along the way Its only the graphic files I have this issue with.
(unless this has been replaced by the general "summary" flag used by the 96 hex)
Its only the graphic files I have this issue with.