Show HN: An 8-bit live gamecast for baseball
87 points - today at 4:44 PM
Hey HN, I built a website to watch live baseball games in an 8-bit broadcast. It takes live MLB data streams and converts them into near real-time pixel art gamecasts.
Been waiting to share this for when there’s actually a good slate of games happening since the site is pretty bare otherwise.
Here is today's schedule:
Mets @ Reds - 9:40am PDT https://ribbie.tv/watch/game/824503
Royals @ Nationals - 10:05am PDT https://ribbie.tv/watch/game/822721
Marlins @ Phillies - 10:05am PDT https://ribbie.tv/watch/game/823450
Tigers @ Astros - 11:10am PDT https://ribbie.tv/watch/game/824178
Padres @ Cardinals - 11:15am PDT https://ribbie.tv/watch/game/823044
..and another 14 games throughout the later day.
I'm still early on in this project, but I've tried to add little details with actual stadiums, day and night modes, between inning graphics and interstitials, live scoreboards, etc.
Would love any feedback and ideas. Thanks for checking it out!
Comments
I am a big fan of the ESPN CDN data api and have made a few "scoreboards" of my own. Recently I polished a simple html one at: https://mlb.ope.cool/
But I will most definitely be reaching for yours and tossing it up on the TV's in the office, this is so cool
IDK if there’s an easy way for the average person to get a live audio broadcast feed from games, so maybe your target market would be listening to that instead.
I’m thinking it could use some sound effects, for balls, strikes, hits, etc. I only tuned in for a couple pitches and then it was between innings, so maybe the more significant events already have something, and I just wasn’t patient enough to experience them.
I was looking away when the last out of the inning happened (or maybe changing views?). Is there a display of what caused the out, and maybe an animation of the fielders coming into the dugout, or does it flash up the “between innings” screen pretty quickly?
It might be nice to have a significant event summary available somewhere. It feels hard to believe that this would catch someone’s attention well enough that they’re watching the whole thing, and without audio cues / replays, I know I wouldn’t be interested in watching it for any length of time.
I wonder if some kind of filter would work or we would need some data source. Looks much harder given the fast-paced nature of the game.
I know when it comes to historical data, projects like the Sean Lahman Database have to go through quite a bit of trouble to reproduce "clean room" versions of historical data that are legally fine to use. I have to imagine there's a lot of complications when it comes to live data for anything that even has a hint of being more than a hobby project.
One comment is, during “in between innings” when it was showing around the league and other stats, the text was really small on my phone. If possible I’d rather have it scrolling or switching between pages of data than trying to fit it on one screen. I get that on a tv or pc it’s probably the right size, so not sure if you’d want to spend the effort to have a separate view for small screens.
Either way though, great job on this!
edit- First 2 plays I watched are back to back homers. Go Royals!
Something about the way baseball itself is played seems to make recreations really satisfying -- like, more accurate? -- and fun compared to say, soccer hilights of matches on Youtube made with what looks like an EA soccer video game
I also really like the idea of recreating any type of event in this format. It's almost like photogrammetry but with as much creative intention as you have documentary. very awesome, very inspirational really
This is clearly 16 bit.
do the mlb streams flag a challenge?