English Amiga Board - View Single Post

tin · 14 November 2016, 01:13

Haha sorry for the delay in replying, somehow missed there was any reply to this thread. Yes I went down the same rabbit hole about 6 years ago and despite never having seen prevue guide I was pretty amazed. I know people talk about famous Amiga uses, but pretty much every local cable system in America having one presenting the guide at them 24x7? That's a cool use IMHO.

There was a lot of discussion in the early days (just after finding a copy of the software) about how to feed in listings and indeed some people have, including myself, under emulation, but at the moment it is an utter ballache to do.

In the original system some central computer talked to all the Amigas out there over a 2400-baud (AFAIR) modem signal transmitted over a Satellite audio subcarrier, and it's possible to feed information into an Amiga running the software by talking at 2400 baud to the serial port.

I hacked together some Perl scripts to rip the EPG out of a MythTV install and pump them into an Amiga (I think I got as far as running on a real 2000 but I can't remember)

The other way to do it was the Amiga cached a local copy of listings on disk in a file called curday.dat, and it's possible to edit that, but that's a hack and not scalable imho.

There's quite a lot of discussion and some information here: http://ariweinstein.com/prevue/ and http://prevueguide.com

I'm sort of interested in doing some more work on it soon, but time is a harsh mistress at the moment.

14 November 2016, 01:13	#18
tin Registered User Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: chester Posts: 415	Haha sorry for the delay in replying, somehow missed there was any reply to this thread. Yes I went down the same rabbit hole about 6 years ago and despite never having seen prevue guide I was pretty amazed. I know people talk about famous Amiga uses, but pretty much every local cable system in America having one presenting the guide at them 24x7? That's a cool use IMHO. There was a lot of discussion in the early days (just after finding a copy of the software) about how to feed in listings and indeed some people have, including myself, under emulation, but at the moment it is an utter ballache to do. In the original system some central computer talked to all the Amigas out there over a 2400-baud (AFAIR) modem signal transmitted over a Satellite audio subcarrier, and it's possible to feed information into an Amiga running the software by talking at 2400 baud to the serial port. I hacked together some Perl scripts to rip the EPG out of a MythTV install and pump them into an Amiga (I think I got as far as running on a real 2000 but I can't remember) The other way to do it was the Amiga cached a local copy of listings on disk in a file called curday.dat, and it's possible to edit that, but that's a hack and not scalable imho. There's quite a lot of discussion and some information here: http://ariweinstein.com/prevue/ and http://prevueguide.com I'm sort of interested in doing some more work on it soon, but time is a harsh mistress at the moment.