Prevue Guide Forums

Hey all, I have some very exciting news...

Thanks to forum user rudyvalencia, I have been able to boot the TV Guide Channel (from the floppy disk image discussed in the "Prevue Channel System Disk" topic) fully in E-UAE, an Amiga Emulator, and... it works! No video in the top, but the listing things scrolls around continuously with no listings, and the menus work... The ad menus are locked, however Rudy found that tin's backdoor to unlock the menus with no serial feed still works in the final Prevue software release from 1999. Go to the diagnostics screen, and type exclamation point twice, then press any key to leave the menu. The ad menus will then be unlocked.

Now, I could be wrong, but it sure LOOKS like we could get this to work without even having the genlock cards we previously thought were necessary. The guide seems to be fully working, with no data, and I would assume if we were to send it some of the serial commands that tin has reversed, it will come to life (I am currently trying to figure out how to send emulated serial commands, will try changing the date with mode K, etc.) Also, if you leave the guide running, it will start showing images from the /LOGOS directory of the ADF disk image.

Rudy has been working on figuring out how to properly boot this disk image for a little while, and he realized that it will only boot if the emulator is configured in a certain way. His configuration didn't work quite perfectly for me, (I think, it's kinda confusing) but here's the one that worked for me in Hi-Toro (probably several possibilities):

ROM: "Kickstart v2.04 rev 37.175 (1991)(Commodore)(A500+).rom"
Chip RAM: 1.0MB
Fast RAM: 8.0MB
Slow RAM: 0.5MB
CPU: 68000
Chipset: ECS
Mode: NTSC
Center horizontal: Simple
Center vertical: Simple
DF0: PREVUE.ADF

If you want to try this out, I would recommend using the E-UAE Amiga emulator on Mac/Linux or WinUAE on Windows, and I will send anyone the ADF who wants it. I will post videos and screenshots soon, for now here are the two screenshots Rudy provided me with:

Found a few more functions in the diagnostic screen, dunno if they're known from the EPG Jr. software but here's what they do (visually, at least). All other keys dump back out into the main menu (well, at least we can say that once I've gone through the whole keyboard). I will add more to this thread as I can figure out what a key does or doesn't to.

Shift-1: Changes TEXT between L, S, N, and R. I assume L means Local, unsure about the others but it's possible that either S (serial) or R (RS-232) refers to feeding ads in over serial.
Shift-2: Changes VIN between L, I, Z, N, Y, and y. Perhaps VIN refers to Video INput? Conjecture at this point without a manual or some good old RE'ing.
Shift-3: Changes LINE between 6, 5, 4, and 3. Perhaps the number of lines per ad?
Shift-4: Changes GRPH between L, R, S, N, and Y. Once again, unsure what this means, perhaps it allows the PowerPacked IFF files to come in from another source, allowing graphic updates without exposing the UI to the viewer?
Shift-9: Causes a brief pop-up above the visual indicators for these settings that says Start TAPE Video. This would undoubtedly be used to test the functionality allowing locals video ads to run on the top half, because of the next item...
Shift-0: Causes a brief pop-up in the same spot as Shift-9 that says Stop.
1: Causes KHHR to change to Silence, but this does not persist when you re-enter the diagnostic screen.
2: Causes Left to appear in this spot.
3: Causes Right to appear in this spot. Looks like it might be used to test the audio source that goes to air?
4: Causes Background to appear in this spot.
5: Causes Ext. Video Only to appear haphazardly over the "Press any key to continue." prompt.
6: Causes Computer Only to appear there.
7: Causes Overlay Ext. Video to appear there.
8: Causes Negative Video to appear there.
9: Causes Video Switch Open to appear where the earlier Start and Stop message did.

This is from testing on WinUAE. Also, it seems that the 512K of slow RAM is not needed (that physical RAM is usually part of the 1MB chip RAM when a suitable Agnus chip is present). I'll try to hook up the A2000 sometime today or tomorrow and explore the software on it.

Edit: Somehow missed 6, added it now.

LocalH wrote:Found a few more functions in the diagnostic screen, dunno if they're known from the EPG Jr. software but here's what they do (visually, at least). All other keys dump back out into the main menu (well, at least we can say that once I've gone through the whole keyboard). I will add more to this thread as I can figure out what a key does or doesn't to.

Cool, thanks for documenting this stuff... Looks like there are some really interesting options here, we'll see what we can do with this. I'm working on serial input, it seems to be going pretty well...

Once we figure out the format for this version of the software, I'll look into setting up an old PC and my A2000, and do like Metalguy66 did with the EPG Jr. software, and how bad-ass would that be?

It'd really help if we had a manual. Maybe one day we'll come across one...

Right now my main goal is to set up an emulated Workbench environment on a hard drive and investigate some of these file formats (the .dat files, in particular, might hold some interesting stuff). Also, I plan to play around with the settings in the .ini files, looks like you can change the whole color scheme.

Oh, and for the record, if you haven't noticed, this thing boots SLOWLY...you can speed this up somewhat in WinUAE (unsure about the availability of these options in other ports). In the floppy options, you can safely set the speed to Turbo.

