Microsoft’s WebTV Is Being Revived By Fans

December 30, 2025 by 10 Comments

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 one of those newfangled personal computers when they already had a perfect good television set. This opened a market for TV-connected thin clients that could browse the web with a much lower entry fee, with the WebTV service being launched in 1996. Bought by Microsoft in 1997 and renamed MSN TV, it lasted until 2013. Yet rather than this being the end, the service is now being revived by members of the community through the WebTV Redialed project.

The DreamPi adds dial-up support back to old hardware.
The DreamPi adds dial-up support back to old hardware.

The project, which was recently featured in a video by [MattKC], replaces the original back-end services that the thin clients connected to via their dial-up modems, with the first revision using a proprietary protocol. The later and much more powerful MSN TV 2 devices relied on a standard HTTP-based protocol running on Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) web server and Windows.

What’s interesting about this new project is that it allows you to not just reconnect your vintage WebTV/MSN TV box, but also use a Windows-based viewer and more. What difficulty level you pick depends on the chosen hardware and connection method. For example, you can pair the Raspberry Pi with a USB modem to get online thanks to the DeamPi project.

Interestingly, DreamPi was created to get the Sega Dreamcast back online, with said console also having its own WebTV port that can be revived this way. Just in case you really want to get the full Dreamcast experience.

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39C3: Liberating ESP32 Bluetooth

December 30, 2025 by 3 Comments

Bluetooth is everywhere, but it’s hard to inspect. Most of the magic is done inside a Bluetooth controller chip, accessed only through a controller-specific Host-Controller Interface (HCI) protocol, and almost everything your code does with Bluetooth passes through a binary library that speaks the right HCI dialect. Reverse engineering these libraries can get us a lot more control of and information about what’s going on over the radio link.

That’s [Anton]’s motivation and goal in this reversing and documentation project, which he describes for us in this great talk at this year’s Chaos Communication Congress. In the end, [Anton] gets enough transparency about the internal workings of the Bluetooth binaries to transmit and receive data. He stops short of writing his own BT stack, but suggests that it would be possible, but maybe more work than one person should undertake.

So what does this get us? Low-level control of the BT controller in a popular platform like the ESP32 that can do both classic and low-energy Bluetooth should help a lot with security research into Bluetooth in general. He figured out how to send arbitrary packets, for instance, which should allow someone to write a BT fuzzing tool. Unfortunately, there is a sequence ID that prevents his work from turning the controller into a fully promiscuous BT monitor, but still there’s a lot of new ground exposed here.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, you’ll find his write-up, register descriptions, and more in the GitHub repository. This isn’t a plug-and-play Bluetooth tool yet, but this is the kind of groundwork on a popular chip that we expect will enable future hacking, and we salute [Anton] for shining some light into one of the most ubiquitous and yet intransparent corners of everyday tech.

Playing A Game Of Linux On Your Sony Playstation 2

December 29, 2025 by 13 Comments

Until the 2000s, game consoles existed primarily to bring a bit of the gaming arcade experience to homes, providing graphical feats that the average home computer would struggle to emulate. By the 2000s this changed, along with the idea of running desktop applications on gaming console for some reason. Hence we got Linux for the PlayStation 2, targeting its MIPS R5900 CPU and custom GPU. Unlike these days where game consoles are reskinned gaming PCs, this required some real effort, as well as a veritable stack of accessories, as demonstrated by [Action Retro] in a recent video.

Linux on the PlayStation 2 was a bit of a rare beast, as it required not only the optional HDD and a compatible ‘fat’ PS2, but also an Ethernet adapter, VGA adapter and a dedicated 8 MB memory card along with a keyboard and mouse. PS2 Linux users were also not free to do what they wanted, with e.g. ripping PS2 game discs disallowed, but you could make your own games. All of which had to fit within the PS2’s meagre 32 MB of RAM.

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The Rise Of Fake Casio Scientific Calculators

December 29, 2025 by 25 Comments

Scientific calculators are an amazing invention that take pocket calculators from being merely basic arithmetic machines to being pocket computers that can handle everything from statistics to algebra. That said, there are a few layers of scientific calculators, starting with those aimed at students. This is where Casio is very popular, especially because it uses traditional algebraic notation (VPAM) that follows the written style, rather than the reverse-polish notation (RPN) of HP and others. However, much like retro Casio wristwatches, it appears that these Casio calculators are now being (poorly) faked, as explained by [Another Roof] on YouTube.

