[HN Gopher] Cybiko
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Cybiko
Author : tcmb
Score : 163 points
Date : 2023-01-07 08:04 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| helf wrote:
| I always wanted a Cybiko! Never did manage it.
|
| ... now I want to buy two off eBay to play with. Thanks a lot.
| coredog64 wrote:
| I have a vague memory of a similar device that was an ebook
| reader from the same era: LCD screen, AA batteries, and when the
| batteries died you had to reload all your content from your
| computer. Anyone else remember this, or am I hallucinating?
| Eleison23 wrote:
| [dead]
| Daegalus wrote:
| I remember having one, it was pretty awesome.
|
| I'm trying to recreate a modern one using ESP32 WIFI, LORA, eink
| screen, blackberry keyboard. I have all the parts, just need to
| start building it
| myself248 wrote:
| There are a LOT of people in this thread with similar thoughts,
| it seems!
|
| Can we all get together somehow?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| user eternityforest expressed a wish for a modern equivalent
| running an ESP32 or something:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30487745
|
| Something close (& and extremely hackable) can be yours for $79 +
| shipping:
| https://shop.m5stack.com/products/face?variant=1729043762389...
|
| It's not official yet but they're prototyping a reboot which is
| compatible with the current core module that has better
| performance and a touch screen.
| myself248 wrote:
| It sounds like there are a lot of people, in this thread and
| elsewhere, pushing for something similar. If only there were a
| way to unite all this effort under one umbrella...
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I still have a bunch of homebrew cybiko games on a drive
| somewhere. I was in 7th grade when I got a cybiko and it blew my
| mind. Make your own games, wireless instant messaging, wireless
| internet. Is there any modern equivalent?
| rvba wrote:
| Was this used as some sort of a spy device?
| mulnz wrote:
| These came out when I was in 6th grade and were the hot new nerd
| toy for a few months. A handful of kids had them and the ability
| to text message students in nearby classrooms was impossibly
| cool. They became pretty disruptive as whoever had one had a
| group of kids huddled around them, pretty sure they were
| eventually banned by the school district (and were not easy to
| hide)
| Tepix wrote:
| Smartphones can do almost everything that cybiko did. All that's
| missing is a low power p2p networking component like a bluetooth
| LoRa transceiver.
| billiam wrote:
| This really brings back the memories. So many great ideas
| executed to 90%, all in a wacky brightly colored package. I was
| one of the leaders at Palm in 2000 and we did a pretty deep dive
| on partnering with Yang while looking at the device. I even went
| to Moscow to check out the small army of teenagers he had
| thinking up games by the boatload and spinning ideas of a
| teenager-led digital revolution. Yang understood the teenager
| customer really well but not the economics of devices: a
| sophisticated and complex wireless device built to look like a
| toy but costing well over $100. We wanted him to come up with a
| better made device that parents would buy for their teens (post
| 9/11 security) with all the Cylandia concepts and better working
| radios, but he had his own ideas of taking the product in a
| million directions at once.
| jerbearito wrote:
| Fascinating! Have you written more about this?
| jashper wrote:
| Oh man this brings back memories -- managed to convince a bunch
| of friends in elementary school to get one, it made us way OP on
| the playground when playing games that had a bit of espionage
| involved :P
| memalign wrote:
| Some relevant previous discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30485353
| mawise wrote:
| I've thought about trying to build a mesh-networking chat device
| for my kid and their friends who are too young for phones but
| would enjoy "texting" in town. Probably using a LoRA +
| Arduino/Rasberry Pi but by the time I add in a screen and
| keyboard it might be cheaper/easier to just buy a few of these
| off ebay.
|
| Anyone have thoughts or experience acquiring and using a Cybiko
| recently?
| eternityforest wrote:
| I'm not a fan of actually using unsupported vintage hardware
| even though Cybiko was really awesome.
|
| What about just using cheap tablets with rugged cases, and some
| app like meshenger?
| tcmb wrote:
| The LGR video (linked in this thread) mentions they bought four
| devices and all had defects that needed to be fixed before they
| could be used. Most cases the batteries had leaked, which had
| to be cleaned up. This might cause some corrosion of contacts
| as well.
|
| So if you want to give used Cybikos a try, you should be
| willing to deal with this.
| ollybee wrote:
| The obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/2699/
| 3guk wrote:
| Damn that takes me back - I begged my parents for one, eventually
| got one and found out that there was no one to actually message.
|
| Definitely remember being a little bit addicted to Cylandia and
| eventually found another person at my school who had one.
| crims0n wrote:
| I remember wanting one of these so badly when they were
| announced, they were marketing the hell out of them at the time.
