Prevue Guide Forums

YES!

Obviously I'll be providing details soon, for now if you want to try this yourself:
55AA412A0094000000000D0A000055AA542020202054484953204953204120544553542046524F4D20554E4954454420564944454F20202000800D0A55AA430F120158595A3111320158595A3100820D0A55AA50120F58595A31120150524F4752414D2031205453203138204A4441544520313500DA0D0A is what you need to write to the serial of the EPG Jr. unit OR Prevue Amiga 2000 unit, provided that the time and date are January 15th at 2:00PM.

(You can set the date of an EPG Jr. to 2PM with the command 55AA412A0094000000000D0A000055AA4B05000E000E061A0101AD)

There will be more goodies (and details) coming our way shortly as well

Wow this sounds pretty epic!!

WOW, flamin genius - please do tell a little bit about how you figured that out?!

Is it possible to put either a red or grey highlight color in some of the listings?

tin wrote:WOW, flamin genius - please do tell a little bit about how you figured that out?!

To be honest, I didn't figure it out myself (although I have been trying). I have some really great contacts from UVSG and TV Guide, and one of them was the lead programmer for the many of the pieces of software we've been discussing here. Some of my contacts don't want their names used, and others I haven't asked yet, so I'm just going to keep quiet in that department for now.

In any case, the lead dev guy is awesome and gave me a partial copy of an older version of the testing suite that UVSG used to test Prevue boxes and new versions of the software. The commands in the files are mostly compatible with the Amiga version (everything except for the K command, which has been changed in the version of the software we have) and completely compatible with the Atari version, so I just had to figure out what date they were for, set the clock to that date, and send them... Worked like a charm! When it says "THIS IS A TEST FROM UNITED VIDEO", it actually is - I didn't write that.

Anyway, the testing suite does not only have 2400-baud commands, but also 110-baud control commands (for the top half of the screen). I haven't yet figured out how to get it to recognize control commands, as I think it does something fancy to receive them. I hope to figure this stuff out and more pretty soon. I'm not sure whether or not I can share these test files with you guys right now, but hopefully I'll get confirmation on that in the next few days and I can upload it for general consumption. Also, it could take a little bit, but there will likely be more awesome things coming our way in the near future.

Pretty soon I'll be able to start documenting the new commands I've learned about.

WeatherSTARIII wrote:Is it possible to put either a red or grey highlight color in some of the listings?

Yeah - you can set highlights in either the channel flags or the program flags, like in curday.dat. You'd have to generate a new checksum though. I'll be documenting this soon, in the meantime if you want to try your hand at it you can send your own P and C commands where the checksum for P is 0xAF, and for C it's 0xBC (thanks to tin for finding that originally - if you want to find it yourself, take this disassembly, look for 8ea3, where you'll find all of the commands the software is capable of receiving. Then, follow the addresses after the BEQ mnemonics, for example, L8f04, and then follow the resulting JMP argument, like L9240. Two lines after, you'll see an instruction that will load the checksum start byte into the accumulator, like LDA #$ab. Therefore, the start byte for mode T is 0xAB.)

AriX wrote:

tin wrote: Anyway, the testing suite does not only have 2400-baud commands, but also 110-baud control commands (for the top half of the screen). I haven't yet figured out how to get it to recognize control commands, as I think it does something fancy to receive them. I hope to figure this stuff out and more pretty soon. I'm not sure whether or not I can share these test files with you guys right now, but hopefully I'll get confirmation on that in the next few days and I can upload it for general consumption. Also, it could take a little bit, but there will likely be more awesome things coming our way in the near future.

I kind of wondered if there must be another set of commands, or another control method when we were discussing the Audio card, and the cables between and how the Amiga could possibly control the card given it was ISA only. I wondered if it was possible the audio card listens for control data to switch channels. However that still confuses me a bit, does the audio card have a select code as well? For that to work, the USVG data server must work out and send which audio stream to switch to, rather than have the local box do it. In addition the Amiga must still be sent the same control signals to put the graphics over the unused video stream at the right time, so maybe not. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree. Hopefully your investigations will expand on this

tin wrote:I kind of wondered if there must be another set of commands, or another control method when we were discussing the Audio card, and the cables between and how the Amiga could possibly control the card given it was ISA only. I wondered if it was possible the audio card listens for control data to switch channels. However that still confuses me a bit, does the audio card have a select code as well? For that to work, the USVG data server must work out and send which audio stream to switch to, rather than have the local box do it. In addition the Amiga must still be sent the same control signals to put the graphics over the unused video stream at the right time, so maybe not. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree. Hopefully your investigations will expand on this

Well, as swest77 pointed out in his own video about the Saddest Prevue Guide that Ever Lived, the Amiga had the capability to control the audio card all by itself (when you went into the menu with the escape key). It's an interesting possibility though.

Good point well made still wonder how it did that....

I've been working on my sender, and I put together a little demo of what it looks like right now... It only sends the first 9 channels of my cable lineup in the video, because the Atari starts acting a bit odd when you go beyond that (the Amiga does fine though). I'm going to work on this and see if I can get it 100% working on the Atari. Also, I can release the sender code soon if anyone is interested in it, although it's not the most efficient and clear code you've ever seen :p

The listings are inaccurate because the timezones for both platforms are set totally incorrectly. Also, you can see that the programs are sent REALLY slowly. This is because (1) the code used in the video was a little less efficient than my current code and (2) the way I'm sending the messages right now is byte-by-byte, 1 byte per UDP packet, which slows everything down a lot. The end result is that if I send messages any faster than I was (which was 4 times slower than it was supposed to be, which is 240 bytes/sec), the Atari will fall behind and things will start getting screwy.

You can download the video at http://prevueguide.com/ListingSend.mov.zip (warning: big file, requires QuickTime or compatible)

Wow! I love the progress