Prevue Guide Forums

I need some help. I am trying to place a couple of tables in the Wiki on the pages that I created and just are now getting to edit. The problem is that the tables are not showing up in the correct locations. I trying to figure out what I am doing wrong.

Also, I am still trying to figure out some more about the lower case p select code. I haven't been able to get it working as of yet. I am wondering if the upper case P select code had sub codes within it to set the other features of the listings?

Does anyone one of a good Atari 8bit emulator for Windows 7 where it has serial input? I have tried Altirra and Atari800WinPlus and I can't get the Serial port to work correctly at all. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Lastly, I was checking to see if the control feed is still being worked on as far as a reliable way of getting it to work? Since I am on a Windows 7 laptop without a serial port, I am using a virtual serial port to feed the data into the system. I can get my C# program to toggle the RTS pin and it will increment, but I can't get it to work reliably to send an actual command to it. What do you suggest I could try?

I realize this is a lot to ask. Any help would be appreciated. I would like to try to incorporate the Control Data into my program, but it's been tough. Also, I am in the process of getting the Configuration data setup in the software that I am working on. I have the listings building reliably and some of the other select codes working correctly. I wished there was a source to find free USA TV listings that aren't encrypted....

Thanks very much,
Steven

Just to say, and you might have already realised, but it's not clear from the post, that lowercase codes and the RTS/CTS sending don't apply to the Atari channel guide.

tin wrote:Just to say, and you might have already realised, but it's not clear from the post, that lowercase codes and the RTS/CTS sending don't apply to the Atari channel guide.

It's okay. I know. I am trying to do a couple of tasks with both Atari and Amiga with emulators in Windows....

Thanks,
Steven

I wondered if that was the case

nwgatwcfan wrote:I need some help. I am trying to place a couple of tables in the Wiki on the pages that I created and just are now getting to edit. The problem is that the tables are not showing up in the correct locations. I trying to figure out what I am doing wrong.

No idea. Can you link to an example of a table that's not showing up right? I can see if I can figure out what's going on. Maybe the UVSG Satellite Data page would be helpful as a reference?

nwgatwcfan wrote:Also, I am still trying to figure out some more about the lower case p select code. I haven't been able to get it working as of yet. I am wondering if the upper case P select code had sub codes within it to set the other features of the listings?

What other features of the listings are you talking about? I believe we have covered a good bit of the different possibilities in different threads here, but I don't quite remember. Maybe you've already seen this, but here is an example of the lower case p command in use (from the set of UVSG test files I got from one of the original Prevue engineers).

nwgatwcfan wrote:Does anyone one of a good Atari 8bit emulator for Windows 7 where it has serial input? I have tried Altirra and Atari800WinPlus and I can't get the Serial port to work correctly at all. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I couldn't find one, so I took the source of Atari800MacX and added code that listened on a port and wrote what it received directly to the Atari's ring buffer (0x3800, iirc). I'd be happy to provide my source code if it would be helpful.

nwgatwcfan wrote:Lastly, I was checking to see if the control feed is still being worked on as far as a reliable way of getting it to work? Since I am on a Windows 7 laptop without a serial port, I am using a virtual serial port to feed the data into the system. I can get my C# program to toggle the RTS pin and it will increment, but I can't get it to work reliably to send an actual command to it. What do you suggest I could try?

I haven't had a chance to work on it in a long time. When I was working with this stuff, my emulated ESQ for some reason never seemed to read from RTS. For testing, I hand-modified ESQ to add a diagnostic command that would dump the current state of the CTRL buffers when you sent "55 AA 47" ("mode G") You can find more info in these posts. If I remember correctly, the mode G command I wrote also reads a bit from CTRL whenever it's called. So if you can set a bit and then send 55 AA 47, you can (slowly) bit-bang everything in. Like I said, though, the emulated ESQ wasn't reading in from RTS itself at the time, so I didn't have to deal with it reading at the wrong time. Happy to explain more if this doesn't make sense and give more general feedback (and maybe help you custom-assemble something that will make it easier to test CTRL), since I worked on this for a long time. Read through the posts I made in that thread, though.

nwgatwcfan wrote:I realize this is a lot to ask. Any help would be appreciated. I would like to try to incorporate the Control Data into my program, but it's been tough. Also, I am in the process of getting the Configuration data setup in the software that I am working on. I have the listings building reliably and some of the other select codes working correctly. I wished there was a source to find free USA TV listings that aren't encrypted….

