Anyway, I got some new gear and brushed the dust off of my trusty old JP1 interface, and downloaded the latest IR.EXE and keymap-master spreadsheets from the http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jp1/files address. Hope that's the right place to grab files from? If those aren't the latest, I apologize...
Anyway, everything worked fine and I've got the gear all working (thanks very much to the chaps who posted the protocol definitions for the Tivo HDVR2 and the Samsung 160 Highdef receiver), but I had the following two issues, and I'm wondering if anyone can help:
Issue Number 1, "Key54 and Key55":
My Ratshack 15-1994 is a hardware-hacked version where I've swapped the wires so that the SCAN button is Key54 and the SLEEP button is Key55. That way, they can behave like normal buttons instead of with the funky default behavior. Note that I did this in the days before Nicola descended upon the JP1 group and started writing cool machine language protocols for everybody. I'm sure you can override scan and sleep with software now, but at the time you could only override them with a hardware hack.
Anyway. In the Key Move screen, older versions of IR.EXE would offer me Key54 and Key55 in their drop-down lists, so that I could assign functions to them. This version of IR.EXE does not. If I load up an old file that's got those keys assigned, then I can use them, but I can't create a key move "from scratch" that uses Key54 or Key55. Was this an oversight because so few people did that hardware hack? Let's say I have a carefully assembled program for this remote and can't go back to an old file that contains Key54. How do I get Key54 into this new file?
Issue Number 2, "learned keys don't play atop HDVR2 protocol":
From the above-mentioned URL, I got a file called "Hughes-HDVR2.txt" which is a programmed protocol for my Tivo. Opened it in keymap-master, copied the two necessary segments into IR.EXE, and it all seemed to work. I can control my Tivo with it. Assigned it to "Aux2" (since VCR is already taken by a real VCR) and off I go.
But there were a few keys I wanted to do differently (ie, totally non-tivo), and I was out of key-move memory. In the past, for every other time I'd run out of key-move memory, I did a "learned" key instead. In fact, my 1994 programs are always a careful balance of Learned keys and Moved keys, so that I distribute the memory usage between these two small pools of memory.
For every other device except the HDVR2, any learned keys always worked fine. For instance, on the Samsung_SIR-TS160 device, which I put in place at the same time using the same method, I could do a learned key to make the "4s" key toggle Bass Boost on my amplifier. But on top of the HDVR2 device, none of the Learned keys work. Only Keymove keys work.
And I'm talking the SAME functions. For instance, that thing I described about the bassboost... I do that on every single one of my devices. On the TV button, 4s does bassboost. On the VCR button, 4s does bassboost. On the CD button, 4s does bassboost. On the Sat button (the new Samsung protocol I just inserted), 4s does bassboost. And I can do all of the above with either a keymove or a learned key, it doesn't matter, they both work equally well.
But for the HDVR2 protocol, only keymoves work for that, not learned keys. Why is that? Anyone know? I've worked around the problem by shuffling things around and trading keymoves for learned keys in certain spots. So I've got it working now. But I just wondered why this happened?