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Porting Zelda Classic to the web (hoten.cc)
447 points by MrAwesomeSauce on May 3, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 114 comments



I remember about 20 years ago there was a (IIRC) Java Applet-based multiplayer clone of Zelda: A Link to the Past that was sort of a forerunner the to MMORPGs we see today. It changed names to Graal Online because of the lawyers.

Thinking back to it, it was really ahead of its time, not only because it was massively multiplayer, but it had a great level editor and was doing user-created content in the late '90s.

--edit--

Oldest I could find on the wayback machine is from 1999, but that's a later version that was a standalone exe. http://web.archive.org/web/19991012175711/http://graalonline...

--edit 2--

Here's a nice writeup: https://graal.in/t/graal-zelda-online-historical-thread/1420...


I’m Chris Wright, mentioned in the 2nd link. I had the original idea, as the article says I commissioned Stefan to write it for me as I had next to no coding skills back then (apart from HTML and PHP). I ran a fairly successful SNES emulation site (I knew the teams behind Snes9x and Zsnes well) and was looking for a gimmick to boost traffic. Stefan took things off in his own direction with the Graal makeover (we never actually got threatened by Nintendo legal) and we lost touch. There was a house in the game that was ‘mine’ and credited me with the idea.

Half related fun fact: I was also behind the very first leak of the SNES Starfox 2 ROM onto the web. One of the devs, which I prob shouldn’t name (though I think it is common knowledge now) was a fan of the site. He got in touch and we did an exclusive interview and ROM release.


Hey man. Graal was an intimate part of my life growing up. I had thousands of hours logged on Valikorlia and a few hundred on other playerworlds. It was a good idea. It's where I first started programming; graalscript was my first language.

It's sad to see it go. I really wish we could have a game experience that had the community graal did. There's not much with that level of involvement for players anymore; it's all now downstream of ivory towers and extremely restricted.


Likewise! I played a ton of Graal Online during my adolescence and owe my programming career to its level editor (NPC scripting). I was able to learn how to program without reading much documentation outside of reading its command sidebar and inferring from others' NPC scripts. Thinking about it now, they did an outstanding job making it very straightforward to learn and use.


If you remember Konidias he's been working on a game in a similar art style named Cloudscape, details can be found on Steam!


Seconding graal being hugely formative for me, and I still think of it often.

It was my first real social experience online, and inspired in part the hobby projects that led me into software as a career. Thanks so much :)


I think it's pretty sad how a lot of these projects, that not only had a lot of effort put into them, but also had an impact on a lot of people's lives, they just sort of unceremoniously fade away into obscurity.

Graal Online doesn't even have a Wikipedia article. Like there ought to be a tomb stone.


There is a German Wikipedia article[0] and it's mostly readable through Google Translate[1] (I made a static snapshot).

[0] - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graal_Online

[1] - https://archive.ph/77B1o


In typical wiki and also typical German fashion, the article is very technical, focuses on things like technical requirements rather than the story, descriptions or definitions.


Similar story to others here, Graal was hugely formative in 98-99 era. Learned how to script in part to create interactive levels and became a Game Coordinator for a period. Thank you in part for creating it!

Random memory: using infinite gold hacks and the suicide dagger (which would the drop gold for other players) over and over hour hours inside the throne room or the castle west of Burger Refuge.


Loved Graal growing up! Thank you!


I had Graal on a shovelware CD, but back then we didn't have Internet access at home. I could start the client and walk around on some of the maps that were included, occasionally interacting with scripted characters, but mostly just picking up jars and throwing them around. I didn't know any of the back story and no documentation was on the disc, so it turned out to be quite boring after a while :)

Also when you went to sleep in a bed, your body disappeared and only your head remained visible, floating above the pillow. I found it pretty funny for some reason.

Edit: this was the Java version's homepage: http://web.archive.org/web/19990423103617/http://www.cyberjo...


I remember Graal, but where I really sank time in was Era, a modern day mod of Graal. It was so cool, like if Zelda and GTA had a baby. You could get an assortment of weapons, join gangs, get in violent shootouts, I even remember getting blown at a beach house by someone playing a hooker. I think they eventually introduced cars or something. For a middle school kid it was super cool, even though the city was kind of small there was tons of role playing opportunity and emergent gameplay.

