Your local channel has always had two looks: our house design and the 1990s Classic skin. As of this update it has four. We went back to the two machines that defined televised local weather — the WeatherStar 3000 and the WeatherStar 4000 — and rebuilt both as skins you can flip on for your own town, running on live National Weather Service data.
Two machines, two decades, two moods
If you grew up with cable in the late 1980s, your forecast came off a WeatherStar 3000: a flat indigo screen, no icons, no maps, just confident bitmap letters with a hard black shadow telling you it was 64° and cloudy. It's the forecast as a terminal readout — austere, hypnotic, pure.
Its successor needs no introduction. The WeatherStar 4000 (circa 1990) is the machine most people picture when they hear "Local on the 8s": the orange-to-brown gradient, the navy panel with the glowing blue border, the pixel-art sun poking out from behind a pixel-art cloud, three-day cards with a yellow Hi and a blue Lo. (Not sure how the generations fit together? Our WeatherStar vs. Weatherscan explainer untangles the family tree.)
How the rebuild works
Everything you see on our local channel is rendered server-side as broadcast frames — the same pipeline for every skin, fed by the same NWS forecast, observations and radar. A skin is a parallel renderer: same data, same rotation of pages, completely different drawing. So the 3000 skin renders your Latest Hourly Observations as the text table the real unit drew, the 4000 skin renders your neighbors' temperatures sitting on a gray regional map with little pixel skies, and both carry a live ticking clock in the era's own typeface.
- The type is the real thing. Both skins use the Star3000 and Star4000 bitmap fonts — freeware recreations by Nick Smith of TWC Classics, the same faces the emulation community has used for decades.
- The pixel art is authentic. The 4000's condition icons and moon phases come from the open-source simulator world (see the credit below), scaled with hard pixels, never smoothed.
- The 3000 has no icons on purpose. The real one said the weather; it never drew it. We kept that discipline — down to the rotating readout line in the bottom band.
- The radar is a loving anachronism. The real 3000 predates local radar loops, but our viewers would riot without one — so the radar page wears 3000 chrome around the live loop.
Standing on the shoulders of simulators
None of this gets built without the people who documented these machines frame by frame. Matt Walsh's open-source simulators — the WeatherStar 4000+ and the WeatherStar 3000+ — are the gold standard, and both are MIT-licensed with their code on GitHub. We measured our layouts against them the way the originals were measured against broadcast tape. If you want a pure simulator experience in your browser, go run his. If you want the era piped into a 24/7 channel for your ZIP code, with our original smooth jazz underneath — that's what we built.
Try an era on your town
Open your local channel and use the Design picker, or jump straight in: