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Grapevine: Difference between revisions
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A version was created by [[Mark Hansgate]] for the [[Commodore Amiga]] which was used briefly during 1994. This featured greatly improved graphics over the BBC Micro version but proved to be unreliable (with Guru Meditation [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation] being a regular feature) and so was abandoned. | A version was created by [[Mark Hansgate]] for the [[Commodore Amiga]] which was used briefly during 1994. This featured greatly improved graphics over the BBC Micro version but proved to be unreliable (with Guru Meditation [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation] being a regular feature) and so was abandoned. | ||
During 1995-96, [[Owain Davies]] took a bold step and used a PC in the place of the BBC computer. This was made possible with a VGA to composite converter from Bull Electrical. Elegant it was not, however somehow it managed to do the job even under Windows (the driver was loaded in DOS during the autoexec.bat). A windows presentation software package was used to scroll through a series of 'slides' to form the basis of the service. | |||
This first PC interpretation of Grapevine lacked some of the features with which members had grown to love, so [[Adam Baxter]] wrote a much similar version in Visual Basic, which was later updated in {{unsure|1998}} by [[Chris Parker]] still in Visual Basic but this time supporting a wider range of sizes and colour depths of display bitmaps. However this version suffered from storing a running ticker (below the bitmap portion) in a CSV file which wasn't escaped, so ticker items enclosed in quotes would crash the program leaving a Windows 3.11 error box being broadcast. | |||
Later in {{unsure|1999}} it was migrated to a Window 98 machine by [[Alex Hudson]] after the cache memory failed on the old machine, and at this point it was renamed from Grapevine to Inform. The software branding was still as Grapevine, and by 2002 it was once more known as Grapevine. Whilst more stable, it still crashed quite easily when new slides were added, and the 640x480 resolution with 256 colours didn't look great on photos. | Later in {{unsure|1999}} it was migrated to a Window 98 machine by [[Alex Hudson]] after the cache memory failed on the old machine, and at this point it was renamed from Grapevine to Inform. The software branding was still as Grapevine, and by 2002 it was once more known as Grapevine. Whilst more stable, it still crashed quite easily when new slides were added, and the 640x480 resolution with 256 colours didn't look great on photos. | ||