WeatherStar 4000+: Weather Channel Simulator
weatherstar.netbymatt.comIf 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 doesn't have their logo in the corner (I guess for trademark reasons). Here's a stream of his WeatherStar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66mSjXpfD2c
If it's the same one that brings the equipment to Retro Computing events. He sadly has declined to publish any kind of archive of the software for other hobbyists :(
I understand that he's under no obligation to do so. But a lot of us worry that if the hard disks die or if he loses interest in the hobby, that software will be irrevocably lost for all of us
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..."
https://www.twcarchive.com/wiki/Weather_Star_XL
Modified SGI O2 in a rackable form-factor
I didn't even realize I wasn't reading Wikipedia for the first couple minutes.
Importantly, it also plays Weather Channel-esque background music.
Thanks for mentioning that, had me digging around for where I can find the music. The youtube link lead me to the project's hackaday log, which is extremely detailed but lacks any mention of music [0]
The submission link's github page [1] links to a website listing all the tracks that ever played [2], explaining they dropped the music from the project so as not to deal with copyright claims. too bad fair use isn't clear enough to apply here, I think its a relatively transformative use and doesn't compete with the original.
[0] https://hackaday.io/project/178144-reverse-engineering-the-w...
why would fair use be at play here? TWC would have paid a license fee through ASCAP or whomever for the rights to broadcast that music. They didn't just download a bunch of mp3 files from Napster and try to disrupt broadcasting.
You're right, of course. I guess I just put a lot of weight on the charm of keeping old things running, and think there's value to the public in allowing free use of music, particularly for non-commercial/educational purposes.
Not sure if you are aware but the weather Channel sold music CDs I have one.
Can also stream it at Internet archive:
https://archive.org/details/WeatherChannelMusic
https://archive.org/details/weatherscancompletecollection
https://archive.org/details/lfset1
https://archive.org/details/the-weather-channel-presents-the...
https://archive.org/details/the-weather-channel-presents-smo...
https://archive.org/details/weatherscanlocalmusic
YouTube has a few TWC playlists:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMUZjd023YBtp0iB962Uz...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYyTo0ex76Q&list=PL2UoJXK3rr...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmGd-cx-dXc
It’s on Twitch:
https://m.twitch.tv/retroweatherchannel?desktop-redirect=tru...
There’s a nice Spotify playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0WEViIh23PGbLqGbjYNAZz
And the site dedicated to it mentioned earlier in the thread has some recordings:
Many for sale here: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=Weather+Channel+Music+C...
They would have had it custom commissioned so they didn't have to pay royalties.
> 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...
If you read his devlog, he started this project not knowing assembly or C... teaching himself as he went. Incredible.
Interesting project thanks for sharing.
I've casually tried to track down a voice in weather from that time with no luck, but this project scratches the itch somewhat. When I was younger (late 90s-early 00's) I spent a fair amount of my summers fishing with my father and brother on Lake Ontario. We would occasionally turn on the radio and catch a weather report from the coast guard/noaa. There was something about that then out-dated computer generated voice delivering the weather succinctly and to the point.
It was actually a project I used to evaluate coding done by an LLM. It was mediocre and took way too many iterations. But I now have a keyboard shortcut that will fetch KML/XML from noaa, parse out my important details, and read it back to me. The voice isn't quite right. But the morning I spent working on that was a good distraction at the time.
A comment on this YouTube video [1] says that DECtalk Perfect Paul was used for NOAA Weather Radio in the 1990s.
oh man, thanks!
Kind of wild how much of that era's tech was ephemeral
I run one of these on my desk 24x7 with a raspberry pi and a 3D printed monitor that simulates a CRT. I tried with a real CRT TV but the frequency and having it at the side of my main monitor started to make me sick.
I love the contrast between using a book to raise your main screen... and having a whole computer dedicated to showing weather 24/7!
You missed the irony of the monitor sitting on a NUC that is probably 1000x more powerful than the Pi running the weather lol.
What do you mean by "sick"? Headaches from coil/flyback transformer whine? Perceptible flicker due to the CRT being in the corner of your peripheral vision?
I'm a bit susceptible to noises myself.
The flicker in the corner of my eye. It started to make me sick to my stomach somehow. It's a weird feeling.
It seems like this could make a good addition for the folks working on EmuVR @ https://www.emuvr.net/
Nice! Which screen is that? All of the screens I've found are widescreen and I'd like to do a similar project
I listen to a lot of Pat Metheny Group, which my wife refers to as "Weather Channel Music". I used to argue that Pat was waaay better than the stuff on the Weather Channel, until one day we had it on in a hotel room and "Last Train Home" came on, and I had to shut the heck up.
Music is so funny. I just listened to this on youtube and _immediately_ started crying because it reminded me of my late father who used to watch the weather channel all the time. Seeing this thread and all the weather channel talk makes me think of him, but man, hearing the music just wrecks me.
