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Cybiko

en.wikipedia.org

181 pointstcmb86 comments

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/

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.

> 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!

I thought they used the same "gumstick" batteries a lot of minidisk players used at the time. Were they something else?

Similar but I think smaller than the minidisk ones

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.

Fascinating! Have you written more about this?

>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.

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!

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.

I don't remember it ever being a thing in Russia. The first time I've seen it was probably in an LGR video.

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.

> 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.

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.

check out hyperswarm/holepunch: https://docs.holepunch.to/

or urbit: https://urbit.org

They have some pretty impressive tech, but they're not ready to use polished apps on all platforms like BitTorrent and SyncThing are.

Plus it seems like urbit has a lot of stuff tied to Ethereum and anything using those features might have some issues if you don't have access to the internet.

this is true, these p2p apps do assume internet access lol

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.

Bittorrent was the only P2P system that solved all the thorny NAT issues in a satisfactory way.

NAT might have been what started it all, but PKI and DNS are the problem now I think.

Nobody wants to self host an insecure thing, but security t requires self signed certs(A hassle, often not even supported well, nobody else can see it unless they go through the cert installing hassle either), or a domain name and let's encrypt(Manual work that costs money).

What I suspect we should have done is just collapsed TLS and IP into the same protocol, and put the certs hash right onto the IP, so that as long as DNS gives you the right address, you're secure.

Then all you have to do is make DNS run over that same secured IP, and DNS will never give you a bad IP, and as soon as you buy a domain, you get security without having to think about it at all on the application side, besides giving yourself a new key in your IP periodically or when it gets compromised.

Yggdrasil has it right, but they have to use almost the whole 128 bits, and rely on mesh routing, there's not really a way to fit traditional IPv6 routing AND good security in just 16 bytes.

Also, routers with bad UPnP implementations did not help. Now you can't rely on all non-technical users having it enabled because people don't trust it.

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...

Unfortunately, many of these are proprietary protocols that are hindered by patents.

The other legal problem is that any p2p communication system is very quickly taken over by the sharing of copyrighted content, and then by stuff like child porn. This is, for example, what happened recently with Firefox Send.

For any p2p system, law enforcement go after the creators of the system, because that's the only entity they can go after besides those who actually commit the crimes.

However, if one builds a federated system with moderation tools built in, then law enforcement go after the ones running "bad" instances rather than the system builders.

There's (kind of) a way around that, if you don't build sharing things to the public in an anonymous way into your system.

SyncThing and Jami are fine because they don't provide publishing tools the way BitTorrent does, just personal use and private group tools.

There's still lots of unexplored potential that has nothing to do with publishing, but most P2P devs seem to be most interesting in trying to get rid of all centralization entirely and build a whole new internet.

I don't follow Mozilla news, but it looks like FF Send claims they closed because people were using it to ship malware.

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!

There is a Cybiko emulator out there! Obviously it can't talk to nearby Cybikos but it's still fun to play old games and mess around with the apps

Thanks, I'll look again. I found one about a year ago but had issues running it in Wine probably.

There is also an emulator that runs in a web browser. https://www.reddit.com/r/cybiko/comments/z79f2p/cybiko_emula...

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.

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...

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?

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?

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.

I saw that link after I posted--seems like a lot of hassle and the radio range might not even be very good. Back to the LoRa-based ideas I guess..

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

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

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.

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™.

This is exactly what I was interested in, unlicensed transceiver so a novice or a kid can transmit a short distance like a handie talkie without worrying about eavesdropping.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISM_radio_band

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.

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.

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.

The ClockworkPi products, particularly uConsole, look like a reasonable modern equivalent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33331139

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.

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...

the zipit z2 cost (inflation-adjusted) around $225 in 2008, more than the clockworkpi uconsole does today

I bought a second hand one by less than $50.

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.

I wonder if you could emulate the mesh protocol using SDR?

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.

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.

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)

Good video on demonstrating Cybiko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojatBoMZubk

LGR also had a great one:

https://youtu.be/38VEBOseAzM

Some relevant previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30485353

Smartphones can do almost everything that cybiko did. All that's missing is a low power p2p networking component like a bluetooth LoRa transceiver.

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.

it's just amazing. I want one right now. it would be great to fix it to send BTC transactions

I remember begging my parents for one of these things (Cybiko Xtreme) and absolutely loving it for quite a while - until I started to feel bad that I couldn't do any of the networked stuff since I was probably the only kid on the entire island of Ireland who had one.

edit watching through [this LGR video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38VEBOseAzM) is unlocking some core memories

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

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...

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.

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

There are a LOT of people in this thread with similar thoughts, it seems!

Can we all get together somehow?

I had two of them that I'd bring to school. I had a few classes where my friends were next door so we'd chat on Cybiko or play the FPS maze game multiplayer. It was really fun, but the next year all the kids started getting cell phones/DS (Pictochat). My friends didn't want to use the Cybiko anymore, but it always helps a special place in my heart.

Note all the comms! https://xkcd.com/2699/

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?

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.

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?

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.

no citation, but I wanted one of these as a kid and remember them being around $100-150 USD in the early 00s

Yeah, the LGR video says they were USD 150 at launch in May 2000 and 130 by the end of the year.

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.

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.

Probably the experience of every eager eyed young nerd who got one. Certainly was mine too.

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.

I wonder if it would be possible to make a repeater for the signal, perhaps over the internet

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.

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.

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.

They had the device for the Cybiko 2 but they were very hard to get in the US.

Very interesting! I did some searching but it seems they never had a system for having it act as a bridge between two cybiko nets? I would expect that to be a reasonable thing to do what with the mesh network.

On the Cybiko 2, there was a wifi card add on that allowed you to do this. Unfortunately.

I always wanted a Cybiko! Never did manage it.

… now I want to buy two off eBay to play with. Thanks a lot.

The obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/2699/

Was this used as some sort of a spy device?

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