Although I’d probably get bored of such a game these days, I’d probably have a lot of fun building it out and watching a community grow from playing it.

I sometimes wondered about the developers who built this game. Maybe they were the age I am now when they wrote it. Is it my turn now to build a game like this for some new younger generation? A circle of life? Eh, I don’t know, I feel like kids these days just don’t play these kind of games anymore on a PC.


Unfortunately most of the families in my circle that are not in tech don’t own computers anymore. They literally just turned the PC off one day and then a few years later unplugged it and put it in a closet to collect dust, with zero chance of ever purchasing another thousand dollar replacement. Their toddlers are amazing at driving tablets/phones though. Who is going to crack the SmartPhone native WoW 2.0?


In the '90s, PCs weren't everywhere either. It was very much still a middle class thing. I honestly think it's a trap going for the biggest market. You don't need another Minecraft-success to win. Graal certainly wasn't.


Wow lots of people here who played Graal. I spent 10 years of my life on that game and I can credit it with giving me my start in development. Learning to script for the game became my first step towards programming in general.

In fact, developing new content for the game became the fun itself.

Codein here btw (ignore the icky nickname - is what it is).


Godspeed here, I worked on G2K/Kingdoms :D


>Here's a nice writeup: link

OP of the writeup: "Goatse" Ah that takes me back.


Our generation's Herodetus will be some random account named xXxPoopFeast420xXx


Yeah and historians will pore over the annals of /u/PM_ME_UR_BUTT


I still load the homepage every now and then. I'll open one article, look at the comments, and close the tab.

I guess it's like looking up your ex every now and then. You insensitive clod.


I played Graal for 10+ years, mostly on Valikorlia, but I tossed around Era and Maloria too; I started some time between 2002 and 2005.

But I didn't realize its main website had been taken down, as I was literally on it a few months ago. Did it die completely? I am no longer able to login with the client.

That's too bad. It really was ahead of its time technologically; it's where my programming life got started and I was intimately familiar with graalscript and GS2.


This was my experience too :) Was a bit more promiscuous with where I helped out, including UN, Graal Kingdoms and Zone, but also spent a lot of time building my own playerworlds.

I owe my career to that game!


Sounds like that story is worth a submission of its own!


There's probably enough material to write a whole article about it. I just thought it was funny how history repeats itself.


There were MUDs and Roguelikes way back. I personally consider Ultima Online is the genesis of modern MMO's


Funny you should mention UO. I've been working forever to recreate the UO experience (it's called Gridia, you can find links to it on my website). Not too far from being ready, but still a lot of work to be done. Now that I've wrapped up this Zelda Classic project I'll return my focus to Gridia soon.


UO is actually roughly the same generation as Graal. There were several of these fairly creative stabs at the problem before WoW came along and really defined what a MMO is.

I think in many way Neverwinter Nights' persistent worlds is another noteworthy entry. They weren't massively multiplayer, but I think more like a cross between Baldur's Gate and a MUD.


> WoW came along and really defined what a MMO is.

I wouldn't call WoW the first that defined it, or even the first wildly successful one that did. I never played any of them, but EverQuest was huge back in the day. If we are willing to lower the bar of success, there's predecessors to EverQuest as well.

Then again, maybe there's something very different than WoW and EverQuest that I'm not aware of? They seemed pretty similar from the outside.


I don't think WoW did anything particularly new, what it did was completely suck the air out of the room with its runaway success (which also ended up turning a lot of its competition into ghost towns).

Before WoW, there were a lot of different multiplayer games. After WoW, there was almost only WoW and WoW-clones (often down to mimicking the art style).


WoW was accessible in a way that previous MMOs were not: instead of repetitive grinding from the very start players are hand-held through levelling with the quest system and a story line. The levelling dungeons have comparatively generous static loot tables, with the rare drops from those dungeons just a nice little bonus. It's not until endgame that WoW reverts to genre.

WoW IMO killed Star Wars: Galaxies, which was exploring a more "open world" style of game; subsequent expansions progressively dialled back the classless system and player generated content.

More traditional repetitive grind MMOs remain popular in some parts of the world, but it's either EverQuest style or WoW style MMOs now.