Yeah, there's something about hearing -- especially music -- and smell that can somehow really induce major nostalgia, where sight just doesn't have the same effect.
Sight still definitely can induce nostalgia, but not near to the extent as hearing and smell.
Particularly music, where it already has the power to induce emotions already.
"Last Train Home" was used in a popular supermarket chain (Publix) commercial in the 1990s. I'm pretty sure it was one of Pat's most commercially successful songs. The album, "Still Life", is great.
"Last Train Home" is a banger, in any case.
Given how much fusion they played on "Local on the 8s" I wonder if they ever spun some Weather Report...
Enterprising TV producers used Pat Metheny a fair bit. The Search was used as a theme for a TV show (The Search for Solutions), and at least a half dozen KNME made TV shows in the 90s used bits of American Garage and First Circle
Wasn't there also a text-to-speech voiceover of the local forecast text?
I would have sworn they would replace the music with a guy "reading" the forecast.
In large markets, some of the local broadcast stations have a dedicated digital channel that plays a local version of this. In my market, they have the digital voice reading the forecast.
There was a time when it was only prerecorded “The forecast for your area”
For a time, you could call a phone number for the forecast. A lot of banks would tell you the time with one of their numbers.
This still exists in some cities. Albuquerque is one.
"Your Local 'On the 8s'"
"Last Train Home" was also used as outro music for the anime JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, S3, Stardust Crusaders.
This reminds me of when I first listened to my dad’s Spyro Gyra CD.
It will only be the true 90s Weather Channel when I hear some Rippingtons playing in the background.
I bought all of the Rippingtons albums because I heard them on the Weather Channel...I was inexplicably into smooth jazz at the time.
If you like the music more than the data, search YouTube for "weather channel vaporwave". I find it relaxing
I remember instrumental covers of Pink Floyd.
Not sure how they're going to go around that corner with that vehicle
I 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)
Love it, made me smile. The "warmth" of all this old tech is nostalgic, all the little human touches lost to history. The little bits of heart and soul that shaped the details of our lives, some nameless engineer on some forgotten afternoon implementing the little blue waves in the rain clouds. Something strangely bittersweet about it.
There's something really touching about how even the most utilitarian things (like a weather report) had this quiet artistry to them.
Looks 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.
Not knowing what WeatherStar 4000+ was, I was expecting "Weather Channel Simulator" to use AI to generate live video of a weather reporter describing the weather.
Can't be too far off.
This is a lot more interesting and impressive than AI generated goop
I was thinking the same thing! I've been working with some TTS applications, such as real-time commentary for Pong and personalized radio stations. I might give this a try, it sounds fun.
Honestly, give it a year or two and someone will have a fine-tuned LLM generating endless 90s-style weather banter with a deepfaked Jim Cantore pointing at AI-generated radar maps.
Yeah! There's nothing quite like watching fake people on fake weather broadcasts presenting weather just for me. One day we'll wonder why we ever used humans for anything.
Nice!
It'd be helpful to have the options stored in the URL, especially the kiosk mode, so it can be bookmarked.
And allow <esc> to exit kiosk mode.
It seems if you left click "Copy Permalink" that the site will generate a massive URL with all of your options. One of them is "settings-kiosk-checkbox". Change it to "true" in your copied URL and that should work.
Thanks! I didn't even notice the obvious share link below the options :p
Well, this wins the internet for today — pack it up everybody.
Seriously though beyond just being awesome, this site is such a good experience on mobile. Really well crafted nostalgia vibes.
Yep. 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
> It needs terrible elevator music (mellow jazz)
Did you click the unmute button? :)
Didn't see it. It's not obvious. There are too many controls.
Completely forgot about Local on the 8s! I remember when I was much younger (probably around 12 or 13) I was obsessed for a while with how it worked on DirecTV- there was a national feed that was being played as normal, but when that started there was also some signal sent that (if you were lucky enough for it to actually work) would cause the receiver to generate a few static images for the saved zip code that were styled to look like Local on the 8s, and those would just be shown on top of the national feed. Best video I could find of it was https://youtu.be/WX2KQHJ8vHA (usually it was not synced that well to start and finish with the actual national feed, from what I saw it was pretty often you'd see the first few seconds or last few seconds of the national feed).
How much effort went into creating the illusion of locality with national infrastructure
Far out! From the old days before they had shitty non-weather shows all the time and before they started "naming" winter storms.
And before they started saying "impactful" nine times a minute.
And before they hired that fuckface Justin Michaels.
Before that 1970s "comedian" bought the channel and fucked it up.
Is there anyone who could point me to a way to get this running and served up via a stream that is consumable via VLC?
I have an hdhomreun and watch my antenna via IPTV apps and would love to have a personal “weather channel” on my TV.
I’ve looked in to this in the past, using a node program to take screenshots of the page and try to splice things together with ffmpeg but it was quite awful and didn't work well.
I also wasn’t sure how to have this all ‘spin up’ when the stream is accessed, vs running all the time…but I suppose that is less important.