It's not free, but Schedules Direct is only $20 annually and you can get XMLTV out of it.

Arix,

This is the wiki that I was working on with the tables. Prevue Emulation: Curday.dat and Nextday.dat

The large table with the HEX codes is supposed to appear under Flag 1, but it puts it a bit further down. The second table was regarding the Timeslots, it's all the way at the bottom of the page. I noticed that you used "scope = row" in your table. Do you think that could be the issue with my two tables?

Regarding the commands, I think there is one more flag (for the Digital PPV information or Digital Niche channels) and there is a Blackout Mask that is still yet to be determined. I am thinking when we are sending the HEX 12 during the P command, and the HEX 14 that allowed me to send the Timeslot Mask. It's this HEX 12 or HEX 14 that I am referring to as subcommands within P. My hypothesis is that there are a few more of these that we haven't gotten to yet. I may try HEX 11, HEX 13, and HEX 15 and see if I can get something to build.

I have the newp file already and have been carefully examining the code. I have tried to build it and send it, but I haven't quite got it right as of yet. I will go back to the drawing board on this one.

nwgatwcfan wrote:Does anyone one of a good Atari 8bit emulator for Windows 7 where it has serial input? I have tried Altirra and Atari800WinPlus and I can't get the Serial port to work correctly at all. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I couldn't find one, so I took the source of Atari800MacX and added code that listened on a port and wrote what it received directly to the Atari's ring buffer (0x3800, iirc). I'd be happy to provide my source code if it would be helpful.

I don't feel so bad now. If you still have the added code for this, I would be glad to take it and try to build it on Altirra or AtariWin800Plus.

I will also look back over the CTRL posts from previous threads and see if I might have missed something along the way.

Again thanks for your help. I appreciate it.

Steven

nwgatwcfan wrote:Arix,

This is the wiki that I was working on with the tables. Prevue Emulation: Curday.dat and Nextday.dat

The large table with the HEX codes is supposed to appear under Flag 1, but it puts it a bit further down. The second table was regarding the Timeslots, it's all the way at the bottom of the page. I noticed that you used "scope = row" in your table. Do you think that could be the issue with my two tables?

I have no idea. I took a look at your table, and it looks odd, but I'm not sure what's going wrong. I'm no MediaWiki expert, but the code of your table looks pretty different than the one I made all that time ago. Maybe try making it more similar?

nwgatwcfan wrote:I don't feel so bad now. If you still have the added code for this, I would be glad to take it and try to build it on Altirra or AtariWin800Plus.

So what I did is put some code into the atari_sdl_mac.c file; you should use the equivalent for your platform. Here is the code I put at the top of the main() function and here are the other function definitions that I put further up in the file. Sorry the implementation is so hacky. Then, you can send data to the emulator by sending raw data over UDP to port 4441, or hex data (i.e. 55AA412A0094) to port 5541. (I'll give a cookie to whoever figures out why I chose those ports :p)

Good luck!

AriX wrote:

nwgatwcfan wrote:Arix,

This is the wiki that I was working on with the tables. Prevue Emulation: Curday.dat and Nextday.dat

The large table with the HEX codes is supposed to appear under Flag 1, but it puts it a bit further down. The second table was regarding the Timeslots, it's all the way at the bottom of the page. I noticed that you used "scope = row" in your table. Do you think that could be the issue with my two tables?

I have no idea. I took a look at your table, and it looks odd, but I'm not sure what's going wrong. I'm no MediaWiki expert, but the code of your table looks pretty different than the one I made all that time ago. Maybe try making it more similar?

Sorted for you, your tables didn't end with |} properly. Therefore the HTML didn't include the proper closing tags so how the browser would render it would be messed up

Tin, Arix, and anyone else that viewed this, thank you very much for finding that. I am still trying to get used to the Wiki table. I am used to HTML codes for tables.

I have updated a little more information on how the timeslot mask worked on the same page. If you would like, take a look and see. I would like to still clean up some of the information on that page. Again it's still a work in progress.

Again, thank you everyone.

Steven

No problem, I don't know the wiki code either, but I do know HTML, and firefox helped.

More thanks to you for updating something in the wiki!!