What are considered the best games in WASM? I recently got into playing around with WASM - it would've been great if this technology was prevalent during the Flash games era
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
There should be 2 options for speed, regular and sped up. Then there should be a key to speed the game up. When I was a kid, it was the space key for GBA. You could have the normal game and skip the boring parts fast.
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
Copyright being as long as it is is a theft of our culture. I (and many of our generation) grew up with Pokemon, it's a common experience for many of us. A classic of our culture. Except we're not allowed to use it, remix it, build our own versions, etc. We still do, of course, but it's all illegal.
It didn't used to be this way.
I think 20-30 years of copyright should be plenty to extract whatever profits you deserve from the fruits of your labor. Anything beyond that is just holding culture hostage for the benefit of a few. It doesn't serve society in any meaningful way.
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.
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.
I get the sense that these disassembly/decompilation projects believe that some types of IP-laden asset data can be shipped embedded into the project — not necessarily "legally", but in that they'll likely get away with doing so indefinitely — as long as:
1. those assets are stored in proprietary formats that only the game code itself understands, and
2. no tool exists in the project to extract the assets from these proprietary formats into open formats, unless that tool itself exists only in source-code form in the codebase, and requires the ROM as an input to compile it (even if in the case of such a tool, the ROM is doing nothing but serving as a "key" to unlock compilation.)
Basically, if you have to prove you have your own copy of the IP in order to make their embedded copy of the IP "legible", then it's very hard to construct an evidence-based DMCA takedown order that actually makes any coherent point about the project "distributing" said IP.
That being said, shipping assets like this at all, even if you "can get away with it", is ultimately just a kind of laziness / shortcut-taking. They do it because there's either no clear/simple/obvious way to automatically extract the given asset data from the ROM (e.g. because the relevant data is split up into various data planes + metadata bits that are stored "exploded" all over the ROM), so they just did it once by hand, committing the results; or because there's no clear/simple/obvious way to store the extracted asset data such that a regular compiler/assembler natively understands how to embed it into the binary in the particular form it was found in the original ROM. (Remember, re-assembling/compiling to the original ROM is always the test these projects use to ensure their disassembly/decompilation is preserving semantics. So they need to replicate every weird layout quirk the original dev tooling imposed upon the original ROM. And sometimes the original dev tooling included special-purpose domain-specific asset-codegen tools that aren't part of regular compiler toolchains.)
What these projects should actually be doing, is taking on the schlep: writing the extract tooling anyway, even if it's just "copy these bytes from here and these bytes from there, and spit them out as hex in an .asm file with this header"; and/or writing matching asset-codegen tooling to the tooling that likely existed in the platform SDK, to run before compile/assemble time, converting the extracted ROM asset files into a form (probably a bunch of little assembly files) that will land in the right places when linked back together to form the original ROM.
And, to be clear, they mostly do do this! These projects are very good at doing this!
But sometimes — especially on a larger project with many contributors — one or two things like this aren't audited properly, and fall through the cracks. Or they start out as temporary "bootstrap" approaches made during a private phase of development to get things working + compiling to a correct image; and then not all of those get cleaned up before the repo gets made public.
I’m of the opinion that projects like this should start hosting Forgejo instances in countries with favorable laws and just mirroring to Github for exposure.
If anyone has emulator suggestions, I recently attempted a playthrough and found that midway through my copy of red, the game was corrupted? Oddest thing -- hadn't reading the point where you do the "Missingno trick" near cinnebar.
Anyways, I suspect the save got corrupted somehow but it made me swear off emulation and try a physical copy. (Which had the battery I replaced fail... it's been a comedy of errors).
Emerald is well regarded as the best of Generation 3, which is the final of the traditional 2D games and can trade with Fire Red/Leaf Green (remakes of the classic)
Maybe the internal battery died. I honestly recommend you look at GBC style handhelds or if you like the GBA style, Anbernic made one that looks insanely close to a GBA.
There also a craze of DS style emulators popping up. They all give you comfort knowing that your saves will be fine forever if you back them up, even if the device dies.
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.
42 comments:
Confirming that saving genuinely works. Interesting stuff. Wonder if we can get trades working too.
Yeah, I made sure saving worked correctly
First thing I checked as well! I've been Poke-sniped, there goes a few hours.
What are considered the best games in WASM? I recently got into playing around with WASM - it would've been great if this technology was prevalent during the Flash games era
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
I use the cheat engine in zsnes to get rid of the grinding in final fantasy games.
I find it improves the game when I don't have to spend a bunch of time leveling up or earning gold for equipment.
There should be 2 options for speed, regular and sped up. Then there should be a key to speed the game up. When I was a kid, it was the space key for GBA. You could have the normal game and skip the boring parts fast.
https://github.com/tripplyons/pokeemerald-wasm/
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
Copyright being as long as it is is a theft of our culture. I (and many of our generation) grew up with Pokemon, it's a common experience for many of us. A classic of our culture. Except we're not allowed to use it, remix it, build our own versions, etc. We still do, of course, but it's all illegal.
