Air traffic visualizers seem to be having a bit of a moment right now, and now that moment has come to the venerable NES thanks to [k6lcm]’s NES Radar project, which is open-source under the GPL on GitHub. In spite of the name, there’s no Radio Direction or Range-Finding involved in this project– no radio at all, in fact, which makes this a bit interesting. It’s just an NES cartridge and a carefully constructed cable.
It looks like a period game, but it’s current-day air traffic.
The cartridge is a standard ROM cart that holds the software — no hidden ESP32 or PicoW here, which is what we initially suspected the project would be. So how is it that when you start up the NES with the cartridge inside, you can input an International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) code, like, say, KATL, and get a visualization of the traffic? Well, okay, if you put in KATL, you won’t get all the traffic, since the software is limited to 8 sprites, and that’s the world’s busiest airport. Still, how does it know where those airplanes are?
The secret is in the carefully constructed cable mentioned above: this project is using the second controller port on the NES as a serial port, and getting the data that way. A handy Python script on a nearby computer is what actually fetches aircraft positions. It’s based on c64u-radar, also by [k6lcm], which does the same Python server trick but relies on the Commodore 64 Ultimate’s LAN port to get data rather than using serial. The NES has no such ports available, though, so the controller port it was. We saw a similar trick used for satellite tracking on the NES some years ago.
If you like the idea of tracking flights, perhaps you’d like to see it done on a real radar CRT, or projected directly onto the ceiling. Thanks to ADS-B and free APIs, it seems airplane trackers are everywhere; if an interesting one has come onto your radar, please send us a tip.
Speaking of tips, thanks to [Levi] for putting this one on our scopes!
We recently updated our article on ShadowBroker, which a lot of you liked. The latest release brought some new features and made the dashboard even richer.
But ShadowBroker is resource intensive and might need you to allocate a good chunk of resources to your VM, which not all systems have. Instead, there’s Osiris and it can do similar things without any installation. You can run it in the browser or host it on your Kali. Both versions are identical.
Osiris
Osiris is a global intelligence dashboard that aggregates live flight tracking, CCTV, earthquake monitoring, conflict zone mapping and 24/7 news feeds. It’s made to give you situational awareness across multiple intelligence domains. The tool was built with Next.js 16 and MapLibre GL and every data point is rendered via WebGL for 60fps performance even with thousands of concurrent entities on screen.
Dashboard
Let’s start with the live version. It’s available here.
The world looks busy once you enable all the data layers on the left side of the screen.
Camera Feeds
There’s a huge number of cameras available around the world that are free to access. They are usually scattered across different websites and don’t look nearly as good as they do on a map. The dashboard has integrated a big number of them, marked with green dots on the map.
Here’s a camera in Toronto. Looks empty at 5 am.
Aircraft Tracking
All kinds of aircraft and maritime vehicles can be tracked. Not only that, you can do a deep dive on the intel available for each one. Below you can see we picked a random flight over the UAE and the dashboard pulled up the company it belongs to, Tim Clark who is the CEO and some publicly known information on him.
You can do similar things with other objects on the map.
So if you’re monitoring military activity in a certain region, that can come in handy.
Critical Infrastructure
There are different data assets you can display by clicking the database icon on the right side of the screen. The data is relevant for various places, but mostly for the US.
Above you can see the critical infrastructure in New York (red) and nationwide (yellow).
Conflicts and Dangerous Zones
Wars, tensions and threats are differentiated by color and notes are assigned to each with a severity level.
Market Analysis
When someone loses, someone else wins. Osiris can do some Market AI overview, which you obviously shouldn’t take as legit advice. But you can see it does some basic analysis and warns of potential price spikes.
Satellite Tracking
All kinds of satellites are available on the dashboard and they can also be tracked. Here you can see Starlink flying over the Atlantic and Canada.
Malware Threats
Finally, you can view malware threats and attacks on the map. There was a big node in China linked to a lot of attacks, with more scattered around the rest of the country.
Hosting Locally
Although the live version is stable and its uptime is good, you might still want to run it locally. It’s pretty easy to set up:
kali > sudo apt install npm
kali > git clone https://github.com/simplifaisoul/osiris.git
kali > cd osiris
kali > npm audit fix --force
kali > npm run dev
Then it’ll be available at http://localhost:3000
Summary
As you can see, there are different platforms available for different setups. Having compared the two, ShadowBroker looks richer and more professional, but Osiris hosts a live version you can use without any installation and it already has most of what you’d want to test. The installation itself is quick and easy and the dashboard consumes way fewer resources than ShadowBroker. Test it yourself and see what you like.
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