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Comment by ndiddy | Hacker News Reader

If 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

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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...

[1] https://github.com/netbymatt/ws4kp

[2] https://twcclassics.com/audio/artists.html

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:

https://twcclassics.com/

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.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JGpf6B8EvVY

oh man, thanks!

Kind of wild how much of that era's tech was ephemeral

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