It didn't used to be this way.
I think 20-30 years of copyright should be plenty to extract whatever profits you deserve from the fruits of your labor. Anything beyond that is just holding culture hostage for the benefit of a few. It doesn't serve society in any meaningful way.
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.
Interesting; but the GitHub project linked seems to have the original animations from the ROM.
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.
I get the sense that these disassembly/decompilation projects believe that some types of IP-laden asset data can be shipped embedded into the project — not necessarily "legally", but in that they'll likely get away with doing so indefinitely — as long as:
1. those assets are stored in proprietary formats that only the game code itself understands, and
2. no tool exists in the project to extract the assets from these proprietary formats into open formats, unless that tool itself exists only in source-code form in the codebase, and requires the ROM as an input to compile it (even if in the case of such a tool, the ROM is doing nothing but serving as a "key" to unlock compilation.)
Basically, if you have to prove you have your own copy of the IP in order to make their embedded copy of the IP "legible", then it's very hard to construct an evidence-based DMCA takedown order that actually makes any coherent point about the project "distributing" said IP.
That being said, shipping assets like this at all, even if you "can get away with it", is ultimately just a kind of laziness / shortcut-taking. They do it because there's either no clear/simple/obvious way to automatically extract the given asset data from the ROM (e.g. because the relevant data is split up into various data planes + metadata bits that are stored "exploded" all over the ROM), so they just did it once by hand, committing the results; or because there's no clear/simple/obvious way to store the extracted asset data such that a regular compiler/assembler natively understands how to embed it into the binary in the particular form it was found in the original ROM. (Remember, re-assembling/compiling to the original ROM is always the test these projects use to ensure their disassembly/decompilation is preserving semantics. So they need to replicate every weird layout quirk the original dev tooling imposed upon the original ROM. And sometimes the original dev tooling included special-purpose domain-specific asset-codegen tools that aren't part of regular compiler toolchains.)
What these projects should actually be doing, is taking on the schlep: writing the extract tooling anyway, even if it's just "copy these bytes from here and these bytes from there, and spit them out as hex in an .asm file with this header"; and/or writing matching asset-codegen tooling to the tooling that likely existed in the platform SDK, to run before compile/assemble time, converting the extracted ROM asset files into a form (probably a bunch of little assembly files) that will land in the right places when linked back together to form the original ROM.
And, to be clear, they mostly do do this! These projects are very good at doing this!
But sometimes — especially on a larger project with many contributors — one or two things like this aren't audited properly, and fall through the cracks. Or they start out as temporary "bootstrap" approaches made during a private phase of development to get things working + compiling to a correct image; and then not all of those get cleaned up before the repo gets made public.
How is this a port which requires you to provide my own ROM?
Its not requiring you to provide your own ROM so this demo very sell could get DMCAd but Nintendo layers are surprisingly asleep.
I’m of the opinion that projects like this should start hosting Forgejo instances in countries with favorable laws and just mirroring to Github for exposure.
or something decentralised, like radicle (https://radicle.dev)
Crashed when using a potion vs May :(
Why Emerald -- is classic already done?
If anyone has emulator suggestions, I recently attempted a playthrough and found that midway through my copy of red, the game was corrupted? Oddest thing -- hadn't reading the point where you do the "Missingno trick" near cinnebar.
Anyways, I suspect the save got corrupted somehow but it made me swear off emulation and try a physical copy. (Which had the battery I replaced fail... it's been a comedy of errors).
Emerald is well regarded as the best of Generation 3, which is the final of the traditional 2D games and can trade with Fire Red/Leaf Green (remakes of the classic)
So you have available all of the original Pokémon
Maybe the internal battery died. I honestly recommend you look at GBC style handhelds or if you like the GBA style, Anbernic made one that looks insanely close to a GBA.
There also a craze of DS style emulators popping up. They all give you comfort knowing that your saves will be fine forever if you back them up, even if the device dies.
I chose Pokemon Emerald because it is my favorite of the games that have been disassembled!
Try https://afterplay.io it’s cross platform, saves every 20 seconds and keeps your last 50 saves which you can recover from if anything goes wrong
Any way to get sound?
I have not added that yet, but it would probably be quite easy to throw a few prompts to Codex to do so.
Next step: 100% browser javascript pokémon emerald.
New LLM benchmark?
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.
Yes, it a recompilation of a community decompilation!
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.
Very cool. Too bad this doesnt seem to work as a PWA, or am I jusr missing the button on Android Firefox?
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.
You have to use "Add to home" menu item on Firefox for Android. But this web app doesn't seem to be a PWA.
What kind of mods and new features could be added?
29 FPS for me, what hardware are you using to get a hundred thousand FPS?
iPhone 13. Did you change the slider at the bottom?
Yeah, just found that. Now I'm getting 3000+FPS on my ancient Thinkpad T520.
Nintendo lawyers intensifi
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
Likely because all of the external docs were already in its training set.
Yes, this project was made in around 15 hours of Codex.