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As some of you may know, I was one of the lucky ones to subscribe to the Sega Channel service back in the day. I was digging through some old boxes the other day and found something that will interest any SC fan.

Scroll down past the images of the adapters on the right

I don't think I've seen anyone else recover one of these, so I figured I'd go ahead and scan it and upload it (those scans are resampled to 300dpi, I do have 600dpi scans on my HD, however).

Some of you may remember that I expressed interest in wanting to do something like this in the past, but was unable to due to lack of time. Well, someone's done it. It doesn't work on hardware ATM (Tiido did test it), but other than that it's fucking brilliant (world 36 seems to crash the game, as seen in the YouTube video).

Short history of this:

There is a cable channel in the US called TV Guide Channel, that shows upcoming programs in a scrolling grid fashion. This concept was started back in the late 80s, in a form called EPG Jr. EPG stands for Electronic Program Guide, and the Jr. ran on an 8-bit Atari (I forget which model). The company later released an EPG Sr. that had the same functionality but instead ran on an Amiga 1000. Both of these pieces of software ran fullscreen, with scrolling guides and text ad capability (the Sr also had a one-line demoscene-style scroller at the bottom of the screen).

After this, the company began a service known as Prevue Guide (this is where some of the older US members will start remembering). It was basically a direct upgrade of the EPG Sr. software that made full use of the Amiga's genlocking and video overlay capabilities. It reduced the listings to half-height and ran promos and other ads in the upper half, with graphics on one half of that half detailing what time and channel the program being advertised on the other half was on. The satellite feed actually fed two videos at once in the upper half, and both sets of audio - the software was able to choose which video and audio to use based on region. Quite a nifty system, and one that I longed to gain access to, being an Amiga-head and all. Later still, they upgraded once again and overhauled the visual style of the channel, still running on the Amiga. This is where this thread comes in.

Recently, a disk was found that contained this later version of the software, after they had been bought and were renamed TV Guide Channel. This software boots under WinUAE, and will most likely work on any real Amiga that has 1MB of chip RAM and 1MB of fast RAM - nothing else is absolutely required (sure, there was a lot of support hardware, but that was just for getting guide data into the system and overlaying the graphics on top of the satellite feed).

Here is the forum where most of the hacking is taking place. We have already figured out quite a bit in terms of operating the software (for example, I think we already have most of the keyboard functions, and I'd say about 75% we actually know the meaning of the options). We are currently trying to figure out the format of the guide and control data (which was fed to the software via RS-232, thanks to a demodulator that took the satellite signal and pulled data from the VBI). If it helps, we're fairly sure the software was written in C, so if anyone is good at decompiling C-based 68k code, feel free to head over there and help if you feel like it.

Another sub-forum over there contains a thread detailing their efforts at reversing the Atari-based EPG Jr software (which is also dumped). I'm not so much helping with that because my knowledge is based on the Amiga, but it's there. Here's a screenshot of when I found how to get the text ads to actually display on the top half:



It's sort of a weird thing for me, but this software is something I've wanted to fuck around with for like 15 years, so you can imagine why I'm so gung-ho about it. Anyone wanna help out? I don't have the ADF uploaded anywhere, but if you ask the guy who runs the forum (AriX), he'll be happy to give you a copy.

This honestly feels like the early days of the Sonic scene to me - so little was actually known that there was a lot of mystery and unknown shit. I don't expect anyone else to have this same feeling for this, but if you're a big Amiga-head then by all means feel free to help out.

In a quest to get a working MS-DOS setup for my SMD800, I came across a few interesting things, and a need for a tool that I cannot find.

First of all, does anyone have a copy of Charles MacDonald's SMDUTIL? The link on his website is 404, and I can not find it anywhere (have done about two solid hours of Google scouring). I need it to dump my unit's BIOS, which reports onscreen to be v3.3 from 1992, and I have not seen any dumps of this version yet. I'd especially like to look inside it for an internal build date.

While searching for any information or tools, I came across five other BIOS dumps (although one isn't technically a "dump", more on this later):

* v3, 1991, available on the wiki, internal date 8/17/91
* v3.1, 1991, available as part of "mdutils.zip" found here (see below), internal date 11/4/91
* v3.1g, 1992, available on the wiki, no internal date
* v4.1a, 1993, available on the wiki, "93-12-07" (ambigious M/D ordering but based on v3 I will call it Dec 7, 1993)
* Magic Drive Plus BIOS, 1993, no internal date, no reference to either JSI or FFE, also includes anti-piracy message, available here

The 11/4/91 v3.1 version is quite interesting, as rather than being just a regular dump, it's a file of length $4200 (16896). In this file, it looks like the actual ROM begins at offset $1E00, and mirrors at $3E00 until the end of the file ($41FF). Within mdutils.zip, there is a "README!.MD" file which describes this file:



This seems to be pointing towards the "DOS can be updated by disk (ala Kickstart image files)" feature listed on the wiki. My question is, has anyone ever found any other such upgrade files, and also has anyone ever taken a look to find out exactly how this type of upgrade works, such that one could upgrade their own unit to one of the other BIOS dumps available? I'd try merely replacing the 8K of data at $1E00 but I don't want to take a chance at bricking my unit. I don't have IDA installed right now so I can't check to see if there is any 68k code in there that would trigger the upgrade process once the data has been loaded into DRAM. It almost looks like there might be a speck of 68k in there at $0200, but I don't know enough about either the Z80 or the SMD's internal workings to make an educated guess.

(original topic here)

I'm pretty sure all we have of this video is a lo-res, 30fps butchery. This tape really needs archival-quality preservation, something along the lines of interlaced 7-8Mbps MPEG-2 (the codec doesn't matter so much as leaving it interlaced does).

Deinterlacing is a blight on internet releases of most SD video, and this is no exception. Does anyone actually own this tape, or would this one need to be purchased to re-digitize it?