alt Hacker NewsVibe coded browser ports of Halo, The Simpsons: Hit And Run, GTA work well
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My heads exploding. I expected to try Quake and just run through the first level and maybe stop. Being dropped into a multiplayer game and it feeling as good as it did was a jaw dropping moment for me. Quake 3, same experience... my ping wasn't great.
I don't know where my quake cds are. Even if I found them I'd have to figure out what mods to run to have it feel good. Then I'd have to find communities to play with.
This is super cool to me.
Actually a great way to safely try old games that you've never played before.
Reminds me of my recent vibe coding project of porting Winamp AVS to web using Emscripten. It worked so well that it was simply.. done after a few sessions, and I was amazed and also feeling fuzzy in the head.
One turn involved ChatGPT explicitly fixing C++ source code to fix beat detection for the available audio sources after I complained that it was broken.
Hands down, sure, the most respectable work, apart from the original AVS code, was done by the Emscripten contributors. Anyway, it readjusted my expectations, even after my day job switched to agentic coding as the primary development tool.
Honest question: Anybody has more details how to do this? I.e. I have my favorite game from the DOS/Win95 era I want to port plus a dev background - how to get started with AI reverse engineering?
What I'm interested in is their performance, since I would assume that they are running in WebAssembly from reconstructed C/C++ code decompiled from binary, what would be the overhead on that compared to running on native? And how does running on WebGPU compared to running with native through DirectX/OpenGL?
Opus doesn't push back against this kind of thing for reasons like "not your code"?
I have been experimenting with porting old games too and the speed in which frontier models can accomplish this is just amazing.
The companies looking at this will just turn to cloud gaming services instead for newer games. They have tried it with Stadia, which that failed because of the existing consoles.
Now the games industry will try it again for real and find a way to rebrand cloud gaming and trick everyone to believe its better than running games on your own machine, only for them to stream the game back to you without you ever owning it.
What amazes me is how uninspired this all is. I got bored of the browser ports after seeing two of them.
All of this power and still there's nothing new I want to play.
And here I am playing checkers on flij https://flij.com/star/checkers
The whole world is about to get wild.
It makes perfect sense that LLMs are good at this. We've always known that a binary is not a true moat, but that it's just a lot of toil to transpile.
Compiler output is highly predictable, but it doesn't make the inverse true. LLMs are not themselves compilers.
If there’s one good thing about the LLM hype. It’s that we are strongly reconsidering the value of "copyright" and "patent" law.
It’s an archaic law framework designed by corporations to guarantee a monopoly to extract as much value from "their idea."
This gives decomps/recomps a bad name.
I'm tired of these terribly made AI projects in this space. It's just noise and low quality spam. I miss when these were done legitimately.
Some script kiddie ran this through a chat bot once and probably doesn't even understand the code.
For those who don't understand, watch this segment of DF Retro Super Show - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6gJTdk_BkI&t=165s
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I don't really understand the IP protection angle here: These browser ports are no more or less illegal that hosting a RAM file for use on an emulator, or pirated software in general. And sites hosting them are no harder or easier to shut down than existing piracy sites.
What's more interesting is the new ability to easily create ports of old games that let you play old games legally: Bringing your copy of the original's data files and playing on a modernised engine with high-resolution, unlocked FPS, bugfixes, etc. In the past couple of months, I've seen a bunch of vibe-coded ports of DOS games for which the source code was lost.