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A developer has converted the original 1987 NES game Contra by translating its assembly code into C and then compiling it to WebAssembly, allowing it to run natively in a web browser. The Show HN project includes single-player and online two-player modes, with the latter supporting invite links so a remote friend can join a session.
Lasm is a new toolchain that ahead-of-time compiles standard Lean 4 programs into WebAssembly, letting a single codebase run as a Node server, serverless or edge function, WASI/Fastly module, or browser app. It ships via npm bundling Lean and its Lake build tools, requiring only Node, Bun, or Deno. Its flagship demo, a RealWorld-spec app called Conduit, includes 117 formally proved theorems.
ElementaryUI, an open-source project for writing Swift code that runs in the browser, has published a message thanking current financial supporters and inviting new sponsors. The post includes minimal project details, focusing mainly on acknowledging backers and soliciting further funding.
A project called kube32 brings a Kubernetes-compatible API and control plane to ESP32-S3 microcontrollers, letting kubectl and k9s manage clusters of boards over Wi-Fi or USB serial. Pods run as WebAssembly modules via the wasm3 interpreter, with boards that have PSRAM acting as control-plane nodes and others joining as workers; a host simulator for macOS and Linux shares the same codebase.
A solo SaaS founder has detailed a year of running Dioxus 0.7 fullstack Rust apps in production for products SeggWat and infra.page, both built on Cargo workspaces with PostgreSQL backends. The developer reports shared Rust types across server and client eliminate drift between backend and frontend, but notes release builds on GitHub-hosted runners take 90 minutes.
The company has published earstrip, a C++ header and WebAssembly library for triangulating polygons, under the ISC license used by the popular earcut library. The developers report it runs 14% faster than earcut.hpp in C++ and 1.4 to 2.1 times faster than earcut.js in the browser, and say it triangulated 3.7 million map polygons from a Masovian Voivodeship dataset in 489 milliseconds.
NetWasm, an independent compiler toolchain that compiles C# and .NET CIL directly to WebAssembly without the desktop CLR or Mono, reports that version 0.8.0 produced a 47,798-byte standalone WASI Preview 2 component for a test workload, versus 53,635 bytes for a size-optimized Rust 1.95.0 build of the same task. Separately, NetWasm 0.10.0 reportedly ran allocation and garbage-collection benchmarks 26-40% faster than Mono AOT on .NET 10, using identical C# source run under the same Wasmtime engine on an Apple M1 Max.
Microsoft is forming a new internal group called Xbox Labs, led by Scott (a games executive), tasked with turning emerging AI techniques—like decompiling and rebuilding games for new hardware, porting PC titles to browsers via WebAssembly and WebGPU, and remixing one game's code into another—into experiences for players and developers. The initiative follows recent community experiments that rapidly ported and transformed major titles using AI tools.
A new open-source project, PS2 Web Recomp, statically translates PlayStation 2 Emotion Engine machine code into C++ and compiles it to WebAssembly, pairing it with a reimplemented PS2 OS and WebGPU-based graphics to run games directly in a browser without an emulator. The project, a sibling to an earlier PSP recompilation effort, has gotten Gran Turismo 4 and God of War II playable from boot through gameplay, with saves stored in the browser; users must supply their own disc images since no game data is distributed.
A developer has ported the original Quake engine to Rust, using memory-safe code rather than the game's original C codebase, and compiled it to run in a web browser. The port supports keyboard and mouse controls as well as gamepads, including original id Software joystick configurations, with adjustable mouse sensitivity to account for platform differences like macOS.
A new system converts original DOS demoscene productions into web-compatible formats by emulating the x86 architecture within a browser. It records the demo's CPU activity, translates it into C code with precise timing, and compiles it into WebAssembly, replicating hardware components like the VGA and Sound Blaster. The demos' original loaders and effects operate unchanged, preserving their authentic experience.
A developer has released PSP Web Recomp, a tool that translates decompiled PSP game executables into C++ and compiles them to WebAssembly, pairing the output with a reimplemented PSP operating system and a WebGL2 graphics layer. Using disc images supplied by the user, it runs God of War: Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta directly in Chrome and Firefox, including on phones with touch controls, at 60 frames per second and higher-than-native resolutions, though in-game movies are currently skipped.