I loved Star Wars Galaxies, that was the last MMO I really played.


I beta tested SWG -- it had so much potential.


You are getting the replies because though unintentional your prior wording implies that MMORPG was some niche experimental, concept type genre until 2004 which just doesn’t jive with history. EverQuest was out for years already and was immensely successful as was UO. That WoW became dominant is a different point. And as you have already stated - WoW didn’t do too much new in terms of genre defining.


EVE online is a wholly different experience than either of these. It came out back in 2003 and is still going. I enjoyed it a lot, some fun memories of getting bored then creating havoc by ripping off my rich corp mates and committing in game insurance fraud, then losing most of my ill gotten gains at the casino. Truly I felt like a space cowboy.


> I wouldn't call WoW the first that defined it, or even the first wildly successful one that did

> Then again, maybe there's something very different than WoW and EverQuest that I'm not aware of?

Agreed that WoW did not define what an MMO was, a lot of the perception has to do with timing. More people had access to a decent computer and reliable internet when WoW came out than in the mid-late 90's. I think of BBS door games and MUDs I played as a teenager as what defined MMOs (personally, not generally). To me those were huge, playing games with random people I would never meet at a time when the other options were 1.) passing a controller around or 2.) literally carrying computer equipment to random LAN parties.

But it was UO that made the big commercial splash, the marketing was on point. It was this new thing called a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG. This new world where you could be someone else. A place you could just log in to go fishing, or save up to buy a boat to find better places to fish, hunt and mine ore. And placing your first home, which was probably the smallest most useless building in the game, was yours. Your little safe haven in this new crazy virtual wild west that didn't stop evolving just because you had to go do homework. I was obsessed with MMO's after that, and obsessed with being one of the first to play. Luckily I ended up in one of the first areas to offer cable internet in the late 90's as these MMO's were doing beta test sign ups - having cable internet usually got you in early.

EverQuest was the game changer (for the more mainstream gamers, Meridian 59 was the first 3D MMO and it came out before UO). I remember the first day in EQ, standing outside in the noob area and the chat was full of people in complete awe. There was nothing even close. I ran around with a couple other people trying to see as many locations we could get to without dying and not even trying to level.

Shortly after EQ, was AC - Asheron's Call, which gave us the beautiful 3D world without the annoying (loading)zones of EQ and others, freedom atleast. I probably played AC the most while mixing in others I had missed or got beta invites. When WoW came out I refused to play it (still haven't), I was a big fan of Warcraft. I thought what they did to it was sacrilege and viewed it as the place for the new gamer-generation to pick up their participation trophy cause they couldn't handle the grind of a real MMO. They should suffer as I suffered.

As for MMO's that I found different, EVE for sure.

Project Entropia - was/is? the only one I know of that used real money for the in-game economy. You could literally play for free and make money from selling stuff from hunting, crafting, mining. I had about $200 I never cashed out (earned, not deposited) and I think my account got purged from not logging in for 2+ years at one point, or so an old email said would happen.

World War II Online - this game was def for people who would do cosplay US Civil war reenactments, but for WWII. Was a little much for me, but it was the foundation of my love of Battlefield games.

A Tale in the Desert - this one was fun when I played, I loved the concept. Its played in 1+ year long episodes where society has to pass test and challenges and work together or not. If you like crafting with a large side of real social politics that will determine if this years episode is "won", this is the game for you.

Hattrick Football Manager - browser MMO that is unlike any browser game I have played since (I played in the early aughts), if you like manager type games it was addicting. So much so I am right now trying to not make a new team and get sucked down that rabbit-hole again: https://www.hattrick.org/en-us/

Mortal Online - this was the last one I was actively engaged with, as I was trying to re-live the first days of UO, I went back to UO many times and nothing else ever felt the same. MO was trying to re-live it as well. No levels, huge crafting, hunting, exploring taking over cities. You could collect other people heads as trophies. It was ambitious and promising during beta - then completely unplayable after launch. MO2 came out recently, not sure how it is.


Ultima Online was actually ahead of its time in many aspects (it sort of still is).

The concept of 'shards' which many MMO games embraced (sometimes not even supporting as many players). Only Eve Online really rejected the idea.

