During the 1990s, everyone wanted to surf the information super-highway — also known as the World Wide Web or just ‘Internet’ — but not everyone was interested in getting on…

The most surprising thing (covered in the video at the bottom of the article) is that the MSN WebTV 2 has similar specs to the original Xbox. Major differences are lack of GPU as in the Xbox, Windows CE instead of a modified W2K, and twice the RAM (128 MB vs the Xbox’s 64).

  • Iced Raktajino@startrek.website
    5·
    2 days ago

    I have 3 of the original ones in my basement that my parents were going to throw out years ago that I rescued. They were pretty awful in every way but I always hoped to do something with them eventually.

    Maybe with this I can make a lo-fi HomeAssistant dashboard / control panel and/or plumb in the Weather Channel emulator (https://weatherstar.netbymatt.com/)

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      That would be cool. I didn’t dive too deep into it, but the server project for it seems like you can configure the menus any way you want since they’re just HTML. You’d probably have to do server-side rendering or otherwise put all the HA API logic in the backend, but that could work!

      I loooove that WeatherStar 4000 emulator and run a copy at home. It seems like it relies on Javascript so sadly may not play well with those old set top boxes. But if you get it working, please share.