| It's a shame they were not more popular, could have been fun
| bringing them to school and interacting with students similarly
| to how we later did with PictoChat on the Nintendo DS.
| taylorfinley wrote:
| I saved up for months and months and bought a lime green one when
| I was a middle school kid. They had an mp3 player attachment
| (!!!) so the Cybiko was actually my first digital music player.
| When they went bankrupt I bought a couple more (magenta this
| time) off eBay for next to nothing. Unfortunately I didn't have
| any friends that were as in to tech as I was, so I never really
| did have anyone to text with during classes. I remember
| corresponding with the company about some bugs and feature
| requests and learning they had an army of developers somewhere in
| Eastern Europe, which really impressed me then. I have such fond
| memories of my cybikos! I wish I knew where they ended up.
| anthomtb wrote:
| Does anyone know the protocol used for wireless communications
| between Cybiko devices? It sounds fairly sophisticated given the
| time period in which these devices were released.
| Mizza wrote:
| I found one of these when I was going through some old boxes at
| my parents house, totally forgot I had it. I really begged them
| for it - then played with it once, put it in a box and never saw
| again.
|
| It's an amazing artifact of late 90s design - colored translucent
| plastic, sort-of-ergonomic form factor, weirdly shaped buttons
| that can only be used with a stylus, an aerial. The screen is
| actually amazing for the time, light years ahead of a GameBoy.
|
| The glaring problem, sadly, is that there's nothing you can
| actually _do_ with it. There were no games of any quality, and
| the mesh networking would only work over a short range and if
| somebody else had one, which meant that feature was useless in
| the suburbs.
|
| I think it has to be remembered that at the time, before
| smartphones, PalmPilots were a very big deal. Somebody thought
| hey, what if we made a PalmPilot for teenagers. Maybe not a
| terrible idea on paper, but they didn't need them.
|
| Still, it's an awesome _object_. A pure crystal of optimistic
| new-millenium funk, not the drab industrial design of slow,
| perpetual decline we have now.
| indymike wrote:
| > which meant that feature was useless in the suburbs.
|
| I bought my kids a box of cybikos on eBay. My daughters gave
| them to their neighborhood friends so they could chat, and the
| FM transceiver had a range of 300-500 ft, so they had our whole
| suburban neighborhood chatting. There were a couple of good
| games. The real problem was batteries. They used prismatic
| batteries which were simply hard to get, and the batteries
| would die after about 8 months of use. If I bought at a local
| store, the battery would be $30 per cell, but if I bought a box
| online, I could get 144 for $50. I paid $50 for the box of
| cybikos!
| vel0city wrote:
| I thought they used the same "gumstick" batteries a lot of
| minidisk players used at the time. Were they something else?
| kgeist wrote:
| >The Cybiko is a Russian handheld computer introduced in the
| United States by David Yang's company Cybiko Inc.
|
| Interestingly, the Russian language version has no mention of it
| being Russian. The English article doesn't elaborate further. At
| first I thought the wiki page was vandalized but then I followed
| one of the links and ended up finding a Russian game magazine of
| the time where they mention the software for it was developed in
| Russia.
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| I noticed this too. Thanks for digging this out! Maybe you
| should put that sentence on both Wikipedias, so the next person
| wouldn't be wondering about this!
| grishka wrote:
| I don't remember it ever being a thing in Russia. The first
| time I've seen it was probably in an LGR video.
| thriftwy wrote:
| I still think it's too early to call it a Russian computer.
| That's like calling Revolut a Russian bank.
|
| I don't remember it ever being introduced in Russia.
| koboll wrote:
| I had both of these things. Loved CyLandia so much, nearly got
| addicted to that game at one point. The only problem is I never
| knew or even heard of a single other human being in real life who
| had one...
| guessbest wrote:
| I was trying to cobble something together with an esp32 that
| would make a handie talking that would allow text, voice and
| image transfers on a p2p network that wouldn't have a range
| longer than a house a way, but it is a slog.
|
| Is there a modern equivalent to this or can an old android phone
| be repurposed to do this? I was thinking that if the frequency
| was shifted up to 2.4 GHz then a repurposed android device could
| do all of this, but alas there aren't any projects of which I
| have been able to find.
|
| > US variant (Model No. CY44801) has frequency range of 902-928
| MHz and European variant (Model No. CY44802) with frequency range
| of 868-870 MHz
| nanomonkey wrote:
| There are several varieties of ESP32's combined with LoRa, such
| as the disaster radio, meshtastic and ttgo t-beam. The last one
| is probably the easiest bit of kit to get from Amazon and will
| run the other's firmware.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Meshtastic sounds like what you want, but sending images over
| LoRa is probably gonna clog the bandwidth and annoy people.