The in-game 'economy', by having player craftable items, done in a way that IMHO was way better than what WoW came up with. It wasn't restricted to crafting. Mages could charge for portals, ditto for healers. There was robbery - you could either demand money or pickpocket people.

Law enforcement was limited to cities and had to be called.

Housing! That was actually in world, not another instance. There was actually a real state market. And scouting for empty spots was a viable 'profession', even if informal.

Full PVP - in fact, I'd say that the non-PVP servers actually caused its demise.

One concept that was not embraced by later MMO games was 'no levels'. Only had skills and attributes. And items were not a big deal. Sure, you could yield a very rare magical sword, but are you really going to risk losing it? Most people would fight with cheap weapons and armor and only take out the special stuff in limited circumstances.

I could go on.

I think there's a modern 'Ultima' game that could be birthed from what Origin came up with decades ago.


Tibia is basically the successor to UO, it's art and many gameplay elements are inspired by it.


I don't think WoW was anywhere close to the first MMO. RuneScape came before it and Tibia came before that.


I did some scripts for a NWN RP persistent world back when I was a teenager. Great memories


Yes, let's not forget Legends of Kesmai and its predecessor Island of Kesmai.


UO had a persistent world. It even had real estate, and later fully customizable houses. And the custom server scene had some really crazy stuff as well.


Amazingly I had never heard of this! A link to the past was one of the first (and only) first party games I owned on the SNES and I played it until it almost fell apart. A multiplayer version would have been amazing!


Oh hey I worked on this! Mostly Graal2K and a bit of Kingdoms, I used to go by "GodSpeed" and had a sparring area :)

Stefan Knorr inspired me to get into development and is a legend in my mind, I recall staying up at 4am walking around in early builds of Graal2K with him and seeing the infancy of "GANIs" (Graal Animations). Unixmad on the other hand...

If anyone knows what happened to Birdbird let me know, he was the most naturally talented level designer ever!


I was a high schooler developing a web-based multiplayer RPG game around this time and remember being so impressed and intimidated by Graal.


I have been tinkering on something similar - I had no idea this already existed, and so long ago. Absolutely amazing.


Sorry, nobody likes to be reminded, but by now that was around 25 years ago, not 20! (I got a little confused when reading because around 2002 the landscape was very different already.)


Well, 20-25 is perhaps a good compromise. It had its glory days around 2000-2001 I think.


Zelda Classic holds a special place in my heart.

My older brother downloaded it thinking it was just a Zelda 1 clone. I discovered it had a quest editor. And it was a very magical moment for me.

I spent hundreds of hours never completing any of my projects. It was the first online community I ever joined and actively participated in.

Eventually I yearned for for power and discovered Dark Basic. Now I’m a software dev.

Zelda Classic was a major spark in my life. And it’s a really cool piece of software. 100% original code, (obviously the default assets are lifted… from another project). It’s got to be a 20 year old project at this point.


Haha, cool!

My developer career also started with gaming.

The StarCraft map/script editor was my entry drug.


I already knew a few languages, but I credit quake C for teaching me to code at scale and work in large code bases, as well as tipping me towards a software/firmware career vs biochem.


Back then I spent a hell lot of time trying to figure out how Blizzard managed to order corsairs to cast spells on certain area. Years later figured out there was an internal functionality not exposed to outsiders.


I didn't do actual scripting there, but through the gui you could set up events to happen on various triggers. That really sparked something in me.


yes, same for me.


Ditto. my most popular map was probably Toads turret defense


Similar story, just a, ahem, few years earlier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set commodore64 ftw.

Good times.


I followed a very similar path: never getting very far in many many different projects I started with it as a kid, but having it serve as a motivator to work with other tools like Dark Basic, GameMaker, RPG Maker, etc.

Almost as instrumental as my dad's Ti 83 Plus in my eventual career path


GameMaker and RPG Maker just never quite stuck with me the way Zelda Classic did. But my kids are getting to that age where they want to "make games". So I'm hoping something like that would be fun for them.

I remember getting the Ti83+ in High School and trying to make a Snake game. I followed a tutorial, and I barely knew what I was doing. But man, was it fun!


