9
edits
Grapevine: Difference between revisions
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Recovered beeb version off the 5.25" archive floppies
Dummy User (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
(Recovered beeb version off the 5.25" archive floppies) |
||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
Grapevine was the name for YSTV's service of still advertisments and promotions between programmes. | Grapevine was the name for YSTV's service of still advertisments and promotions between programmes. The underlying software has been revamped many times, usually to improve graphics. | ||
==Versions== | |||
===Dragon=== | |||
The earliest known incarnation was a textual information system called Quaxfax (Ceefax with a campus duck flavour!), and was produced from a Dragon (?) computer. | |||
== | ===BBC Micro=== | ||
This was first used in the mid-1980s using mainly primitive Teletext-style images driven from a BBC Micro computer, plus an occasional bitmapped graphic for infrequently changing adverts such as those advertising the Grapevine service itself. Written by [[Roger Moffatt]] in 1986, it remained in constant use until 1994. | |||
[[Image:TeletextGVine.gif|right|thumb|160px|Society pages from the 1990s]] | |||
Old VHS archive tapes from the era which were recorded directly from the network output before a programme started show live evidence of the system, and 5.25" floppies from the [[YSTV archive]] are still perfectly readable despite the continual thrashing that they would have endured as each page was loaded from disc rather than cached in precious RAM. | |||
===Amiga version=== | |||
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. | ||
===PC versions=== | |||
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. | 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. | ||