|
| Also, there are many BLE based mesh apps like meshenger IIRC.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Those are the LoRa frequencies so you might have more luck
| trying to get some modern LoRa gear communicating with it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
| tjohns wrote:
| Those are the ISM frequencies, not specific to LoRa.
| Basically an unlicensed wasteland of RF where anything goes,
| as long as you stay below a certain transmit power level.
|
| I guarantee this device (made in the the 90s) is completely
| incompatible at the link layer with LoRa gear.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Some LoRa chips support multiple modulation types for non-
| LoRa "legacy" applications.
|
| My point is they use the same frequencies and would likely
| be easier than upshifting to 2.4GHz and having an Android
| device handle it. I didn't make any indication it would
| Just Work(tm).
| sigmaris wrote:
| The ClockworkPi products, particularly uConsole, look like a
| reasonable modern equivalent:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33331139
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Those aren't nearly as cool looking although I'd still want
| one. Unfortunately, these kinds of devices are more expensive
| than they should be considering that they're marketed as
| toys/experimental devices. Once you go over $100, it's more
| cost effective to just pick up a cheap second-hand laptop
| instead, though they're not pocketable and certainly a lot more
| boring.
|
| Also, it bugs me that the ClockworkPi seems to be RISC-V
| powered - they should change the name for those and fully get
| on the RISC-V bandwagon.
| anthk wrote:
| My zipitz2 costs far less and it was an amazing tiny serial
| console (with an 80x25 cli with a tiny font) and a sdl2 based
| GUI. I could emulate the NES, play nethack/slashem, IF, mp3,
| join MUDs, connect to wifi to browse webs with lynx and links,
| read epubs with a custom script with unzip and elinks...
| Palomides wrote:
| the zipit z2 cost (inflation-adjusted) around $225 in 2008,
| more than the clockworkpi uconsole does today
| anthk wrote:
| I bought a second hand one by less than $50.
| mrtksn wrote:
| > Cybikos can communicate with each other up to a maximum range
| of 100 meters (330 ft)
|
| That was something I was hoping we will get on Apple Watch
| walkie-talkie feature. Unfortunately the features depends on
| having a stable internet connection and never worked for me
| reliably.
|
| The world needs more P2P.
| eternityforest wrote:
| It's amazing how P2P basically doesn't exist anywhere. Open
| source got taken over completely by federated/self hosted, or
| Blockchain.
|
| Commerical stuff is all cloud based, for some reason (Even
| surveillance doesn't explain it, you can put telemetry in
| proprietary P2P apps)
|
| We have really good long range Bluetooth and LoRa and yet there
| is not one decent affordable alternative to decades old analog
| FRS after all this time.
|
| It's like devs want everything to fall apart the moment the
| internet goes down.
| danw1979 wrote:
| I blame NAT.
|
| I got online around 1994, behind a corporate firewall through
| my Dad's work and it took me _ages_ to work out why no one
| could reach my web server I was running on that machine,
| despite getting all the DNS setup right.
|
| I think that's when the penny dropped that the internet isn't
| necessarily open; not everyone can reach everyone else.
|
| NAT always meant there was something (fiddly port forwards,
| or broken UPnP) in the way of a user publishing stuff from
| their own machines.
|
| You always had to have a web host - to rely on someone else's
| computers - to publish your message. And so it continues.
| narrator wrote:
| Bittorrent was the only P2P system that solved all the
| thorny NAT issues in a satisfactory way.
| vel0city wrote:
| There are digital voice and message modes in the amateur
| radio space. I've used dstar myself, yaesu fusion is common,
| P25 and DMR are also a thing.
|
| I've been tempted for a while to pick up one of these
| Unihertz Atom XL's with DMR and analog FM transceivers built
| in.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Unihertz-Smallest-Walkie-Talkie-
| Smart...
| nyolfen wrote:
| check out hyperswarm/holepunch: https://docs.holepunch.to/
|
| or urbit: https://urbit.org
| themodelplumber wrote:
| I used it (Xtreme version) to chat with my now-wife during my
| university graduation ceremony, as I sat on the stand and she
| sat in the upper level audience seating.
|
| It worked really well, and the chats managed to get me so
| distracted that I got into the diploma line twice.
|
| This and many other memories have me wishing I could use it
| emulated somehow. It would be so funny to set it up on her
| laptop and send a chat.
|
| Thanks Cybiko!