The advanced fx-991 models are updated every few years, with the letters following the model indicating the year, such as fx-991EX standing for the 2015-released model. This was the model that got purchased online and which turned out to be fake. While the fx-991CW is newer, it changes the entire interface and is rightfully scolded in the video. Arguably this makes it the worst Casio scientific calculator in history.

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3D Printing A Telescope Is Rewarding, Even If Not Always Cheaper

December 29, 2025 by 3 Comments

What can one expect from 3D printing an 8″ Newtonian telescope? [Molly Wakeling] shares her thoughts after doing exactly that. The performance was on par with any solid 8″ telescope, but in the end it wasn’t really any cheaper than purchasing a manufactured unit. Does that mean it wasn’t worth it? Not at all!

[Molly] makes the excellent observation that the process of printing and building one’s own telescope is highly educational and rewarding. Also, the end result is modular, user-serviceable, and customizable in a way that many commercial offerings can only dream of. It’s a great conversation starter with other enthusiasts, as well!

[Molly] printed the 203 Leavitt design (3d models available on Printables) which is an 8″ Newtonian telescope. This telescope design uses a concave parabolic mirror (a significant part of the expense) at the back of the tube to gather and focus light, and a small flat mirror near the front of the tube reflects this light to an eyepiece on the side. The wood stand makes things convenient, and we like the elastic tie-down used as a simple way to put tension on the mounts.

Do you find yourself intrigued but would prefer to start a little smaller and cheaper? Good news, because the same designer of the 203 Leavitt has a very similar design we happen to have featured before: the 114 Hadley. It features easily obtainable, lower-cost optics which perform well and can be easily ordered online, making it a great DIY starter telescope.

39C3: Recreating Sandstorm

December 29, 2025 by 7 Comments

Some synthesizer sounds are just catchy, but some of them are genre-defining. We think you could make that case for the Roland JP-8000 patch “Sandstorm”, which you’ve heard if you listened to any trance from the 90’s, but especially the song that was named after it.

“Sandstorm” is powered by the Roland Supersaw, and synth nerds have argued for a decade about how it’s made. The JP-8000 is a digital synthesizer, though, so it’s just code, run through custom DSP chips. If you could reverse engineer these chips, make a virtual machine, and send them the right program, you could get the sound 100% right. Think MAME but for synthesizers.

That brings us to [giulioz]’s talk at the 39th Chaos Communication Congress, where he dives deep into the custom DSP chip at the heart of the JP-8000. He and his crew had approached older digital synths by decapping and mapping out the logic, as you often do in video game emulation. Here, getting the connections right turned out to be simply too daunting, so he found a simpler device that had a test mode that, combined with knowledge of the chip architecture, helped him to figure out the undocumented DSP chip’s instruction set.

After essentially recreating the datasheet from first principles for a custom chip, [guiloz] and team could finally answer the burning question: “how does the Supersaw work”?  The horrifying answer, after all this effort, is that it’s exactly what you’d expect — seven sawtooth waves, slightly detuned, and layered over each other. Just what it sounds like.

The real end result is an emulation that’s every bit (tee-hee!) as good as the original, because it’s been checked out on a logic analyzer. But the real fun is the voyage. Go give the talk a watch.

Different Algorithms Sort Christmas Lights

December 29, 2025 by 10 Comments

Sorting algorithms are a common exercise for new programmers, and for good reason: they introduce many programming fundamentals at once, including loops and conditionals, arrays and lists, comparisons, algorithmic complexity, and the tradeoff between correctness and performance. As a fun Christmas project, [Scripsi] set out to implement twelve different sorting algorithms over twelve days, using Christmas lights as the sorting medium.

The lights in use here are strings of WS2812 addressable LED strips, with the program set up to assign random hue values to each of the lights in the string. From there, an RP2040-based platform will step through the array of lights and implement the day’s sorting algorithm of choice. When operating on an element in the array the saturation is turned all the way up, helping to show exactly what it’s doing at any specific time. When the sorting algorithm has finished, the microcontroller randomizes the lights and starts the process all over again.

For each of the twelve days of Christmas [Scripsi] has chosen one of twelve of their favorite sorting algorithms. While there are a few oddballs like Bogosort which is a guess-and-check algorithm that might never sort the lights correctly before the next Christmas (although if you want to try to speed this up you can always try an FPGA), there are also a few favorites and some more esoteric ones as well. It’s a great way to get some visualization of how sorting algorithms work, learn a bit about programming fundamentals, and get in the holiday spirit as well.