Am impressed by your hex detective work and preparation to try unpacking the executables yourself, LocalH. You're old hat. I read the infection guide just for the fun of it. Reminded me of equally fun days in the x86 univese. Virus collections were great teachers by example for aspiring coders then. You didn't learn to code artistically and creatively at universities or from books. You scrutinized the disassemblage of bohemians with idiot savant-like rapports with hardware and machine language who broke into hysterics at the idea of millions of drives worldwide spontaneously xoring their FATs against their pet lizard's name on its birthdate.
Alas I'm solid rust these days: haven't tinkered with things at this level since my late teen years. Cool you're still at it. And Ari, you jailbreak fones? God, now I feel twice as puny amongst the company here.
About the palette tweaking by decompressors being mentioned: just curious, was that something their authors in Amigaland collectively did as a "calling card"? Or was there an abstract reason for it? (Like, can I see someone in those days of limited resources, in a bind, resorting to using palette DACs for temporary variable storage? Yes I can. (You wonder sometimes how fast pigs like Ubuntu, OSX, and Windows would be on modern quad core processors if they were coded by guys who eschewed convention for what was just fastest and most elegant.))
About the unpacked binary, awesome. And now it's in-your-face obvious. Look at all those %s's and %d's and %ld's and ... it's C alright. The references to "<filename>.c" everywhere help too.
You know, having toyed with the software a bit now, I'm really wondering why all the glitches. Like
this at startup. And
this and
this and
this and
this when you enter/exit the menus. And with previous menu activity leaving newly-drawn graphics with
incorrect palettes. I saw these same problems with Prevue 4.x on my old cable system's A2000, but theirs faithfully reported "memory allocation is bad" with every boot and back then, I assumed that explained all this. (At least in 9.0.4, I also notice the
normal palette doesn't match the
menu mode palette).
@Ari - Yeah, the second diskette is how they maintained ads locally. It should work just fine, unless graphical advertisements were a "privilege" that had to be paid extra for, and the software only checked DF1 if told to by the satellite feed.
Incidentally, two very interesting things I discovered yesterday. First:
http://www.cbtricks.com/pub/secret_cb/v ... g65_68.pdf
It's an old time satellite loading chart pre-dating Prevue Guide. Scroll down to the bottom of the first page and look at transponder 3 on SATCOM F3. Sure enough, it's WGN. Now scroll to the next page and look at the list of subcarrier auxiliary services (audio subcarriers) for SATCOM F3. On WGN's transponder (3), you'll see several audio carries but one in particular is interesting. Appears the VBI wasn't the only way they sent data! 7.237 MHz must have been data as audio -- literally, one-way modem transmission. That got me thinking about something I noticed while looking at
http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardw ... ?HARDID=54 once. It notes that the VBI decoder card had "separate Control Data and EPG Data traces." Hmm. I wonder if all the VBI ever contained was an instantaneously-accurate time clock reference and maybe cues for exactly when promos started/ended; with the 2400 baud listings and other machine-addressable data and software distribution all being piped in modem-style? This wouldn't change anything we already know about how the Amigas/Ataris were setup. Would just mean the decoder cards decoded two things instead of one... but still sent out the sum of it all via RS-232.
The other very interesting thing is this. This satellite loading list comes from July
1984. One year before the EPG was supposed to have been introduced. One year before the 130XE and Amiga 1000 existed. Huh! Maybe EPG Jr. and EPG Sr. weren't their first generation products? Maybe before that, it was just "The EPG", and only on the 600XL? *moments pass* Aha. Check out this
S.E.C. 10-K filing by United Video. "The Company launched the Electronic Program Guide (now marketed as EPG), the industry's first satellite-delivered, 24-hour electronic program guide for the cable television industry, in 1981." Wow. That would put it even before the 1983-vintage 600XL. I wonder what the first one ran on. Though probably the only way to find out would be digging through the Tulsa library's newspaper archives looking for a "local business hits it big" story. And I ain't going to Tulsa.
Anyway, I'm off now to look for interesting strings myself. About 9600 -- that must be something they were testing before everything got pulled on the Amiga platform. I always wondered, in the later years, with thousands of machines in the field (about 2,000 according to that SEC article), how 2400 was ever enough to sustain them. It must have been a constant bottleneck.
One last thing. Tin, I listened to that theme music file again, and I'm also starting to think it might have been a mod file. Some of the instrument sounds have sudden, unnatural stoppages in their reverberation as if they're truncated samples. Like the "kff-kssshh!" that syncs in my video with the appearance of "(Cercopithecoid)". Maybe they did develop it as a mod after all. Perhaps playing it 24/7 out of an Amiga. All's I know is, it was on a tape loop by the time I was consulting for 'em. Maybe later they just figured a tape deck would suck up less electricity.
