Somebody just gave me an old Phillips WebTV (yes I am the office junk collector). Does anybody know of any good uses for these things (a google search didn't turn up much so far) or webpages with actual tech specs on them? Can I make it do anything more useful run WinCE and dial MSN? Anyway to make it a thin client to a linux box or some such? Any other suggestions besides paper weight?

-Mike

Your one has ethernet? Or you thinking of dialing in? The modem in them is only 33.6k I think. I've actually got one. It's stacked away somewhere under stuff. It's even more useful as I'm actually in the UK and I wouldn't have been able to dial up anyway

- Trevor

Your one has ethernet? Or you thinking of dialing in?

Nope and nope It does have a parallel port so a PLIP connection to a unix box might be possible. I don't really know, that is why I was looking to see if anybody had done anything interesting with them. I don't know much of anything about the architecture (most stuff that turned up under Google was for the new WebTV Plus) so it may be totally useless. A lot of devices like these are just really stripped down PCs running an OS out of flash memory. I haven't taken this one apart to poke at it and see what is actually there yet though.

-Mike

Ah okay.
If we're talking about the same box then it's a MIPS processor running at around 112MHz.

- Trevor

I have this door in my house that the wind keeps blowing closed...

In reply to:

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Does anybody know of any good uses for these things

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Sync pulse generator? We used a web tv box to sync up our ROT recorders at the radio station. That was until we got our hands on a pair of PCM700s hmmm, nice!

I have this door in my house that the wind keeps blowing closed...

ROFL