TIL about Zelda Classic which has apparently been around a long time https://www.zeldaclassic.com/development-history/

Very cool port, I like that it tries to integrate it into the browser features instead of calling it a day after compiling. The lack of D-pad support is a bit jarring considering gamepads are supported but it was still very playable.


You should be able to reconfigure the controls to use the dpad instead of the joystick. The menu is behind the settings dropdown (click to see): https://imgur.com/a/hQEEVTt

Might make sense to have dpad be the default.


I'm ashamed I haven't heard of Zelda Classic. As a Nintendo fanboy (my github handle is kintendo), I thank you!

Also thank you for this work! When WASM was first announced this is the kind of project that I envisioned we'd see more of. Instead, everything has been mobile-centric and app-centric but you give me hope.


There is also https://www.neilb.net/n64wasm/ , but you have to bring your own rom.


Just today I ended up giving up on HTML5 gamedev because of the Chrome extra frame of lag issue:

https://www.vsynctester.com/

If you have Godot or Unity or some other game engine that does web exports, try playing the native and web versions back-to-back of any game that draws a software mouse cursor, and don't hide the native hardware cursor so you can compare how much the software cursor lags the hardware cursor.

The cynic in me says Google deliberately adds lag to browser games to guard the multi-billions of Play Store game revenues. Web audio has 300ish millisecond latency on many (not all) Android devices.


Oh thank goodness, so it's not just me who is driven insane by the mouse lag in browser input.

And while I understand your cynicism, I don't think it's deliberate as much as it's complacency, given that it's latency issues all the way down when it comes to modern user interfaces.

A literal decade ago Microsoft Research uploaded a video highlighting how much of an effect minimizing latency for touchscreens had on the user experience[0]. The vast majority of tablets still utterly suck in this regard a decade later, and I wonder if any manage to get below the 10ms barrier.

And of course there is Dan Luu's famous 2017 article on computer latency in general[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

[1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/


Thank you! I had never heard of Zelda Classic before, but I'm also not much of a Windows gamer. Porting it to WASM indeed lets me play this when I wouldn't otherwise -- thank you! Awesome work!!


Wow, the link[1] to the custom games ("Quests") made using the engine shows a lot of things that look fun to play.

1: https://www.purezc.net/index.php?page=quests&sort=rating


It's really amazing what some people have made in this thing.


Very neat to see this isn't just a re-implementation but provides some modernization by providing extra menus, and persistent storage. Great work. Helps make me feel a little less bad to download multiple MBs for what would otherwise be a small emulator + 64KB ROM :) edit: typo


Yeah, I thought it was really important to make it a usable as possible. Quest makers can just share a link directly to their quest, and they can get people playing their stuff with zero effort. No driver issues, no downloading and trusting random executables.


I don't know if you're familiar with Zelda Classic, but it wouldn't be comparable to the 64KB ROM either way

Zelda Classic is a very open ended game engine that happens to have Zelda 1 assets baked in

I recall people making entire Metroidvanias with it



Nintendo have had a conflicted stance about community projects over the years. From threatening UltraHLE (early Nintendo 64 emulator) developers back in the late 90s to largely ignoring the Wii exploits and homebrew scene in the mid-to-late 2000s to attempting to hire private investigators to identify and implicate 3DS homebrew developers in 'illegal' activities.

A similar case is when the PS3 Slim was released without OtherOS support and later removed from existing consoles with a firmware-update that really incited research and development into the PS3 console security, which led to a full break around late 2010 and Sony attempting to retaliate with smear-campaign and prosecution(s) for copyright infringement across the USA and Europe. Some of those were more successful than others.

There have been public emulators for recent consoles from Nintendo and Sony and they've managed to stay up without any cease-and-desist or lawsuits so one would imagine they are doing something correctly to protect themselves (such as not being associated with piracy and some of the shady monetisation involved with that).


I don’t believe you read the article there… he ported zquest an engine remake which you can play with your original ie. self ripped Zelda rom.


"I ported Zelda Classic to the web. You can play it here–grab a gamepad if you have one!"


Yep, I thought they'd just include some user made quests/content to showcase the web port but it defaults to loading a replica of NES Zelda.


I'm wondering if it could be prudent to at least make the default quest be one of the custom quests. And maybe remove the remakes of the original games (1st, 2nd, and BS Zelda).

