Hacker News

Pokemon Emerald Ported to WebAssembly (100k FPS)

63 points by tripplyons 4 hours ago | 20 comments

Super neat. I'd love to see what it would be like to play with more modern &intuitive touch controls instead of just the D-pad and A/B.

hawkice 2 hours ago

Confirming that saving genuinely works. Interesting stuff. Wonder if we can get trades working too.

tripplyons 30 minutes ago

Yeah, I made sure saving worked correctly

Luc 2 hours ago

https://github.com/tripplyons/pokeemerald-wasm/

fc417fc802 2 hours ago

How long until this is DMCA'd? How has the project it's based on stuck around for so long? Do I perhaps misunderstand what this is? https://github.com/pret/pokeemerald

mathgeek 59 minutes ago

It's a port of a disassembly that requires you to provide your own ROM. The legality of such things is a tangled web that anyone producing them needs to navigate very, very carefully.

yw3410 39 minutes ago

Interesting; but the GitHub project linked seems to have the original animations from the ROM.

mathgeek 29 minutes ago

It's mostly argued around or against the application of fair use. I suggest consulting a lawyer if you're truly interested, as it quickly gets into legalese around what constitutes ownership, distribution, etc. Throw in a lack of extensive case law and you quickly get into opinions rather than legal bases.

weird-eye-issue 2 hours ago

I did a Pokémon Crystal playthrough several months ago, still great games!

I used an emulator on my laptop with increased speed so it made everything like walking and combat way faster which was really nice and I probably would have given up if it wasn't for that

eigenspace 3 hours ago

Very cool. Too bad this doesnt seem to work as a PWA, or am I jusr missing the button on Android Firefox?

ameliaquining 56 minutes ago

You could send a PR. It's reasonably straightforward to add a manifest to make the app installable (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...), and to use Workbox to make it work offline since it's fully static (https://developer.chrome.com/docs/workbox).

The one caveat is that a PWA needs an icon but the project doesn't currently have one, so you'd have to design, find, or LLM-generate one.

parasti 2 hours ago

You have to use "Add to home" menu item on Firefox for Android. But this web app doesn't seem to be a PWA.

dmitrygr 2 hours ago

Ok. So what’s interesting here, presumably, is that this isn’t a wasm GBA emulator (which also exist and work). This is the game itself compiled to wasm. Even though no official source code was ever published, there was a community based decompilation.

tripplyons 54 minutes ago

Yes, it a recompilation of a community decompilation!

gobdovan 2 hours ago

Any way to get sound?

tripplyons 55 minutes ago

I have not added that yet, but it would probably be quite easy to throw a few prompts to Codex to do so.

oceansky 2 hours ago

Next step: 100% browser javascript pokémon emerald.

itsthecourier 2 hours ago

some weeks ago I made a Gameboy emulator from zero in rust and then exported it to wasm

https://holy-lake-f6df.sdreyesg.workers.dev/

took me 3 hours with Opus. Opus knew the whole ISA, clock, bus quirks, etc. from their training without any external docs

mathgeek 56 minutes ago

Likely because all of the external docs were already in its training set.

tripplyons 53 minutes ago

Yes, this project was made in around 15 hours of Codex.