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WeatherStar 4000+: Weather Channel Simulator
101–110 of 141 posts
Re: WeatherStar 4000+: Weather Channel Simulator
#102*Only works for Americans
Re: WeatherStar 4000+: Weather Channel Simulator
#103Looks like this was the original version? https://github.com/vbguyny/ws4kp
Indeed, though significant work has been done on this one, detailed in the readme. On the other hand, the one you’ve linked has since the fork added a “custom RSS feed in the scroller” feature.
Re: WeatherStar 4000+: Weather Channel Simulator
#104Yep. That's pretty much what it used to look like on cable and satellite TV in the late 90's/early 00's. Just missing the scan lines. Pretty awesome that you can skip sections. It needs terrible elevator music (mellow jazz) and occasional announcers to voice over and unenthusiastically explain what's already obvious in front of a green screen.
look again, there is a scanlines option!
I didn’t notice it there this afternoon, so he may have added it for you :D
Re: WeatherStar 4000+: Weather Channel Simulator
#105This page on an Android phone displays briefly and then crashes the tab in Chrome, and crashes the entire app in Firefox. Neat trick.
It crashes Chrome every time on my Samsung Galaxy Tab A7, a cheap tablet from circa 2020.
Re: WeatherStar 4000+: Weather Channel Simulator
#106This is so fucking cool. I expected it to be an SGI Indy or Octane running weather channel software outputting via its SDI card, which in itself is cool, but it turns out to be a much more interesting hardware and software architecture!
Re: WeatherStar 4000+: Weather Channel Simulator
#107If you're interested in this, someone on YouTube got a WeatherStar 4000 (device that sat at cable headends and generated the local weather report graphics) and wrote all new firmware to make 90's style weather reports on the real hardware. This was necessary because the original firmware was downloaded over satellite so it's now lost. It looks basically identical to the real Weather Channel from the 90s, except it do…
Importantly, it also plays Weather Channel-esque background music.
> Importantly, it also plays Weather Channel-esque background music.
Which has its own sort of funny subculture. One is Phish fans unexpectedly hearing what was decidedly not publicly common music being aired on the Weather Channel: https://jambands.com/features/2002/07/24/guyute-and-your-loc...
Fast forward 20ish years and a similar thing happened with Fox Sports interludes: https://www.si.com/nfl/2020/12/17/fox-producer-who-got-the-n...
Re: WeatherStar 4000+: Weather Channel Simulator
#108I love this. Why is the music so good? How do I get more music like this?
There's an archival effort here [1]. It seems to have primarily been instrumental jazz fusion and adjacent artists like The Flecktones, The Rippingtons, Pat Metheny, Spyro Gyra, Phish, etc. I'm personally a bit more into the guitar shred-oriented type of fusion as practiced by Frank Gambale, Alan Holdsworth (RIP), Shawn Lane (RIP #2), Guthrie Govan, and Scott Henderson. The insane guitar acrobatics more than make up…
Thank you, I love this!
Re: WeatherStar 4000+: Weather Channel Simulator
#109I have a version (probably not exactly the same software for the head unit) of this on an SGI O2 sitting around including all the environment scripts and the HTML manuals. I have a tar.gz of it that I should upload to an archive location.
Please do! The software has been undumped and is highly desired by retro enthusiasts (including myself)
Re: WeatherStar 4000+: Weather Channel Simulator
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
The youtube stream has a link in the description for EEPROM dumps https://hackaday.io/project/178144-reverse-engineering-the-w...
There's some that runs specifically on SGI machines to do the TV graphics that has not been dumped afaik
I refuse to be nerd sniped; do you know what the input to the SGI is and what it outputs? looking at the video it seems that most of that is done "in hardware", the SGI could just be providing the actual updated information, and it could just be for nostalgia or "if it is not broke..."