alt Hacker NewsThe blog post reminds me of similar efforts with Shockwave. There's people building decompilers, and runtimes, and if you join enough Discords, you will notice the people in them are cross-contaminating between communities if you will, they share insights with one another, in their efforts towards specific goals. They're hyper focused on making one game or another come back. There's Habbo Hotel, and Coke Studios, as well as other games.
The Coke Studios effort is interesting because there were no "private servers" developed at the time, unlike Habbo which had many, and there are Shockwave Xtras that no open runtime supports currently.
There's several attempts at a full runtime as well, that run in-browser.
Projector Rays (decompiler) really was the biggest release to date, and recently people have been really hacking at it, to some extent AI has helped to reverse engineer bytecode far as I can tell.
For anyone curious, one of the runtimes is called DirPlayer:
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I have a lot of respect for little communities where people gather to work obsessively over a goal like this. It's fun to see projects like this that would never see this much effort applied if not for the passion of a few dedicated people.
Many of the smartest people I've known got their starts in little communities like these: Obsessively learning new things that would normally be beyond their academic or career level because they need to know something advanced to move their passion project forward.
Where can I boot up Coke Studios? Enjoyed that game as a kid, including making music (which was so friggen cool! They had tons of samples you could just drag and drop into a timeline).
Edit: fun memory. I figured out how scamming works at some point. IIRC (and I may not) I set up a minigame in my studio, and contestants had to give me their furniture to participate in a game. Since furniture could stack weirdly, people made all sorts of crazy mazes that were actually quite difficult to navigate due to the fixed isometric perspective.
Each stage required handing over a more expensive item than the last. At some point someone handed over a super rare/expensive piece of furniture.
Not gonna erase that. ACTUALLY I think I figured out how to clone items due to a bug. Or mine infinite DBs. Used that as cover to get someone to give me their item. Was a long time ago.
Anyways, a user handed me their super rare item and I then gave them a stern warning on how this is a common scam and I just stole their item(s). Then I handed everything back over to them and they profusely thanked me. lol
I'm indirectly involved / hear about a project that buys up old feature phones, mainly from Japan, to try and find ones that have data for old imode games on them, notably a FFVII spinoff called Before Crisis. It's difficult because they would release the game in separate data packs, the idea being people can remove data packs for parts of the game they already played to save space (also a feature on modern smartphone games). But since the servers are long gone, they need to find phones with the data on them to extract it.
But they've made really good progress in recent years, to the point that the game is now playable. Not sure if it's complete, but it's playable. See e.g. https://www.oldschoolgamermagazine.com/work-begins-on-restor... for info.