For the classic quests that remake original games, they are made in the ZQuest engine so I'm not distributing any ROMs. However, there are some videogame music files which may be ripped from the ROMs (not sure on their origination). And the graphics are obviously taken from the games too.

Although, pretty much every quest uses some sort of copyrighted material (these are fan games after all). Not sure if any of this falls under fair-use.


I just did the bare minimum and set something other than the original Zelda as the default quest.


It reminds me: a decade ago, I had the idea of porting Baldur's Gate 2 to the web: http://lumakey.net/labs/battleground/demo1/

I initially played with EMSCRIPTEN as well, starting from GemRB, an open-source reimplementation of the engine. But that was boring, as I wasn't really getting any sense of how things were working under the hood.

So I started reverse-engineering the various file formats (a website called IESDP had most things figured out already) and converting them to PNG, JSON and other web formats. At that point I only knew PHP which made it a pain to work with binary data. Then, I started rebuilding the game from scratch: pathfinding, streaming huge maps using small tiles, animations...

10 years later, there's still that one single room and single character that were implemented, but it was still fun times.


That was literally how I first approached this problem of getting Zelda Classic quests to work in the browser. I had initially failed to port it with Emscripten, so I reverse engineered the quest binary format and started painstakingly recreating the engine in JavaScript [1].

I got pretty far but there would have been years and years of tweaks to get it just right, so I gave up.

[1] https://hoten.cc/quest-maker/play/


Baldur's Gate 2 (demo) in WebAssembly. You're welcome!

https://personal-1094.web.app/gemrb.html


Amazing! did you make this? any more details anywhere? what is the license?


This is an awesome explanation about how to port a real (and tricky) native project to WASM/Emscripten. Sadly, the game itself seems to crash in Safari after walking around for a bit.


>the game itself seems to crash in Safari after walking around for a bit.

Apple users need to ask Apple to use a tiny bit of their fortune to make it possible for developers to test Safari and Safari Beta on their preferred OS/device, otherwise small projects can't support it.


I wholeheartedly agree


This is amazing work.. And infact this is the first "Chrome APP" I have allowed to be installed!

>WebGL does not support that, so the entire shader needed to be redesigned

I'm blown away how WebGL has come along. But then theres people like this. Great job!


Not on the web but there is a game engine dedicated to zelda-like game https://www.solarus-games.org/en/games


No word of it a lie, one reason I bought a Switch was to have access to Zelda again.

I am 52 years old.


Oh this is super exciting! I used to be on the dev team for ZC as Joe123 back when I was a teenager, I mostly worked on the scripting language. I left the community about 10 years ago and I haven't seen anything about it since then. It'll be great to have a play on this sometime


Hey joe. I was DarkDragon. CS professor now.


Oh hey! I finished up my PhD in particle physics recently, just taking a break now. Nice to see that 2.5 finally came out, we were working on betas after 2.1 the whole time I was around


This reminds me of The Mana World

https://www.themanaworld.org/

An MMORPG based on the game Secret of Mana, started around 2003-2004.


Is there any work to unbundle web assembly applications from the browser? And further, break apart the monolithic web platform API bundle into something like device drivers?

Because let's say you just wanted a 2d game engine using SDL without shaders and using the mouse. Why do we need to drag the entire browser with 1000 APIs and features into it?

Just add something like a framebuffer and mouse input to web assembly. Distribute via IPFS or something.


Well, you need some sort of underlying platform to run primitives on. Wasm just isn't enough, and isn't meant to be.

But yes, Wasm is not just for the browser, you can run it in Node. Or a custom runtime: https://wasmer.io/


I am very aware of all of that.

The idea that web assembly is not meant to be the platform to run primitives on stems from the political and technical approach initially used to get web assembly inserted into browsers. The basic concept is that it was much easier for people to accept if it was "only the compute part" and also practically speaking only made sense to leverage the extensive UI and other functionality of the browser. Which made it very easy to say it's just for compute.

It's amazing that people are still stuck on that. That just goes to the power of PR and poor adaptability of the average brain. Even Brendan Eich was in a web assembly issue wondering when they were going to add some kind of minimal UI functionality.

