Prevue Guide Forums

Check out the wiki at http://prevueguide.com/ - I haven't had a chance to put much at all up yet, but it should be a good way to organize our information.

I worked a little bit on the Prevue Grid page. Like what the stub message says, you can help by expanding it I am going to work on it a little bit more. I have the System Initializing image, and a Guru error

http://prevueguide.com/index.php/Prevue_Grid

curtjr4 wrote:I worked a little bit on the Prevue Grid page. Like what the stub message says, you can help by expanding it I am going to work on it a little bit more. I have the System Initializing image, and a Guru error

http://prevueguide.com/index.php/Prevue_Grid

Hey Curt,

Thanks for contributing, but your edits were a little inaccurate... You seem to be confusing many aspects of the Prevue Grid with what I call the Prevue List (the Prevue Guide software that ran Prevue from 1988-1993). I'll fix it up a bit.

Also, it would be great if you could post screenshots that used the correct aspect ratio instead of the extra-wide one like LocalH was talking about.

AriX wrote:

curtjr4 wrote:I worked a little bit on the Prevue Grid page. Like what the stub message says, you can help by expanding it I am going to work on it a little bit more. I have the System Initializing image, and a Guru error

http://prevueguide.com/index.php/Prevue_Grid

Hey Curt,

Thanks for contributing, but your edits were a little inaccurate... You seem to be confusing many aspects of the Prevue Grid with what I call the Prevue List (the Prevue Guide software that ran Prevue from 1988-1993). I'll fix it up a bit.

Also, it would be great if you could post screenshots that used the correct aspect ratio instead of the extra-wide one like LocalH was talking about.

Ohh... ok. I will try getting the correct aspect ratio.

You can do that with Photoshop (or other image editor) if you want. What I did was, I cropped the 760 pixel wide image I used down to 740, then resized it to 640 wide. It's not mathematically accurate, but it is close enough for display purposes.

Also, please use PNG for all screenshots. JPEG for computer screenshots is wasteful on space, not to mention the JPEG artifacts are ugly.

What do you guys think we should call the satellite data format for the wiki? I was thinking "UVSG Satellite Format" or "Prevue Satellite Data Format" or something. Anyone have a different opinion?

That's not a bad idea. I think we should also give unofficial version numbers to them, so we know whether we're talking about a data stream for the EPG Jr., EPG Sr. (should we ever locate a copy), or Prevue. Perhaps call it "UVSG Satellite Data" (I never was too much on using the word format in the title of a format, then you have redundancy when it's abbreviated, think "PDF format" = "Portable Document Format format"), so you have "UVSG Satellite Data v1" for the EPG Jr., "UVSG Satellite Data v2" reserved for the EPG Sr., and "UVSG Satellite Data v3" for Prevue. If we ever find out the EPG Sr. uses v1 instead of it's own format, we can figure out what to do then, in such a case I would just rename v3 to v2.

LocalH wrote:That's not a bad idea. I think we should also give unofficial version numbers to them, so we know whether we're talking about a data stream for the EPG Jr., EPG Sr. (should we ever locate a copy), or Prevue. Perhaps call it "UVSG Satellite Data" (I never was too much on using the word format in the title of a format, then you have redundancy when it's abbreviated, think "PDF format" = "Portable Document Format format"), so you have "UVSG Satellite Data v1" for the EPG Jr., "UVSG Satellite Data v2" reserved for the EPG Sr., and "UVSG Satellite Data v3" for Prevue. If we ever find out the EPG Sr. uses v1 instead of it's own format, we can figure out what to do then, in such a case I would just rename v3 to v2.

"UVSG Satellite Data" sounds good to me. The thing about the versions, however, is that they're probably mostly the same and/or have large similarities, since the EPG Jr. was running until 2005 on the same data feed (or at least a subset) that Prevue used to use. We'll know how to version them once we have figured out more about them, however I bet they're all the same thing, just with extra modes for the Prevue machines.

EDIT: And EPG Sr. definitely uses the same data format as EPG Jr... Remember that all three of these systems (Prevue Guide, EPG Jr., EPG Sr.) were in the early 90s running off the same data feed.

I'd still wager that there were different "versions" of the data format, all just backwards compatible (in other words, new versions were supersets of older version). Thus, I agree with your idea that we don't worry about versioning the format itself - all we'd need to do is denote the minimum software version that a particular command requires (so that we know, for example, which commands work on all units, and which only work on Prevue) and the maximum version (as I'm thinking things like the top line on the Jr/Sr are ignored by Prevue). This way, we could end up with the possibility of a single, universal app that supports all EPG/Prevue units, and can be set with the type the user is operating, so that it doesn't waste time sending data that is unused on that system.

That's an issue to take up when we begin defining the "unofficial" data format specification, however.

LocalH wrote:I'd still wager that there were different "versions" of the data format, all just backwards compatible (in other words, new versions were supersets of older version). Thus, I agree with your idea that we don't worry about versioning the format itself - all we'd need to do is denote the minimum software version that a particular command requires (so that we know, for example, which commands work on all units, and which only work on Prevue) and the maximum version (as I'm thinking things like the top line on the Jr/Sr are ignored by Prevue). This way, we could end up with the possibility of a single, universal app that supports all EPG/Prevue units, and can be set with the type the user is operating, so that it doesn't waste time sending data that is unused on that system.

That's an issue to take up when we begin defining the "unofficial" data format specification, however.

Ah, right, sounds good.