When I arrived at college, there was a cable television station broadcasting local events. The thing was an ugly text-based kludge that slowly typed a text file on screen. Being much more interested in hacking with my PC than in my classes, I went about writing new software for the station.
The end result is a mostly assembly-language Television Display Software Package, which took 2 years to develop. Daily events smoothly scroll upwards in the central window. Then, on the top and bottom, two Times-Square style rectangular area display advertisements, which have been scheduled to appear in random order with a fixed frequency. You also can enter weekly repeating events, such as the radio station schedule, and the current radio broadcast is displayed on the bottom as well. Because CGA had a NTSC television output, a PC clone was ideal for the task.
This was a major learning experience for me, in that it was a large scale assembly language program, my first assembly beyond simple screen-filling routines & such. The smooth scrolling was really a bitch, because the software ran on a 128k 3.2mhz PC clone with a floppy disk. The system wasn't very compatible, but because I was writing in assembly, I managed to avoid the incompatibilities. In my yearn for more features, I wrote an animation creation program called Megadraw -- its main task is drawing 24x24 graphic frames for 16 frame animation. It then wrote out hex shape tables, and QuickBasic code to do the animation, which I attached and scheduled into the television display.
After college, I made a half-hearted attempt to sell it on the commercial market, without much success. If you're interested in using it, let me know.
Click here to download the Television Display Software.
Here's what the main screen looks like:
