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

38 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by sn001
(github.com)

17 Comments

wren6991

11 minutes ago

> 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)

tra3

6 minutes ago

I think of an emulator as a separate project/product typically. Perhaps that's what they are saying?

fb03

an hour ago

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.

psygn89

an hour ago

Isn't this technically illegal to reverse engineer and share? It's awesome but I feel like it'll hasten big companies to lobby and make some harsh laws around this type of thing. I'm surprised Claude/Fable allows this? Or do we trick them to do it?

theturtletalks

36 minutes ago

It’s legal to have a ROM of a game you actually owned and ripped. This is simply allowing the ROM that you actually own to be played on a different console, the web.

In this case, the user is distributing the ROM which is illegal. But the method to make it work on the web is fair use. The legal way to do it would be a website where users “insert” their own rom and the website simply lets you play that ROM on the web.

accidc

21 minutes ago

Also pedantic but: it’s jurisdiction dependent

ahoy

32 minutes ago

there is no ROM in the linked github repo

rvz

39 minutes ago

> Isn't this technically illegal to reverse engineer and share?

Software engineers are devoid of copyright and trademark laws and want everything to $0 and will become the new starving artists without knowing it.

Don't be surprised to see far more mass layoffs in the games industry.

dandersch

27 minutes ago

I understand where you are coming from, but look at what else copyright protection has brought: studios and publishers are so insecure that they want to lock consumers out of 10+ year old games so that they don't have to compete with (their own) past games.

Maybe putting some pressure on making games that are actually new and different isn't a bad thing.

rvz

14 minutes ago

> I understand where you are coming from...

I don't think you do. But please continue.

> Maybe putting some pressure on making games that are actually new and different isn't a bad thing.

That's not the point. It is what comes afterwards and software engineers cannot have it both ways.

This will make game studios move to world models with the real game being never released, but only simulated and streamed to you.

So let's see what happens.

Pannoniae

a minute ago

And why do you think people won't be able to rip the streamed games too?

thereader12

25 minutes ago

I don't think reverse engineering or open source is creating the starving artists.

Also, video game programmers are already starving artists comparatively. To many people want to make video games to exploitation is rife. Only publishers benefit from your rhetoric. At least artists get royalties

seki285

an hour ago

Nothing will happen.

lucasverra

39 minutes ago

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

anonymous908213

30 minutes ago

> 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.

woah

10 minutes ago

> 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.

There's kind of a bitter lesson variant with AI coding where the work to make a simple, consistent, flexible, DRY platform or library isn't really worth it when anyone can press a button and get a variant customized to their needs in minutes.

People playing the game don't care about the elegance of the emulator, and if there is a bug in the slop, they can just have their AI fix it immediately and keep playing.

doublerabbit

2 hours ago

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.