Prevue Guide Forums

tin wrote:- the music is slower than I'm used to, how could that have happened?

- the disk between reboots is different %age full. Could it be that they were trying another disk - or maybe another Amiga?

Good point! They must have swapped disks in between, I didn't even notice. The settings are also different after the reboot, but this could be because at that point they didn't have a curday.dat file.

I noticed the issue with the music as well, and it is very strange. Is it possible that the tape loop in Tulsa was just... not working properly? I can't see any other reason this would happen, as the music is not only lower, but slower, than the normal one. To me, it also sounds just... bad. This could just be because it's in another key, but I'm wondering if the music itself is fluctuating around different speeds/keys a bit.

nwgatwcfan wrote:DId you happen to notice after the 2nd reset and the listings were popping in, the top half kept on hitting Pay-Per-View Movies? The system must be reading by channel number because Viewer's Choice (the Pay-per-view channel in this case) was on channel 1. It's odd that on the 4th video, all of the promos were Pay-Per-View. with the exception of Prevue Tonight.

Angie posted on a Prevue emulation thread of her theory on how the top half was selected (albeit in more detail than I probably would have given.) But what struck me was during the time that the promos were changing, the software would very quickly pull from channel list (Possibly the QTable or maybe even curday.dat) and compare the control data telling the system what two channels were appearing next in the top half. The software could have been designed to find the first channel that matched one of the two promos and then show the top half with that channel. I didn't think it was a possiblity, until I watched these last videos and then her explanation kind of made sense.

Part of your theory is quite correct - and we've known this for a long time.

angie2010 (who, by the way, is a guy)'s post was just an obnoxious edit of swest77's original post here: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=186&p=993#p993
swest77's theory about the control feed is incorrect - control is its own data stream, and all information relating to the top half of the screen goes over it. However, the thing he said about how the promos are selected is true.

While the thing about the pay-per-view movies is a bit odd, I'm fairly sure that it's not because they read the channel list by channel number. They tried to randomize things as much as possible, so if the system carried both programs, it would randomly pick one or the other.

Also, still angie2010 is still putting my video menu, from Charlotte, NC.

"nwgatwcfan" wrote: DId you happen to notice after the 2nd reset and the listings were popping in, the top half kept on hitting Pay-Per-View Movies? The system must be reading by channel number because Viewer's Choice (the Pay-per-view channel in this case) was on channel 1. It's odd that on the 4th video, all of the promos were Pay-Per-View. with the exception of Prevue Tonight.

You forgot to mention their was only one preview for "Supermarket Sweep" on Lifetime, the rest were from Pay-Per-View. This seems rather common with Prevue nowadays. Sometimes when they played those previews, they mention the cable network and the title of the program, but they didn't leave in the showtimes, the day or in some cases like in the video, the channel number.

Usually, it happens when the Guide couldn't figure it out when it's the right schedule for the network to plays these programs. I figure Prevue does this information mostly during the late night hours.

AriX wrote:I noticed the issue with the music as well, and it is very strange. Is it possible that the tape loop in Tulsa was just... not working properly? I can't see any other reason this would happen, as the music is not only lower, but slower, than the normal one. To me, it also sounds just... bad. This could just be because it's in another key, but I'm wondering if the music itself is fluctuating around different speeds/keys a bit.

Aha, and the same music is used during the prevue tonight segment on the 4th video, which sounds more like normal. Must have been a tape problem. Also I noticed there is some kind of leakage between audio channels in these videos (you can hear the announcer guy muffled in the background in some of the silences). It must be that the central playout was having some issues! I would say if it was running on tape - likely - the player for at least that audio track was goosed!

joseph_sobora wrote:Usually, it happens when the Guide couldn't figure it out when it's the right schedule for the network to plays these programs. I figure Prevue does this information mostly during the late night hours.

