Teletext for Windows v1.51

Teletext for DOS is a great little program, but really it is about time we had something that, you know, multitasks!

WinTTX offers a way to connect your old Ground Control / Octopus teletext receiver to any PC with a parallel port and compatible operating system - and this includes Windows XP!.
Now I know I don't need to explain teletext - we've all seen it. However be aware that the inventors of teletext (the BBC) plan to phase it out when the analogue transmitters are shut down (starting year, completing in 2012). It has already been phased out on SkyDigital, to be replaced with the more comprehensive digital text services (but you can't interrogate any of that stuff using a computer). In short, enjoy teletext while you still can!

If you are European, Japanese, Australian, etc... chances are good that you have come across teletext services. Developed by the BBC and IBA in the late '70s, this simple text service provides a 40x25 text screen which can display text in eight colours (which may include coloured backgrounds). Text can 'flash' and also be 'concealed' (press the 'Reveal' button on your remote controller to make the text visible). Early video programming systems and electronic programme display data was broadcast using the teletext system as a base. Back in the early '80s when 32K was oodles of memory, the BBC broadcast software using teletext - intended for reception by specialist computer-controlled teletext receivers such as the UTA-3 you'll need for use with WinTTX.
In addition to the text, the specification provides for a 'mosaic' graphics system, where the text display can be replaced by dots on a 2x3 matrix. This gives the maximum screen resolution as 64x72. The display memory can be stored in 1 kilobyte of memory, though often 2Kb is used per page for the reception of extension packets for additional features such as FastText.
Teletext, as a system, is dying out, losing in the face of better-looking digital information services such as those provided by channels on the SkyDigital platform. However there is still confidence in teletext due to its simplicity and reliability - remember that teletext is over thirty years old. I think the only system of similar vintage still in use today is the French Minitel (which is much like teletext via phone lines, and it itself is suffering due to the uptake in broadband). This confidence in teletext is reflected in the fact that many European satellite receivers can display teletext information to you (the Sky Digibox is an exception, it can only insert the teletext data into the output picture). Some broadcasters have so far rejected "interactive" services in favour of teletext on various grounds, such as cost or complexity. The Irish, in particular, still make extensive use of teletext. Likewise, teletext is still frequently used for subtitling (most major European broadcasters provide subtitles via teletext). It is an interesting omission that many satellite receivers have an option to "display subtitles", but no option to determine what language to display, if even this is supported in DBS. Using teletext, multi-lingual subtitling in cross-over areas is easy. The Welsh broadcaster S4C offers subtitling in Welsh and English. I can see applications in similar regions (Gaellic/English, Breton/French, Basque/Spanish) as well as in countries with multiple languages (Flemmish/French, German/French/Italian, Swedish/Norwegian), etc.
Oh, and remember that as teletext information is carried with the television picture, it is totally free. You don't pay anything extra for teletext, and no special teletext subscription is required. All you need is a teletext-capable TV (or satellite receiver, computer interface, etc - something that can decode teletext for you).

If you look at a map of teletext use, and discount developing nations and places where there was no desire for teletext or a variation on the theme (such as the France's 'Antiope', which was phased out in the early '90s and replaced by traditional teletext), there is one rather amusing omission on the map:

If you think I'm not being nice to the Americans, perhaps that is true. In the heyday of teletext (the '80s and '90s), there were incredible feature-laden services in the United Kingdom and many televisions in the late '80s came with teletext as an option; and in the '90s more or less "as standard". The TV I bought myself in the UK (circa 1999) was the cheapest little Japanese portable I could find in a large Tescos. It offered PAL, NTSC, dead-easy automatic setup, nice colour reproduction, low power consumption, and teletext. These are all "base" technologies - I wouldn't purchase a TV if it didn't offer at least those features. Want something even more impressive? My Daewoo video recorder (PDC compatible, that's "packet 8/30 format 2" in teletext terms) was also capable of responding to the format 1 of "packet 8/30". How do I know this? When it received off-air signals, it used to set its clock automatically and perform summer-time adjustment all by itself. This is one of the less obvious features of teletext, but certainly a useful one!
It would be a scenario repeated across Europe. Spanish TV? Offers teletext. French TV? After a brief foray into a home-grown solution, they switched to teletext. German TV? Offers teletext. Dutch TV? Swedish TV? Swiss TV? Belgian, Irish, Portuguese... the list goes on - you can see the Italian RAI in the example at the top of this document.
Countries across Europe routinely fail to agree on many things, but they all agreed on teletext.

Perhaps America's problem was they expected too much, set their hopes too high, and didn't fully appreciate that 10 pages a second is a good data rate to extract from a television broadcast. Because of this, they never really appreciated what teletext could offer them.
Oh well, their loss.

I only include this length description here as there may be Americans who stumble across this software and are like "what's teletext?". There was some use of WST (World Standard Teletext) in the US - Wisconsin, Los Angeles and vicinity, and Chicago; as well as the cable channel WTBS - most of these services being fairly short-lived and occurring in the '80s.

