Archived Updates
Older site updates that'd otherwise clutter the front page.
UPDATE - 8/22/2021: After much stalling, most of the original files for the 1997 and 1998 WebTV Plus interactive demos are now available to download at Archive.org. The files for the original 1997 version are available at https://archive.org/details/webtv-plus-demo-1997, and the files for the 1998 version are available at https://archive.org/details/webtv-plus-demo-1998. Note that the uploads do not have all files available as the current tool that made extracting them possible (WebTV Partition Editor) is known to have issues reading certain files or directories from WebTV/MSN TV disk images.
UPDATE - 8/7/2021: We finally got around to writing a guide on imaging hard drives in WebTV/MSN TV boxes, which'll be useful to those who simply want to make backups and for those who are willing to send the images to us and let us salvage any important WebTV/MSN TV data off them for preservation purposes (see Wanted on the sidebar for more info). Guide is available at Backing Up WebTV (MSN TV) Hard Drives.
UPDATE - 7/3/2021: An earlier version of a clip from the 2.1.1 WebTV Plus demo has been uploaded to the 411 WebTV YouTube channel. Also look forward to the files for said demo being uploaded to the content archive pretty soon. ;)
UPDATE - 6/23/2021: A WebTV/MSN TV ROM part assembler tool written by eMac is now up on the content archive.
UPDATE - 6/20/2021: Some official service documentation from WebTV/MSN TV has been uploaded to the content archive. This includes two revisions of the humorously named "Greater Scroll of Dialing Wisdom", which are also available for direct viewing from our web server.
We also added a Japanese Dreamcast TellyScript sample to our content archive under the TellyScripts folder in "First-Gen WebTV and MSN TV", if anyone cares.
UPDATE - 6/17/2021: All currently available WebTV/MSN TV Viewer installers have been uploaded to the content archive.
UPDATE - 5/30/2021: A collection of clipart available from the WebTV/MSN TV Page Builder service has now been archived on both the content archive and Archive.org.
UPDATE - 5/14/2021 (cont.): The MPEG clips used in the 2.1.1 WebTV Plus demo have now been individually uploaded to the 411 WebTV YouTube channel (which I and a friend, H.M., operate), which also includes the splash videos left out of the MPEG compilation video that were used on boxes that'd carry the demo (currently known to include Sony, Philips Magnavox, and Mitsubishi). Feel free to take a gander and look at any of the uploads if you're interested. I also learned that the original MPEGs are wonky in that they don't play on normal media players (the default Windows 10 app and VLC play them and immediately stop, WMP only plays the audio), and for some reason all have the FPS set to 5, which made conversion to MP4 a bit confusing at first. Using 15fps seems to work well enough, though. Still considering uploading the MPEGs to the content archive soon, though, obviously now with the knowledge that they aren't conventionally playable.
UPDATE 5/13/2021: The ROMFS libraries hosted on our "The WebTV Files" content archive now come with two sample scripts that provide an easy command-line interface for extracting and rebuilding ROMFS data.
- UPDATE 1.5 - 5/14/2021: I would make this its own update but since I feel it's not too major to clutter this page with individual updates I'll group it under yesterday's update. The original MPEG videos used for that 2.1.1 WebTV Plus demo (the one with the cheesy narrator voice) have been ripped and uploaded to YouTube in a high quality compilation (along with the background music used for the menu screen in said demo). Plans to upload the raw MPEG files and to upload them individually to YouTube are being considered.
UPDATE 5/6/2021: The firmware and boot ROM collection for first-gen WebTV/MSN TV that we got a hold of last month has now been published to the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/WebtvMsntvRomCollection
UPDATE - 4/24/2021: We have two major announcements to break to you all. First off, we've moved our host for our "The WebTV Files" archive from Google Drive to MEGA. The initial motive for considering this was more of a personal choice but with a major breakthrough (to us) that happened to take place yesterday, we figured moving there sooner would be beneficial to us. All old Google Drive links for our archive have since been replaced with MEGA ones.
Speaking of major breakthrough, we've received a crap load of ROM images that cover more hardware types and builds. These ROMs have since been dumped into our content archive, and a great thanks to Zefie, a WebTV scene member, for making this all possible. We got in contact with him for something completely different originally (MSNTV 2 info), but he couldn't be of assistance for that as he didn't have much interest in what we were after anyway. He did manage to be helpful with shedding more information about first-gen WebTV though, and we were shocked when he was considering sending a good portion of his ROM archive to us. The RARs Zefie sent us were 13 gigabytes alone, and when everything was uncompressed the data was so large that we figured relying on Google Drive's 15 GB of storage at this point wasn't viable, hence the sudden move to MEGA as they offer 50 gigs of storage for free users now it appears (it's also much better to manage files there than on Google Drive). We're still far from having a complete archive of this data, or anything else WebTV-related for that matter, but this definitely helped us pick up the pace a little and we hope more people will eventually contribute their own information as time goes on.