"WebTV for Dreamcast" Awareness Thread

[-drez01-]

You guys have an advanced knowledge of the service and passion from what i’ve read

I am new to the idea that there was even a scene and am not a networking guy

I can help with modding the dreamcast version if needed

So what would be your ideal realistic end goal? Would it even be possible without mattmans help/tools?

[wtv-411]

Right now, I'm not asking for much from you guys and every other place I've spread the word to. At least just spread the word about this and the efforts to people you think might be interested in this. You guys are free to mod or look into the software if you want, but I would hold the fanfare for releasing any mods until a working, public-facing WebTV service somehow comes out of the woodwork, which probably won't happen for a while. My main goal is to just get as much crucial information and content concerning WebTV as I can out there, be it hardware, software, the service, or anything else. While having a functioning service is nice and all, right now I think it's more important to have previously-obscure information concerning WebTV collected and put onto one trustworthy place, especially since there's very little info that can be found about it elsewhere that's cohesive, let alone any that's been verified.

I'll be frank, I never used or even heard of WebTV back when it was still a thing and only knew about it several years ago, and my interest mainly comes from how ahead of its time and complex it was. Initially, I never noticed that the lack of information on it to be a bad thing. Revisiting it 3 years ago during the time MattMan made his full server "public" to a degree and seeing how the overall scene seemed to not use what I'd call a giant revelation in WebTV history to their advantage and staying silent when asked to consider things as simple as documenting what they know on the protocols, I felt as if I had to step up and do the work for them before the opportunity disappeared forever, mostly focusing on documenting the protocol and service as a whole, using the "full server" as reference and having no knowledge on the encryption used by the main protocol at the time. I am trying to branch out to document other things like ports, hardware, and games for the dedicated boxes (I didn't stutter). It's been a lot of work to even make everything cohesive and up to date, and most of the information comes from what the scene's bothered to document themselves, my own guesswork (I'm not an expert at this technical stuff), and help from a couple scene members who were willing to at least share a few things about WebTV and who have more expertise on it than I ever will have. It's all paid off, though, and I hope people will at least admire the fact that WebTV has more to it than its surface with this new information out there.

QUICK EDIT: Should've said this earlier, but as I stated before, MattMan doesn't even have an idea on how the technical side of WebTV exactly works, and AFAIK his expertise is mostly limited to covering/exploiting known WebTV service URLs and with HTML. He has since released tools another WebTV scene member made this year, but some of them I also have released on my wiki's dedicated content archive with a tad more documentation and even sample code in the case of a ROMFS library on there (ROMFS is a container format for assets used by WebTV builds, which is also used by WebTV for Dreamcast in a "WEBTV.ROM" file on the high density area of the discs). To put it short, he's not a crucial part of the effort I've initiated.

[wtv-411]

While trying to find a bit more info about that "Luck'n Luck" flyer in TGS, I stumbled across this press release from Fujitsu about WebTV's Japanese subsidiary and their partnership with them: https://pr.fujitsu.com/jp/news/1998/Feb/24-2.html.

If Google Translate is anything to go by, it appears Fujitsu had part in maintaining the Japanese WebTV service's infrastructure, and we finally get dates for when the company was founded and when the service started (in general, not for Dreamcast): August 11, 1997 and December 1, 1997 respectively.

So WebTV had a 5-year run in Japan from 1997 to 2002, with its closure not being anything spectacular from what I can tell. A bit anticlimatic, but seeing as Microsoft wasn't clinging onto it and letting it collect dust like they did with the U.S. service, it's not much of a surprise.

[beanboy]

Web TV? This sounds familiar.
Didn't they sell Web TV boxes, that looked like small game consoles, in the late 90's?

[wtv-411]

Web TV? This sounds familiar.
Didn't they sell Web TV boxes, that looked like small game consoles, in the late 90's?

If you mean things like these:







Then yeah, those are exactly related to the WebTV I'm talking about. Also, I can see how you can think they look like game consoles.

WebTV was ambitious enough of a venture to Microsoft that they tried to have it take on Japan and gave it pressed Dreamcast GD-ROM releases that essentially allowed you to access the WebTV service on a Dreamcast. Crazy stuff, huh.