It is perhaps ironic that the two American network channels that are freely available on European satellite offered extensive teletext services.
CNBC had a fairly simple service in 2001, which was expanding by 2003. It is still going today however the channel sold out to Sky. You need a viewing card to watch it at 28°E , while it is free-to-air at 19°E. Shame, I liked watching Jay Leno.
The leader of the pack, and perhaps second only to BBC's unimitable Ceefax service, was CNN. Their teletext service was abandoned in 2005; along with MTV ceasing their teletext service in the UK and (I think) Germany also.

The sad quirk, talking of cessation of service, is that the BBC provide a full and complete teletext service by terrestrial analogue. On digital satellite, only BBC2 carries a tiny (i.e. 15 page) snippet of the service listing TV schedules, recipes (none when I looked) and stuff for schools (will return in September, it said). I would imagine that when the last British analogue transmitter ceases broadcast in 2012, the BBC's Ceefax service, and the service that gave teletext to the world, will simply vanish into history. Teletext will probably still remain, for subtitling, but the text services that have kept viewers informed for what will be nearly forty years will be nowt but a memory - however those of you with access to BBC World (not 28°E) will be able to access a slimmed version of teletext news. That, and sometimes RTÉ, are how I get my news now that my Digibox is non-functional (hence I cannot receive BBCi's news any more).

So here is WinTTX. Get it running, enjoy teletext while it is still around...

The latest version is interim release #2 - v1.51 (2008/08/15):

• Three special frequencies added as a test for VHF tuning - refer to "channel()" in the script interpreter help for details.
• When you "Swap last page", it updates the page search to look for the number of the page swapped in, instead of what it was previously looking for. This will have no real effect if you are stepping back a subpage, but it will have an effect if you are stepping back to a different page.
• If the teletext system is "suspended" when a script begins, it won't try to unsuspend it when the script finishes.
• Now supports the little block character (char 127). Don't know why that was missed!
• At startup, will set the default save location to "<My Documents>\Teletext pages", and if that does not exist, it will be created; however if you are running WinTTX from a drive that is NOT 'C:', then it will first look to see if "<APP_PATH>\Pages" exists, and if it does it will use that instead; thus permitting some degree of portability using a USB flash memory device (note, however, that your options are saved in the system REGISTRY and are not therefore easily transportable).
• Preferred pages - the "Display in menu" option now comes after the page number, so the order is channel->page->show in menu->description which is tidier than the old way (ch->menu->page->desc).
• Pressing ^K in the viewer now pops up the Preferred Pages editor with the current information preset. NOTE that it doesn't warn if something already exists with the same channel/page combination.
• Script correctly identifies itself as v1.08.
• It has been decided that reaching the end of a script file without a 'quit()' command is not a serious enough problem to warrant a warning (!Teletext would report this as a problem).
• When a full screen redraw is being performed, WinTTX now performs a screen clear first. This should remove any little artefacts left during redraw operations (which occur because the original screen coordinate system worked in twips, not pixels, to fit the text size; and the mosaic graphics were overlaid on top of that).
• Various tweaks and fixes, including fixing incorrect tooltips.
• You must now confirm to "unsuspend" WinTTX if reading stuff from the TSDP (clock, channel ID...). This is because it, internally, uses the suspend state as a marker that something went wrong with the IIC communications (and, hence, engages 'suspend' automatically); however if you are already suspended, then these options would have appeared to have no effect.
• The 'H' hold prefix is only applied if there is a page number on-screen. This prevents the loader display appearing with a magenta 'H' in the corner when there is no signal or no receiver connected.
• Cancelling opening a file now works correctly, doesn't complain about invalid filename/number...
• Now correctly selects the default printer from the available ones - the list had been changed to be alphabetically sorted, and this was not reflected in the code.
• The splash screen now shows one of 12 possible teletext frames; one is the familiar test frame and the remaining 11 are index pages from ARD1, BVN, CNBC, Kika, RAI Uno, RTBF, RTE, S4C, TV5Monde, TVEi, and TVP. The images were taken from live broadcasts on 2008/08/03 (~11pm CET) and 2008/08/04 (~0am CET).

Here's what was new in the previous version, 1.50 (2008/08/08):

• Script interpreter!!!
  WinTTX now contains the teletext script interpreter! The executable is 75K larger; with a 112K source added, plus a number of additional routines and modifications in other places.
  • There are obviously differences between how Windows does stuff and how RISC OS does stuff (esp. with filenames/polling control), however the majority of scripts will work with just a few little tweaks. I'm working on a CHM helpfile documenting the script language; it is about halfway complete now.
  • Lots of script-related things, like a new "Script" menu, plus the software will look for "!startup" (script) and offer to start running it as WinTTX loads.
  • Wrote "EuroConv" and "LocalWeather" scripts, plus verified all the test scripts work.
  • Remaining to be done in the script interpreter are "cache_loaddirectory()" and "cache_loadnextentry()", neither of which are essential - they are more script test functions than anything else.
  
