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God of War on PSP, recompiled to WebAssembly and running in the browser

137 points • by sn001 • today at 11:27 AM • 73 comments • view on HN

Comments

wren6991 • today at 4:19 PM

> PSP games running in the browser without an emulator. The game's MIPS machine code is translated ahead of time into C++, compiled to WebAssembly, and linked against a small reimplementation of the PSP's operating system and graphics chip that draws with WebGL2.

Feels slightly pedantic to point this out, but this describes an emulation stack. A lot of emulators are already doing some kind of lift+JIT on the target's machine code (just not through WASM)

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accrual • today at 7:57 PM

FWIW, the two God of War games released on PSP were considered some of the most graphically impressive on the platform. Both came out late in the console's lifetime (2008 and 2010).

An IGN review also described one of them as "it looks better than a big chunk of PS2 games". [0] I've played one of them and yes, it felt like playing a resized PS2 game.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20121020044819/http://www.ign.co...

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pier25 • today at 6:09 PM

I wonder how long it'll take until Sony takes this down

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mamonoleechi • today at 4:54 PM

if you liked this topic, you might be interested in https://thegamingemporium.com/recent/

sigma5 • today at 4:46 PM

I remember trying to emulate this game on my i7 laptop a decade ago. It was running like 15 FPS.So for me this look like magic.

fb03 • today at 3:11 PM

AI is completely cracking up the emulation bubble. We're not even emulating things anymore, we're just reverse engineering things and directly porting games. This is an awesome timeline for old game preservation. These fuckers aren't profiting from the games anymore, yet they won't release their IP, or update their old games to newer, more accessible platforms. So I really appreciate the work these kinds of developers have been doing.

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lucasverra • today at 3:50 PM

maybe i will finally able to play MGSolid saga on a browser on my mac :)

Onavo • today at 4:57 PM

I saw one yesterday for GTA 6 it was taken down. Somebody can probably dig up the X link.

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doublerabbit • today at 2:47 PM

Insane that we can now decompile PSP games to WebGL. Emulation has come far from 2006 where ePSXe the PS1 emulator would only run on a beefy Pentium.

anonymous908213 • today at 3:59 PM

> A small PSP kernel. Whatever the game asks of the PSP's operating system is answered by high-level emulation in profile/host

So this is just an emulator with extra steps. The kind of bad emulator that requires game-specific patches instead of getting the emulation correct to begin with, and is embedding the emulator into a binary together with the game. Absolute slop.

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