Shane Mason Is Bringing Back '90s Cable with the Convincing FieldStation42 Cable TV Simulator

Developer Shane Mason is bringing back the '90s with the FieldStation42 — a cable and broadcast TV simulator that aims to reproduce the experience of watching TV down-the-wire in this era of on-demand streaming.

"Cable TV in the '90s was cool and kind of weird, bit it definitely holds a special place in television history," Mason explains of the love that has gone into the FieldStation42 project. "There were so many generation-defining moments and culture-shifting events that it's hard to overstate how influential '90s cable actually was. Cable rose to prominence in the late '80s before rapidly falling off to streaming services in the 2000s, so '90s was kind of its golden era. I've been thinking about how much has changed about the media we consume and the ways we consume it, so I decided to build a '90s cable simulator so I could relive those moments."

The FieldStation42 started life as a broadcast TV simulator powered by a Raspberry Pi single-board computer, which Mason had previously released under an open source license. Comments from users indicated a lot of nostalgia surrounding cable, rather than terrestrial, broadcasts, and the features they remembered — features Mason could add to FieldStation42 to give it support for simulating cable TV too.

The Python-based software runs, as with its predecessor, on a Raspberry Pi, using either the HDMI output or, if connected to a period-appropriate TV, composite video — either directly or through an HDMI to composite, or even RF, adapter. A Raspberry Pi Pico acts as a coprocessor, running a CircuitPython firmware designed to support channel-switching from a 3D-printed "cable box" — complete with digital channel readout on the front.

There have been plenty of projects that turn a Raspberry Pi into a video source for an old TV set, but Mason's work goes considerably further: the software generates believable weekly schedules, from stored video files, for a number of channels, with support for putting on particular content like sporting events only during a set date range. Turning the TV on will reveal an appropriate show for that channel and time slot — and if you switch channels it acts as though it's continuing to play in the background, just as with broadcast TV, meaning you'll have missed a chunk by channel-flipping.

The project goes further still, though: channels are automatically given commercial breaks and bumps, and stations can even go "off-air" at configurable times — complete with a sign-off video and off-air looping imagery. Some channels can be designated as commercial-free, while others can loop the same video infinitely.

The project is detailed in full in the video embedded above and on Mason's YouTube channel; source code and wiring instructions are available on GitHub under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.