Look at for example the web assembly shell and WASI to see how input / out has reluctantly been added to make it so these systems can have some utility on the server.

The only real reason that there hasn't been something like a serious extension to WASI for UI things is because people accept the status quo. We will forever ship a large monolithic overlay operating system controlled by a single megacorp and everyone will use that.

Except for one "competitor" which actually is also mostly controlled by the same megacorp.


So, your complaint about wasm is that to make it useful we have to bundle it with a browser full of 1000's of APIs.

And your solution is... start bundling Other APIs (mouse, keyboard, presumbly touch, a frame buffer) into wasm runtimes?

Then I guess later people will also want, midi, serial/pipes, audio, simple GUI, shaders, opengl, accessibility, screen readers, sockets, account sign in, webcam acess, notifications ... All in a nice cross platform bundle


No, what I am suggesting is to add the basic UI and audio stuff and leave it at that for a large class of applications.

Then the rest of the features should not be one monolothic bundle. Because what that does it make it so that you have to implement every API in order to be compatible with the platform. Which is impossible unless you are a large corporation.

The platform should be carefully explicitly designed to allow subsets of functionality to be implemented and distributed.

Again, starting with the very most basic UI stuff as one common chunk. Without all of the other features and devices.

The point of this is to make it feasible to have many implementations of different types of browsers or subsets of functionality. This prevents us from being locked into a single dominant vendor or two.

The information browsing can actually be the first subset of functionality. Very simple small vector images and a relatively small amount of RST or markdown. Many different groups can make information browsers.

Then you have the next level up / type of functionality which is basically web assembly SDL. This would be used separately but in conjunction with the information browsers.

You could standardize on another set of functionality with shaders and networking support. Or, if you do it right, it may be possible to create a common web assembly interface for each feature, and package up the additional features into something like device drivers which could be shared across "extended" browser implementations. This would allow for diversity of extended media browser implementations as well as alternative "drivers" to be available.


PURE GENIUS the photo at the very end showing the gadget connecting a smartphone with an Xbox controller:

https://hoten.cc/images/zc/gamepad.jpg


On sprites, the Fanwor project has some which are lookalike to the ones of the Zelda for the NES.

https://git.tuxfamily.org/fanwor/fanwor.git


Great writeup!

Trying it out, it does not load in Firefox 81 (potentially due to some restrictive security setting here?) but runs great in Chromium after an update.


I absolutely remember printing off a guide in color to work with Zelda Classic as a kid so I didn't tie up the phone lines with the internet


And I have trouble compiling Apache from source.


Awesome!

One very minor suggestion: Can you tell me what keys to use (in the UI)?

I figured out the arrow keys, but I just don't know what keys map to A & B.


It seems like Z, X, A, and S are mapped to A, B, L, and R respectively! There's some other information as well in the about panel in the top left.


I'm pretty limited in what I can change in the game's actual UI (those "A" and "B" prompts in the game are literally graphics, not text I can just change), so I shoehorned all that info in the About menu up top.


Do you want Nintendo to have a bad day? Because this is going to stress them out now.


Considering how DMCA-happy Nintendo is I'm surprised this is till up.


I was the main developer and webmaster of Zelda Classic for several years in the mid-2000s. Nintendo knew about us because disgruntled users reported us in retaliation for forum drama, but they never came after us. Probably because we were never prominent enough for them you care, but we liked to imagine we were protected by someone high up at Nintendo.


I wonder if you'd just been around since before Nintendo got so extreme and were grandfathered in. If Nintendo will take down the likes of AM2R and the Unreal Engine remake of Bob-omb Battlefield they'd certainly take down a straight copy of Legend of Zelda.


Have you made your way to the ZC developer discord yet? By the way, clearly I'm a fan of your work, thanks for helping make ZC!


I assume there will be a world-editor and multiplayer


The site's theme makes code unreadable when the OS color scheme is Light: https://i.imgur.com/2Sduvye.png

This is happening because the CSS uses `prefers-color-scheme` media queries – you can't use those and also have a site theme switcher.


Sorry about that, I'll have to figure out how to wrangle that dependency's CSS.


I guess you and I are the only ones who use a light theme? I _wish_ my eyes were still good enough to read text clearly on a dark theme....


Doesn't load, but its the thought that counts




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