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BBC Schedula: Difference between revisions
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[[Image:AlansScheduler.png|left|thumb|160px|An intractable user interface]] | [[Image:AlansScheduler.png|left|thumb|160px|An intractable user interface]] | ||
However, some people were slightly baffled by | 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 Owain's DOS front end== | ==BBC Micro and Owain's DOS front end== | ||
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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. | 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. | 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. | ||
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==BBC Micro and Rob's DOS front end== | ==BBC Micro and Rob's DOS front end== | ||
[[Rob Sprowson]] | The first 3 versions of the BBC Micro software by [[Rob Sprowson]] actually used Alan's binary which was patched to produce a new binary, this was made easy by the use of a 16 entry device table in the ROM so new devices could easily be swapped just by fiddling the table. These first 3 versions added: | ||
[[Image:AutoSchedule.png|right|thumb|160px|Hourly schedule update]] | |||
* New satellite decoder support. This also added a small delay of 8 seconds where [[Grapevine]] would be shown while the satellite decoder unscambled the chosen channel. | |||
* A new teletext device. This allowed teletext magazines for the five UK terrestrial channels to be rebroadcast, primarily being used for sports results during the mute lecture hours. The channel/page/time stripe normally shown on the top line of the page was replaced by "York Student Television", and subpages were visited by the page finding logic. | |||
* Automatic schedules. In conjunction with a change to the DOS front end, hourly schedules (assuming nothing else was being shown) would display what was scheduled for that day. This just redisplayed a teletext image held on the floppy disc on the DOS front end. | |||
By 1999 maintaining the various patches became too difficult and a whole new system ROM was produced, using communications code kindly supplied by Alan. A new 'test card' device was also added - not normally requested by most students - but allowed for easier network testing with a choice of colour bars; 2T pulse; and crosshatch. | |||
The remaining changes to the BBC Micro versions were primarily incremental changes, such as renaming the startup commands, and timestamping the cryptic columns of numbers which scrolled past when the video was not otherwise being used for teletext or automatic schedules. From version 2.86 the [[Station Video Mux]] was used for video output instead, and the test cards gained a 1kHz audio tone. | |||
==BBC Micro and PHP system== | ==BBC Micro and PHP system== | ||
