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Atari EPG jr videos in the wild.

Posted: Mon May 17, 2010 8:42 pm
by tin
Myself and AriX think these are possibly the only two EPG jr videos seen in youtube-land. The first is refered to reasonably often as an example of a jr - the second I had not seen until today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j89RFN3qps

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcb45f ... shortfilms

Some things say Atari to me: (1) The lines go all the way to the edges of the screen - it seems not so on amiga based EPG or PG. (2) the colour of the text on the coloured background is very atari-like (the text takes on a tinge related to the background colour). (3) the bottom scroll is in a big red area - the only Amiga EPG video with a scroller that I can see has just a black area. However none of these are conclusive.

This is quite likely not the ROM we have - ours doesn't appear to do the crawl at the bottom at all (although maybe I will be proven wrong as the reverse engineering continues) and the font is definitely different - see the 6 and 9 for example. Anyone with any leads to a newer version of the jr code?

Re: Atari EPG jr videos in the wild.

Posted: Mon May 17, 2010 9:01 pm
by Bolt96
tin wrote:Myself and AriX think these are possibly the only two EPG jr videos seen in youtube-land. The first is refered to reasonably often as an example of a jr - the second I had not seen until today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j89RFN3qps

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcb45f ... shortfilms

Some things say Atari to me: (1) The lines go all the way to the edges of the screen - it seems not so on amiga based EPG or PG. (2) the colour of the text on the coloured background is very atari-like (the text takes on a tinge related to the background colour). (3) the bottom scroll is in a big red area - the only Amiga EPG video with a scroller that I can see has just a black area. However none of these are conclusive.

This is quite likely not the ROM we have - ours doesn't appear to do the crawl at the bottom at all (although maybe I will be proven wrong as the reverse engineering continues) and the font is definitely different - see the 6 and 9 for example. Anyone with any leads to a newer version of the jr code?
Ah, so I suppose the reason why there are some differences with the ROM we have could be that we have an older version correct?

Re: Atari EPG jr videos in the wild.

Posted: Mon May 17, 2010 9:06 pm
by AriX
Bolt96 wrote:Ah, so I suppose the reason why there are some differences with the ROM we have could be that we have an older version correct?
Exactly. I've contacted several people with EPG Jrs, but they all bought them from the same place and they are all (so far) revision 6 ROMs.

Re: Atari EPG jr videos in the wild.

Posted: Mon May 17, 2010 11:53 pm
by swest77
Both videos are actually of the same EPG Jr. (They're both "WARNER CABLE" and have exactly the same channel line-ups.)

About the font differences, I've noticed that too. (Even on the Atari forum, where I think someone executed the ROM on the actual Atari hardware it came with.) Only explanation that comes to mind is that the Jr. seen in those videos wasn't running on the Atari 130XE. Maybe the 600XL or 800XL. *shrug*

The fact the 130XE ROM has no crawl capabilities (there aren't even any strings in the ROM showing it can set ads to crawl mode) tells me the version you guys have is either very early old, yes ... or very new. Who knows: it's just as possible that feature wasn't added until later as it is that it was removed at some point to make the Srs look better.

Re: Atari EPG jr videos in the wild.

Posted: Tue May 18, 2010 4:34 am
by tin
Very very true - could well have been.

Regard the font, it's deffo in the ROM as a custom thing - its at memory 8000 - 87FF, and can be seen by viewing with dis6502 and using the select sprites function (although they're not sprites obviously). The built in atari font is only used in the editor.

Re: Atari EPG jr videos in the wild.

Posted: Tue May 18, 2010 8:15 am
by AriX
swest77 wrote:The fact the 130XE ROM has no crawl capabilities (there aren't even any strings in the ROM showing it can set ads to crawl mode) tells me the version you guys have is either very early old, yes ... or very new. Who knows: it's just as possible that feature wasn't added until later as it is that it was removed at some point to make the Srs look better.
Interesting, and quite possible, however my best guess is still the other way around. Revision 6 sounds very old compared to Sr's whole 4.0.0 thing...