Retrochallenge: Day 1

OK. First day, and I have to do something.. .whether I can keep this up is another matter....

I had a look at the code used for browsing Jason's teletext captures.   These use a modified version of the edit.tf teletext editor (the 'viewer'), driven by an html page consisting of a mass of links!  The viewer grabs all these, displays the first one, then accepts key-presses to get the next page number, as per a teletext page.  Plus it allows up/down arrow shenanigans to skip through.

Teletext, as you should know, shares the exact same display format as Viewdata, namely 24 (or 25) lines of 40 characters of primary colour text and simple block graphics.  As control codes take up a space on the line, this makes it harder than you might think to do multicoloured images..

So, I've got a pile of dumps of teletext pages over at www.teletext.org.uk so the obvious thing to do is use one of those, see if I can use the viewer just as it is.  That way I have a starting point, and can begin to understand the code and decide on the particular direction I want to go.

I've got a php class in working-but-incomplete state that allows me to manipulate viewdata and teletext pages.  A quick bit of code to load one of the teletext archives and then spit out each page as a link took me significantly less than an hour, and only 14 lines of new code!

So...  from this,  to this.    I think that's a positive step.

Today has, however, shown up a lot of features currently missing in vv.class that I need to add in, particularly to deal with the viewdata side of things.  That is partly what the whole point of what this was for, though: to get an idea of what I need to do next!