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BBC Schedula: Difference between revisions
Pop in some detail on Owain's version, screenshot to follow when I can be bothered.
(Add Alan's schedula screen shot and some sat decoder guff) |
(Pop in some detail on Owain's version, screenshot to follow when I can be bothered.) |
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However, some people were slightly baffled by user interface. During a visit to [[Alan Murrell]] sometime later in 1995 [[Owain Davies]] discussed the issue of the user interface with Alan and suggested he could write an alternate but he could never match the excellent work that had been done in device control. Alan offered to substitute the user interface for a serial interface thus allowing another computer to control the BBC schedula. | However, some people were slightly baffled by user interface. During a visit to [[Alan Murrell]] sometime later in 1995 [[Owain Davies]] discussed the issue of the user interface with Alan and suggested he could write an alternate but he could never match the excellent work that had been done in device control. Alan offered to substitute the user interface for a serial interface thus allowing another computer to control the BBC schedula. | ||
==BBC Micro and DOS front end== | ==BBC Micro and Owain's DOS front end== | ||
Owain set about writing a user interface based in C on a DOS platform | Owain set about writing a user interface based in C on a DOS platform. He thought he would try and use pointers to store all of the scheduling information. This version soon found itself in the bin after many crashes and he reverted to a static array, there's even a quote to that effect at the start of the source code: | ||
/* Owain experiments with arrays, structures and Alan's Scheduling System */ | |||
[[Rob Sprowson]] came along a little while later and further improved it, | True to his word, Alan, produced the ammended program for the BBC. First trial, did not go successful at first, until Alan advised to lift the front edge up of the BBC up a couple of centimetres and then drop it. After which, much to Owain's delight - it worked - the new system proved popular and was used during 1995-96, running on an old 286 with no harddisc. | ||
In a split role, the DOS code also included a simple driver for [[Tank UMatic]] which had been modified to include a set of wires in parallel with the front panel play/rewind/stop buttons, in principle allowing tapes to be scheduled out of hours. However, this was never seen to be working and support was later removed, leaving all hardware in control of the BBC Micro. | |||
At the start of 1996-97, Owain attempted a further feat with the PC user interface. He had experimented with an extremely crude VGA to composite converter from Bull Electrical, that somehow seemed to work. His aim was to get the scheduler to announce the start of a program and show schedules by putting it's VGA output to network and showing some graphics. It was trialed before it was ready, and the system would get itself into a very confused state. | |||
Reluctantly, he reverted to the previous version. Owain's last update was 8th October 1997 before handing over this stable version to [[Rob Sprowson]] to develop further. | |||
==BBC Micro and Rob's DOS front end== | |||
[[Rob Sprowson]] came along a little while later and further improved it, as well as hooking it up to the [[Station Video Mux]]. | |||
==BBC Micro and PHP system== | ==BBC Micro and PHP system== | ||