Hm...for some reason now I'm having trouble getting this to boot. No matter what I do, I can't get it to go past the ER011 error. I'm using the same configuration I was using earlier. I have checked CPU settings, made sure that WinUAE is faking the presence of a genlock, and even set floppy speed back to 100% - no dice. Lemme go back to the original ADF you sent me, to make sure that nothing I did while testing earlier was written back to disk and preventing it from loading this time.

Awesome. Simply awesome!!!!!!

Ah, I think I might have realised what I did. To do some testing, I had tried using 512K chip and 512K slowfast instead of 1MB chip and no slowfast. Booting up under bog-standard cycle-exact A500 mode with 1MB chip to see if I'm right.

Edit: Yup, that's it. The software definitely requires 1MB chip. Now to do some testing on CPU type and floppy speed to see if we can get this thing booting up quicker (and to test for wider compatibility with real Amiga setups).

Edit 2: Software successfully booted with floppy speed set to Turbo and CPU set to cycle-exact 68020 at 14MHz.

Edit 3: Software successfully booted with CPU cycle-exact turned off and CPU speed set to "Fastest possible, but maintain chipset timing". I am now confident this software will run on my A2000.

Edit 4: Also, a few more keys on the diagnostic screen - they're listed right there. They're for showing free memory - Ctrl-C shows free chip RAM, Ctrl-F shows free fast RAM, Ctrl-M shows "max" (which I believe is just the largest single contiguous block of free memory), and Ctrl-A shows all three.

Edit 5: Ctrl-G shows a testing grid (used for calibrating monitors to ensure that the image isn't skewed or rotated). This interestingly also works while the listings are scrolling, but it corrupts the display until the whole thing loops around and scrolls new time blocks into the middle area. If you do this while the diagnostic page is up, it starts drawing everything in the listings font instead of the normal menu font. This is a bug, I believe, as the software does not take this into account on the diagnostic page, meaning that text is mis-positioned.

Edit 6: Something I'm doing seems to be freezing up the software, or at least causing it to disregard future keyboard input. While the listings were scrolling, I pressed Ctrl-U, and the current block scrolling onto the screen continues appearing, and then everything scrolls off and is replaced by blue. The clock also stops ticking when this happens. The only way out, that I know of, is to reboot. At least it boots faster with CPU and floppy speeds turned up.

Edit 7: Ctrl-E, on the listings, slows the scroll speed. It seems to be able to go even slower than speed 7 this way, although not sure how to speed it back up from here. Ctrl-S seems to single-step the listings.

Edit 8: On the listings, C causes the color palette to appear over top of the listings. Given how this appears when it overlaps a gradient area, this confirms that the software uses the copper to generate those, meaning that (for example) the red gradient under the ER007 actually only takes up one color index.

Edit 9: On the listings, F caused the text MR=0 SBS=1 Sport=1 to appear at the bottom of the top half of the screen. Doing some fiddling around with G caused some images to appear in the top half and switch it to interlace mode, causing F to display the above, as well as Cycle=Y CycleFreq=1 AftrOrd ClockCmd=1. I was able to go through a few images (and some black top halves) by going back and forth between F and G. N causes the top half to go black. Shift-S pauses the listings, S causes them to being scrolling again.

Also, I've found that if you set the emulated window to 760x480, everything's nice and properly centered (I recommend turning the emulator centering to Off, as it could potentially cause the image to move around depending on the graphics being used).

Taping only C will show date information... such as the Julian day, jday1, jday2, etc.

Ok, this is definitely odd...In :C, there is a command called MakeFiles. Looking at it in a hex editor, it appears to be a tool to read the two ROMs from an A3000 SuperKickstart disk and write them out to individual files. I can't figure out why this command would be on the disk, considering that I don't think UV/Prevue/TVG ever, ever used A3000s as standard hardware, did they?

Something else I found out. Pressing Scroll will pause the scroll, however, it's still running in the system. When you click Scroll again, it will jump to where it is.
Control + C makes it "redraw"... well... kinda.
Control + B shows "SCRSPD=[Scroll Speed]
Control + C THEN Control + D (This is to make the scrolls go DOWN) allows you to use the locked 1 and 0 scroll speed. You need to do Control D until you get to the speed you want.
Control + C THEN Control + E (This makes the scrolls go UP)

And, I don't think that the A3000 was used... but I could be wrong.

LocalH wrote:Found a few more functions in the diagnostic screen, dunno if they're known from the EPG Jr. software but here's what they do (visually, at least). All other keys dump back out into the main menu (well, at least we can say that once I've gone through the whole keyboard). I will add more to this thread as I can figure out what a key does or doesn't to.

Shift-1: Changes TEXT between L, S, N, and R. I assume L means Local, unsure about the others but it's possible that either S (serial) or R (RS-232) refers to feeding ads in over serial.

I'm thinking "S" might be "Satellite".

LocalH wrote:Shift-3: Changes LINE between 6, 5, 4, and 3. Perhaps the number of lines per ad?

And yes, that's right. When I set it to 3, it limits me to three lines per ad.