settopboxing

C&W/NTL/Telewest Box Revival

Feels a bit cheeky posting a skeleton thread, but I've started one anyway over at https://www.tvliveforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=50.

I hope to have something to fill it with in the coming weeks, progress has been stagnant due to lack of motivation in these "interesting times", but efforts will be made to push on regardless.

Internet on your TV

Since my previous (now a bit old and neglected) thread about reviving set top boxes seemed to gather interest, I thought it might be nice to do the same for their internet-enabled counterparts whilst I'm taking a break from the main part of the project.

So I did. Remember the Bush Internet TV boxes? or ONdigital's own ONnet service? I wanted to see how they looked back in the day - there are surprisingly few screenshots online - so I set up a fake phone line, a local server, and argued with Linux for 12 hours or so, and...





...it worked! Eventually.

The Bush box can freely browse, to the extent you'd expect a slightly dodgy 20 year old embedded web browser to be able to browse (which, it turns out, isn't very great). I wouldn't suggest anybody does, but it functions about as well as it ever would've, minus the broad availability of Geocities-class websites to view on it.

The ONnet box sadly can't freely browse (yet), it seems to require initial registration with ONdigital's back-end system, which... erm, hasn't existed for well over 15 years, so that's a bit tricky. In the meantime I've bodged it to show what it would've looked like (as best I can) by redirecting the initial registration setup page it expects to a slightly modified copy of an archived ONnet homepage from around 2000.

Unfortunately neither service's content pages are especially well archived, so they're not quite as "just like it was back in the day", but it's a nice taste of roughly more-or-less kinda-sorta what it would've looked like.