Prevue Guide Forums

Not sure if this was mentioned in a previous thread or not, but I got to looking at the Qtable.ini and it looks like it is what determined the name of the channel for the program preview playing on the top half of the screen. It takes the call sign of the channel in the curday.dat and uses qtable.ini to translate that call sign into a channel name to display for a previewing program. (Ex: CBSnnn, with nnn being any set of numbers, for "CBS", HB2505 for "HBO Plus" or APTDC for "Animal Planet"). I also note that half of these are either HBO or Pay-Per-View related (this was mentioned in the "New Youtube Videos" post). Hex 0x18 also appears to behave as a "return" character for titles that are longer than the width of the text screen. It would be interesting to see if there would be a way to trigger these and a program name/channel number and a time from the curday.dat file and have it display in front of the tvgdth16.uv file (though this was probably triggered by the video feed). I believe that program information on the left/right hand side of the screen are read from the curday.dat file, though because of the individuality of each channel's separate call signs, these were read from the curday.dat and matched with the qtable for an "understandable" channel name.

I would also like to add that for the previews whose descriptions faded and reappeared with the ordering information, this information was pulled from the OI_00.dat and OI_01.dat files, and for these the call signs from the curday.dat file were used as identification as well (each of which begin with the jdate in the files, but they are a day behind the current day, 90 and 91, respectively. So OI_00 is the previous day's ordering information and OI_01 is the current day).

Let me know what you guys think. Correct me if I am wrong, or if anything was posted elsewhere.

Sounds good. I moved this thread to Prevue Emulation, since this is relevant to the Prevue software itself.

I don't believe it's possible to trigger a promo overlay at all from curday.dat; if anywhere I believe it would be promoID.dat. Maybe I could take a look at what kind of data structures are used when reading/writing that file to see what we could do to display a promo with it.

I am sure that in our case it is at least possible to display it like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjuEll8A0Cs

However, without a video feed it would be impossible for the program to know what to display, where to display it (left or right), and when to display it. Makes sense that the PromoID.dat would show what the choices are, since mine says "No Data". Even if we found a way to feed video into WinUAE from another program, there would be nothing "triggering" this and timing of both the video and the promo description would have to be from sheer luck. On a side note, I have made a couple attempts to change the "TVGDTH16.UV" file into an image not related to TVGuide, but it keeps coming up as missing when I change it. Suppose I have the file's format wrong?

20CenturyFan wrote:I am sure that in our case it is at least possible to display it like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjuEll8A0Cs

However, without a video feed it would be impossible for the program to know what to display, where to display it (left or right), and when to display it. Makes sense that the PromoID.dat would show what the choices are, since mine says "No Data". Even if we found a way to feed video into WinUAE from another program, there would be nothing "triggering" this and timing of both the video and the promo description would have to be from sheer luck. On a side note, I have made a couple attempts to change the "TVGDTH16.UV" file into an image not related to TVGuide, but it keeps coming up as missing when I change it. Suppose I have the file's format wrong?

The software doesn't get that information from the video feed as you suggest... It gets it from the control data feed, which I believe is cached to the file promoID.dat.

nehal wrote:I have an idea on UV ads. since they are easy to edit, i might be able to create modern day ads including ads to TV Shows like The Following on FOX.

I said that already in another post. not you.

I'll keep an eye on that post, they posted it about 11 days ago, so I expect them to come back at any time and edit their sig to put ads in it. It's a spammer, and as soon as they do I will remove the sig.

LocalH wrote:I'll keep an eye on that post, they posted it about 11 days ago, so I expect them to come back at any time and edit their sig to put ads in it. It's a spammer, and as soon as they do I will remove the sig.

Banned.