Show HN: PS2 games statically recompiled to WebAssembly

danxbuild

Impressive. How are you handling the PS2’s timing sensitive hardware, like the vector units, in a static recompilation? Curious how close you can get to correct behavior without emulating cycle by cycle.

fonrex

I hope they'll be able to do that with Forza too !

eluusive

Who would want to play Gran Turismo without long CD loading screens?

anthk

On the PSP recomp, I wish they could somehow target GL 2.1 video cards (ancient Intel iGPU's) so legacy users like me could play most of the games on an n270 netbook.

spwa4

VERY cool. I wish you could make this work for steam deck (and friends) though.

simonmales

No GitHub pages so I can play?

krystalgamer

ah yes, another recomp that still emulates a core system component. https://github.com/snuri00/ps2-web-recomp/blob/1066c9eea78c2...

CodeCompost

AI or no AI, this is amazing.

zuInnp

All of this recomp stuff is pretty amazing. I really don't like how AI changed my profession, but hey at least I get something good from it.

Megabinator

What about compiling the compiler to WebAssembly so it can be hosted anywhere and convert a project directly from a browser?

kodablah

I did similar for PS Vita over the past few months: https://github.com/cretz/vitaslop But instead of single games, I "built" an ARM-to-WASM transpiler in WASM. Also cool transcoding of WebGPU shaders, audio, and more. Only have tested a few games so far, it's early days, but works quite well in Chrome mobile on flagship Android phones.

Elizer0x0309

With the slew of recomps these days enabled by AI, How much incentive is there for a game studio to pour their heart, soul and money in a product when it can be easily "stolen" and shared for free...

mglvsky

are there clean-room games?

gitowiec

I will wait for MVG video

Benard-dev

This is good, I didn't know 3DS could handle PS2 emulation. What's the performance like on heavier titles?

nashtik

Does this means same can happen for ps3?

Hyperlisk

Very cool! I'm working on something similar but am taking it much slower with a focus on accuracy. Mine recompiles into Golang to take advantage of built-in SIMD support. I've been building the tooling around the PS2 binaries and hope to have a standalone PSS player out soon that can play PSS files as they are encoded, via simulated renderer, and via in-game engine renderer. The future is so bright with LLMs!

aceazzameen

I don't know. There's suddenly so many decomps that run native (granted this post is about WebAssembly). Is there no concern about hidden malware? IMO it doesn't have the same level of trust and vetting that the emulator scene has. At least not yet.

khalidkhair

I wonder how "legal" hosting this would be given that it would require the host to basically distribute the game for free for everyone else

Altern4tiveAcc

Pretty cool stuff. Seems like the web build script isn't escaping spaces in the game name.