Cable Weather

Cable Weather puts the local forecast on your TV the way cable ran it in the early '90s. Current conditions, the extended forecast and a radar loop go round on repeat, with smooth jazz underneath and a crawl along the bottom. The weather is live, from the National Weather Service. What makes it different is how the picture gets made. The boxes that ran those forecasts had real limits: 256 colors on screen at once, letters built from a small grid of dots, and pixels that weren't quite square. Cable Weather works under those same limits, so your forecast comes out looking the way it did on a 1994 TV. The colors were measured off old broadcast recordings, and so was the speed of the crawl. If you've played an old game on an emulator, it's a similar idea. I rebuilt the way the machine drew its screen, then handed it today's weather. It's made for Apple TV. Put it on in the morning and leave…