I'll take any advice! Thank you!
You should be able to get this done with OBS.
Set OBS up so your streaming a window of this application.
Go into OBS settings and go to "Stream" and set it to custom.
For server use "srt://127.0.0.1:7777?mode=listener&timeout=50000&transtype=live"
Then in VLC, open a network stream for srt://127.0.0.1:7777.
Xvfb :1 -screen 0 640x480x16 & export DISPLAY=:1.0 firefox -kiosk [URL] & gst-launch-1.0 ! (ask llm tbf) ! udpsrc
I take it this only works for USA locations?
Looks like it. Which is definitely a shame but I can understand they might not have all the APIs for all the locations
International version: https://github.com/mwood77/ws4kp-international https://mwood77.github.io/ws4kp-international/
this is fantastic, thanks!
I yearn for Local on the 8's
I 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 for any dated ROMpler synthesizers or cheesy drum samples :-).
Thank you, I love this!
This is impressive.
So many people loved it, The Weather Channel actually put out CDs. One such example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/127083056970
Thank you for sharing this and to everyone else in this thread posting other resources. I've followed W* projects for a long time and I always am invigorated when they pop up anywhere, in any form. I hope the experience is remembered for as long as possible!
I got curious as to what ever happened to Jeanetta Jones. Found this (tear):
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/231278045/jeanetta-danie...
The only thing missing is the voiceover.
“A look at your local radar.”
“Currently the temperature is 81 degrees under clear skies.”
I feel like that’s the natural next step, and we’re probably not too far away from being able to do that.
Wow, that's horrible, I love it!
Great stuff! Reminds me of when the web used to be fun...
Same here. I’ve been doing web design and development for 24 years now so I’ve witnessed the full pivot towards homogenization of interfaces; it’s necessary for commerce and usability at this point. But once in a while I’ll throw together a microsite like this to return to my roots a bit. This is my latest (a basic Trump presidency countdown clock): https://timeleft.now/
I was impressed as soon as it loaded and immediately said, "Yea but what about the music?". Then I noticed the sound toggle button.
Absolute perfection!
Anyone see an easy way to add the sound-on setting to the URL options generated by "Copy Permalink"?
Yes! Add &mediaPlaying=true to the url. You might also need to allow audio autoplaying for the website first in the non-kiosk version or launch the browser allowing it.
This sounds interesting but here's what I experience: I put London and pressed continue - nothing happened. I gave the location permission and pressed continue - nothing happened again.
Console printed these logs: Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'relativeLocation') at ws.min.js?_=5.21.3:1:133923 at ws.min.js?_=5.21.3:1:89730
Someone posted the international version elsewhere in this page.
International version: https://github.com/mwood77/ws4kp-international https://mwood77.github.io/ws4kp-international/
Love the WS4000. I've been meaning to make a WS4000 like application I can throw on my firestick and just have it play all day on my TV as a side project. As someone without any GUI or graphics programming knowledge, it's definitely been a nice learning experience.
Please share if you go down this road!
This 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!
Where’s the sponsored content?
Very neat! I put it in kiosk mode and could almost hear the hum of a CRT.
hum? you mean a very high pitched squeal?
Is there anyone who could point me to an easy-ish way to get this running on a PI + Screen? I have a special-needs son who would LOVE to have this running. I'll take any advice! Thank you!
Looks like this comment might help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44128109
This 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.
No trouble here. Galaxy S10+, Firefox whatever's current.
Same on Safari iOS
When I visit this site, it just keeps automatically refreshing the homepage over and over every second.
This has unlocked a deep part of my brain that I didn't know I had memories about. Bravo, OP.
I can't believe how nostalgic this made me for the Weather Channel.
Thanks for showing me this. Made me smile.
Thats cool. Can it autoplay when sharing from permalink? It always wants me to click to play.
It literally couldn't find my city nor the most popular city of my country.
The version linked is just using NOAA info, here's the international version: https://mwood77.github.io/ws4kp-international/
I wish the watermark was smaller, because it blocks so much info.
Man, I want to be able to have this as an actual stream on my TV!
Follow what this person did: https://blog.scottlabs.io/2024/02/weather-like-its-1999/
Love it!
Music is a bit too fast, I miss the sleepy jazz feel from the 90s. (=
This is fantastic.
This is amazing! It takes me down memory lane.
I came for the weather, stayed for the music.
I miss this late 80s early 90s jazz fusion.
This is incredible, thanks for sharing!
Thank you for the vaporwave vibes!
Very cool.
Music is a bit too high fidelity ;)
Wow, instant nostalgia hit
*Only works for Americans
half expecting this to veer into some analog horror
The horror lies in seeing 2025 with eyes from 1990.
nothing but love for this. excellent stuff
I love this
Great job!
Not to be confused with WeatherHammer 40000
Oh, man I thought I was going to see an AI generated Heather Tesch.