WeatherStar 4000+: Weather Channel Simulator
136 comments
·May 29, 2025ndiddy
CursedSilicon
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
Maxious
The youtube stream has a link in the description for EEPROM dumps https://hackaday.io/project/178144-reverse-engineering-the-w...
CursedSilicon
There's some that runs specifically on SGI machines to do the TV graphics that has not been dumped afaik
jimmydddd
Importantly, it also plays Weather Channel-esque background music.
insaneirish
> 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...
jazzyjackson
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...
dylan604
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.
mgr86
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.
jjk7
If you read his devlog, he started this project not knowing assembly or C... teaching himself as he went. Incredible.
KurSix
Kind of wild how much of that era's tech was ephemeral
post_break
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.
wiether
I love the contrast between using a book to raise your main screen... and having a whole computer dedicated to showing weather 24/7!
post_break
You missed the irony of the monitor sitting on a NUC that is probably 1000x more powerful than the Pi running the weather lol.
shortstuffsushi
It seems like this could make a good addition for the folks working on EmuVR @ https://www.emuvr.net/
agscala
Nice! Which screen is that? All of the screens I've found are widescreen and I'd like to do a similar project
gasgiant
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.
paradox460
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
mortenjorck
"Last Train Home" is a banger, in any case.
ecocentrik
"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.
alexjplant
Given how much fusion they played on "Local on the 8s" I wonder if they ever spun some Weather Report...
colpabar
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.
jader201
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.
HeckFeck
"Last Train Home" was also used as outro music for the anime JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, S3, Stardust Crusaders.
xorbax
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.
dylan604
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.
dcrazy
There was a time when it was only prerecorded “The forecast for your area”
dylan604
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.
xd1936
"Your Local 'On the 8s'"
dcrazy
This reminds me of when I first listened to my dad’s Spyro Gyra CD.
jader201
It will only be the true 90s Weather Channel when I hear some Rippingtons playing in the background.
huslage
I bought all of the Rippingtons albums because I heard them on the Weather Channel...I was inexplicably into smooth jazz at the time.
gosub100
If you like the music more than the data, search YouTube for "weather channel vaporwave". I find it relaxing
polygot
Not sure how they're going to go around that corner with that vehicle
2OEH8eoCRo0
I remember instrumental covers of Pink Floyd.
bdbenton5255
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.
KurSix
There's something really touching about how even the most utilitarian things (like a weather report) had this quiet artistry to them.
doawoo
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.
CursedSilicon
Please do! The software has been undumped and is highly desired by retro enthusiasts (including myself)
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
Looks like this was the original version? https://github.com/vbguyny/ws4kp
xp84
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.
socalgal2
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.
samtp
This is a lot more interesting and impressive than AI generated goop
pncnmnp
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.
KurSix
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.
beowulfey
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.
jasonpeacock
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.
trvr
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.
jasonpeacock
Thanks! I didn't even notice the obvious share link below the options :p
gdubs
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.
catgirlinspace
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).
KurSix
How much effort went into creating the illusion of locality with national infrastructure
burnt-resistor
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.
xp84
look again, there is a scanlines option!
I didn’t notice it there this afternoon, so he may have added it for you :D
duskwuff
> It needs terrible elevator music (mellow jazz)
Did you click the unmute button? :)
burnt-resistor
Didn't see it. It's not obvious. There are too many controls.
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