How the Commodore Amiga powered cable systems in the 90s

Re:How the Commodore Amiga powered cable systems in the 90s by halffullbrain on Monday May 31, 2021 @05:54PM (#27348407)

PreVue Channel also had an ad-delivery platform which served ads for the upper half of the prevue channel. The system was completely “headless”, using an A4000 that you could dial into, and upload new ads etc.

I developed that in 1993 — I think it was called “AdVue” commercially.

It was able to slideshow/carrousel the uploaded IFF/ILBM files or JPEGs, as I recall. I somehow managed to write a dithering algorithm for rendering as HAM8. I don’t recall how I chose the palette seed colors, as I didn’t know proper clustering algorithms back then.

I also somehow pieced together the “BBS” like Zmodem/Xmodem/etc. functionality for uploads. Long live Public Domain sources. This was pre GitHub ;-)

I’ve heard that the system was used for several years in both USA and perhaps Central and South America.

I lost contact with the company after going back home to Denmark.

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Re:How the Commodore Amiga powered cable systems in the 90s by Fr0styMatt88 on Monday May 31, 2021 @07:53PM (#27349381)

Oh wow I just had such a flashback....

The first time I ever saw JPEG images was from an Amiga magazine (Amiga Format maybe?) coverdisk. If I recall correctly my A2000 would actually take time to display the whole image - it wasn't instant.

Good times!

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Re:How the Commodore Amiga powered cable systems in the 90s by halffullbrain on Tuesday June 01, 2021 @01:54AM (#27351104)

I actually went and found the code. It wasn’t JPEG after all, it was Targa, but it still had to be turned into HAM8.

At that time, I had already worked with JPEG on the Amiga, for loading and saving images to/from the GVP TBCplus product. As I recall, it took about a second to load a JPEG image at SD video resolutions, but that was likely with a 68030 or 68040.

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Re:How the Commodore Amiga powered cable systems in the 90s by LocalH on Tuesday June 01, 2021 @12:35PM (#27357212)

There is actually a small community still interested in poking around what little software related to Prevue we’ve found. Did you have any other involvement with the Prevue software?

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