[HuntrRose]

back in the netlink days we used to go to webTV chats and type a screen worth of
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>

it would crash all the webTVs in chat and we would lol and go back to sega... thats all I got

[Bob Dobbs]

I remember William Shatner (of Captain Kirk fame) did a commercial for WebTV.

https://youtu.be/ZZ5C5lUqCEY

[ticky]

I had to fight hard to resist picking up a copy last time I was in Japan, but I'd be very excited to see someone disassemble this and figure it all out

[ChristinaDreamcustDC]

Hello people. I come here in an effort to spread awareness of the "WebTV for Dreamcast" software in hopes that at least people will realize that efforts have been made recently to document it along with its service and other WebTV-related topics, as it actually has quite a bit to it in terms of how it functions. Not sure if it counts as an online "game," but this is the Online section so I feel it's appropriate to post this here. I imagine most of you are asking, "What is WebTV for Dreamcast?", and in extension, "What is a WebTV?" I'll answer that right now.

[...]

In the meantime, spread the word to people you think might be interested in this effort. If you're up to reverse engineering the Dreamcast WebTV disc, go all in with that. If you know someone who might know a thing or two about the WebTV software or service, Dreamcast or otherwise, reach out to them! Hell, manual scans of the Dreamcast version or any other materials pertaining to Dreamcast WebTV would be valuable, doesn't matter to me (should've clarified this earlier lol). WebTV in the end is a niche product that only satisfied a niche audience with some information on it that's not 100% verified floating on the internet, and while I might've not been part of that original audience or someone who thinks WebTV was flawless, I do think it's worth uncovering as much as we can learn about it, both on the East and West coast side of things, for this otherwise endangered technology.

Hey, thanks for your searching. I remember discovering the Dreamcast WebTV back when I used to do research on video and Internet tools. I've always been tempted to pick up one from J4U or other places, like eBay, that sell Dreamcast discs (Dreamcast WebTV can be cheap, if you know where to find it), but I haven't made the jump. Hearing your interest sparks a warm feeling in my heart.

[wtv-411]

Honestly, I'm pretty amazed to hear some of this community is aware of WebTV for Dreamcast, or just WebTV in general at all, and are interested in seeing it looked further into. Gives me a bit more hope that something can be made out of this soon.

In terms of news concerning documenting/preserving WebTV DC content, I did finally get to uploading a TellyScript designed for the Dreamcast version of WebTV onto my wiki's content archive (TellyScripts are essentially more powerful dialing configs that instruct WebTV clients how to dial, which are downloaded from pre-registration servers that WebTV clients connect to when no TellyScript is already downloaded or if it happens to not be usable anymore). IDK its exact origins but I think I got it from a Git repo for someone else's proof-of-concept WTVP server, and the TellyScript might've been obtained from MattMan's full private WebTV server. All I'm concerned about right now is that it's finally preserved outside of my hard drive, and it gets to see another day. Anyway, the DC TellyScript compared to ones made for dedicated WebTV hardware is much smaller, and when I asked former WebTV employee Andy McFadden about it, I learned that most of the TellyScript functionality was baked into the GD-ROM and the DC TellyScripts were redesigned to simply call higher-level functions directly from the software. The official reason for doing this was that the Dreamcast has way less NVRAM storage to accommodate the (usually 12KB) size of original TellyScripts. According to an internal "Greater Scroll of Dialing Wisdom" document written for WebTV staff, original WebTV boxes had 16KB allocated for TellyScript storage, while the Dreamcast would only allow 2KB to be used for this purpose. On the topic of TellyScripts, Fadden has also just written code a day ago that decompresses and decompiles original TellyScripts into C-like pseudocode, which while not perfect, is a massive step in the right direction when it comes to WebTV. I'll continue to keep you guys updated when more breakthroughs are made.

P.S.: IDK how common WebTV Dreamcast discs are in actual Japanese stores, but finding WebTV Dreamcast discs for sale online is relatively easy on eBay and Yahoo! Auctions Japan, albeit new listings don't pop up often, and some listings ask for a bit too much for the software and some copies show some wear or damage. Otherwise, just stay vigilant with the listings and you might get a good deal.