   
  And in other news:
• HTML export now includes line 25, plus the colours have been tweaked so green looks correct.
• OvationPro export now includes line 25, and that blank line at the start has been removed.
• Numbers on the numeric keypad are now accepted. :-)
• Pressing [Esc] to abort choosing a new page/channel will now clear the "p???" or "ch??" prompting.
• Should now be properly compatible (in load and save) with the !Teletext/Ground Control/Octopus 1080 byte format EXCEPT that CRCs are not calculated, and the header language is assumed to be the same as the frame language.
• Rejigged the options window to look nicer.
• Also added new configuration options for "Don't (offer to) run startup script (when WinTTX started)", "Don't confirm (file) saves", "(Perform an) Automatic lvar() on script error", and whether or not to show the frame information panel. In addition to that, a few more things have immediate effect.
• When you click on "Hold", the page number goes magenta and is prefixed "H" (not "P" as usual). Unsuspending WinTTX restores the normal white "P" style.
• When you "view codes", a light grey 'grid' is overlaid. This should aid in showing you which character cell is which if you need to look up a position (i.e. for a script).
• Numerous quirks and oddities ironed out.
• Double-clicking the channel ID will search for, and display, the channel ID.
• The Czech character set has been implemented (as best it can be within the constraints of the character sets) which may help some Polish services. Unfortunately it will not be viable to support the Turkish services (such as TRT on Astra1x 19.2E) because the teletext character set generator is an Eastern European type and while that is not insurmountable, the fact that the characters are not available in the 8 bit codepage in Western versions of Windows (i.e. the "Terminal" font; VB5 is not unicode, sadly) is a problem. If you would like to use WinTTX to access Turkish content, you will need to define your own character sets. Alter the "NOCS" to convert to 'closest match' - such as the 'L' with a stroke into a plain 'L'. It won't be perfect, but it'll be better than something pulled from a Western character set.

You will need:

• A parallel port - should be an actual one, you're on your own if you are using a USB faked parallel port...
   
  
• A special lead which plugs into your parallel port (you can build this yourself, see below)
  Sorry: I am not able to supply pre-built leads.
   
  
• A teletext receiver (see below)
   
  
• A compatible operating system (Windows 95 or later)
   
  
• WinTTX software
   
  
• This software tended to fail to work on faster computers because the parallel port was running slightly quicker than the EuroCCT could keep up with.
  The version 1.40 release (actually, PtrIIC v0.10) should help to resolve this problem in most cases, to allow WinTTX to work on a faster Windows XP computer...

This software is designed to work with the Ground Control UTA-3 teletext receiver, which I believe is the model that was also marketed by Octopus Systems.

Other IIC-connected receivers may work...
Does your receiver work with my !Teletext under RISC OS? Does it work with Paul Skirrow's !Teletext+ under RISC OS?
If the answer is yes, then it should work with WinTTX!

If you have any teletext equipment that is no longer required (i.e. the Morley receiver, a Ground Control UTA-1, the Acorn Teletext Adaptor (not the 1MHz cheese-wedge one), the DezignIT receiver, the XOB receiver, etc), please consider sending it to me so I that I may provide support for that device within WinTTX.

I am sorry to say that the Acorn Teletext Adapter (the one housed in the big 'cheese wedge' case) uses an interface specific to the BBC range of machines (the 1MHz bus) and also extremely specific timing (so it won't even work on an A5000 with a 1Mhz bus add-on). Thus, while this unit is quite a capable receiver, it looks unlikely that it will be supported on anything non-BBC; in the many years that the Archimedes range of computers has existed, I've not seen or heard of anybody who has managed it.
HOWEVER, it is commonly known that 'I Have No Life'™, so if anybody out there happens to be in possession of a circuit diagram and details of the interfacing and timing... I'd be interested in at least giving it a go...

Here is the schematic and a picture of my lead as assembled. Full details are given in the help file...

WinTTX download
winttx151setup.exe (665K)	Version 1.51 2008/08/15	WinTTX standard distribution, interim 'test' release #2. The script language guide is not included, you can download this further down... This is an interim release because the help file has not been updated.
winttx1-50inst.exe (640K)	Version 1.50 2008/08/08	WinTTX standard distribution, interim 'test' release #1. This is an interim release because the help file has not been updated and there may be bugs/quirks in the script interpreter.
PtrIIC parallel port driver
ptriic_0-10.zip (21K)	Version 0.10 2008/07/04	PtrIIC, current version. You don't need this if you download WinTTX v1.40.
THIS SOFTWARE IS INTENDED FOR MICROSOFT WINDOWS.

 Script information 

Script interpreter guide
wttxscript.chm (350K)	For script v1.08	Teletext script interpreter guide, CHM (HTMLhelp) version. Use your browser's "Save this as..." function, or else it may try to show you this file...literally!

You can also...