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I used to want one of these so bad! But by the time I saved
| enough, my young fickle heart was on to the next thing.
| bdg wrote:
| I got one when I was a kid, but wow was I disappointed when I
| couldn't find a single connection to another device anywhere at
| all.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Probably the experience of every eager eyed young nerd who
| got one. Certainly was mine too.
| progman32 wrote:
| Yeah. I remember taking it on every single family trip for
| years just hoping to catch a single packet. Never got one. Oh
| well. I somehow got a replacement under warranty, they let me
| keep the old broken unit. I set it up to work as a WAP
| gateway (the issue wasn't fatal) and used it to mess about on
| the early mobile internet, had a great time.
| 0ut0flin3 wrote:
| it's just amazing. I want one right now. it would be great to fix
| it to send BTC transactions
| Risse wrote:
| Good video on demonstrating Cybiko
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojatBoMZubk
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| LGR also had a great one:
|
| https://youtu.be/38VEBOseAzM
| afloyd wrote:
| I wonder if it would be possible to make a repeater for the
| signal, perhaps over the internet
| Mizza wrote:
| They do act as repeaters! The mesh networking design was one of
| the big selling points, it was going to be a city-wide teenage
| mesh network!
|
| Unfortunately, one acting as a repeater would take your range
| from 10 feet to 20 feet.
| afloyd wrote:
| I more meant making a fake cybiko that would allow you to
| communicate with someone in another city with another
| repeater, connected over the internet.
| newhouseb wrote:
| You could configure a second Cybiko, hooked up to your
| computer, to act as a gateway between an untethered Cybiko
| and the internet. They teased a standalone device to do
| this (CyWIG) but I don't think that ever actually shipped.
|
| At one point I did set this up and managed to browse some
| (terrible) WAP websites and I think I managed to get AIM
| working somehow too. No memory as to if you could tunnel
| through to do other wireless things with other bridged
| Cybikos though as the setup was so clowny I had no other
| friends to try it with.
| indymike wrote:
| They had the device for the Cybiko 2 but they were very
| hard to get in the US.
| indymike wrote:
| On the Cybiko 2, there was a wifi card add on that allowed
| you to do this. Unfortunately.
| thih9 wrote:
| Does anyone know what was the price at launch? Would be
| interesting to compare it to the price of e.g. a handheld console
| from the same time.
| kyshoc wrote:
| no citation, but I wanted one of these as a kid and remember
| them being around $100-150 USD in the early 00s
| tcmb wrote:
| Yeah, the LGR video says they were USD 150 at launch in May
| 2000 and 130 by the end of the year.
| broast wrote:
| This was my first big purchase in life, when I was 12. When i
| brought it to school, I would discover the 2 other students who
| also had a cybiko through its wireless network, and chat and play
| games with them. It was really cool and a special club to be in.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Note all the comms! https://xkcd.com/2699/
| kierenj wrote:
| This was an exciting product for me! When I was 14 and learning
| coding, I got excited about the Cybiko and started playing around
| with grand ideas about games, apps and even an "RPG Kit" (rpg
| builder) which I started to spec out on their forums.
|
| As a result, Cybiko sent some units to me (in the UK) - before it
| was released! This got little old me very excited.
|
| Unfortunately, not only did it not take off, but I was 14 and had
| all the enthusiasm and ideas without much of the ability to solve
| the problems.
|
| Still, very exciting at the time.. remember working with the
| homebrew/hacking scene on IRC. Someone there was writing an
| emulator, and I had fun with IDA Pro playing around with trying
| to understand the firmware/BIOS dump.
|
| The keyboard and stylus was pretty awful, and performance left a
| lot to be desired..
|
| EDIT: holy moly! I forgot I had an old website with projects from
| that time. Well, here it is, warts and all:
| http://greenprojects.iwarp.com/specialprojects/rpgkit/
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| LGR unsurprisingly did a great video on this device:
|
| https://youtu.be/38VEBOseAzM
|
| It's notable for being one of very few consumer devices featuring
| mesh networking.
|
| I have so much nostalgia for cool little bits of tech like this.
| When I have a more permanent place to live I intend to start a
| collection, mostly of videogame hardware, but including the odd
| random tech device like this.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I wonder if you could emulate the mesh protocol using SDR?
| patwolf wrote:
| I dug out my old Nintendo DSs and gave them to the kids. The fact
| that the chat/drawing app could automatically link the DSs and
| they could just start chatting blew me away. The kids actually
| preferred using the DS over the switch. This reminds me a bit of
| that.
|
| I wish there was a _good_ simple modern-day device for kids to
| use with this kind of capability without connecting to the
| internet.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| If your kids take a liking to it, replacing the LiPo cell is a
| quick and easy hack to breathe new life intob it. Don't bother
| buying replacement batteries, they're all trash, just harvest
| the pcb from the old battery.
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(page generated 2023-01-07 23:01 UTC)