This will be pretty much because the PG machine had received it's channel listing, but not the schedule for the channel. So it knows that the channel is carried on that cable system and so plays through the promo, but hasn't got a listing so doesn't know what time it will be playing. I'm assuming therefore the programmers had some sense and made PG show a generic message asking the viewer to check times. IMHO anyway

joseph_sobora wrote: You forgot to mention their was only one preview for "Supermarket Sweep" on Lifetime, the rest were from Pay-Per-View. This seems rather common with Prevue nowadays. Sometimes when they played those previews, they mention the cable network and the title of the program, but they didn't leave in the showtimes, the day or in some cases like in the video, the channel number.

Usually, it happens when the Guide couldn't figure it out when it's the right schedule for the network to plays these programs. I figure Prevue does this information mostly during the late night hours.

My theory on the Supermarket Sweep ad coming up was that the full channel lineup was not fully downloaded and the system took the first channel that matched the incomplete lineup and showed the ad. Lifetime may have been one of the first channels go into the channel lineup and a few moments later the Pay-Per-View channel was added to the channel lineup, therefore listing the Pay-Per-View ads later.

In addition, in a situation where neither promo was for Pay-Per-View, it would still select a channel in the lineup, which might give the impression of a random selection. But IMHO, I still believe that the system chose the lower of the two channel numbers, since it was easier and faster to select a channel towards the top of the list than to scan the entire channel lineup and then pick something at random. I know it sounds crazy, but it seems more of a coincidence that all of the rest of the promos were Pay-Per-View.....

nwgatwcfan wrote:My theory on the Supermarket Sweep ad coming up was that the full channel lineup was not fully downloaded and the system took the first channel that matched the incomplete lineup and showed the ad. Lifetime may have been one of the first channels go into the channel lineup and a few moments later the Pay-Per-View channel was added to the channel lineup, therefore listing the Pay-Per-View ads later.

Not quite - the channel lineup is not downloaded separately, but rather all at once. All of the channel information is sent together in one block, and is read directly into memory by the receiving machine. So there is no point at which some channels are in the lineup and others are not. It may appear that way when you look at the grid, but in fact channels don't appear in the listings until they have programs attached to them.

nwgatwcfan wrote:In addition, in a situation where neither promo was for Pay-Per-View, it would still select a channel in the lineup, which might give the impression of a random selection. But IMHO, I still believe that the system chose the lower of the two channel numbers, since it was easier and faster to select a channel towards the top of the list than to scan the entire channel lineup and then pick something at random. I know it sounds crazy, but it seems more of a coincidence that all of the rest of the promos were Pay-Per-View.....

Amigas were not as fast as the computers we have today, but they weren't that slow. Searching a list of channels to see if one is present is not very processor intensive, and I'm fairly certain that the channels were picked randomly and not by what was the lower channel number.

AriX wrote:I noticed the issue with the music as well, and it is very strange. Is it possible that the tape loop in Tulsa was just... not working properly? I can't see any other reason this would happen, as the music is not only lower, but slower, than the normal one. To me, it also sounds just... bad. This could just be because it's in another key, but I'm wondering if the music itself is fluctuating around different speeds/keys a bit.

Ahah, towards the end of the 1st video it speeds up, then stops, then is started again like you would imagine it sounded if you just held onto the tape for a sec and then let go (kind of rreeeewwwww noise - how the hell do you express that in a forum?!) I reckon by funny co-incidence they were having problems at Tulsa, which could have included the data, which also means maybe the poor guy fixing the Amiga was actually fixing something that wasn't really broken.

tin wrote:Ahah, towards the end of the 1st video it speeds up, then stops, then is started again like you would imagine it sounded if you just held onto the tape for a sec and then let go (kind of rreeeewwwww noise - how the hell do you express that in a forum?!) I reckon by funny co-incidence they were having problems at Tulsa, which could have included the data, which also means maybe the poor guy fixing the Amiga was actually fixing something that wasn't really broken.

Interesting... When exactly does that happen? Can you get a timestamp?

About 8:40. Listening to it again, it doesn't really speed up, I think I was just getting used to how it sounded slower! It does definitely stop as if the tape got stuck though...