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Pokemon Emerald Ported to WebAssembly (100k FPS)

Cool but any chance of audio? That's half of the experience.

12 minutes agonrightnour

Cool! I like the speeding up feature. I suggest making the UI indicate that you can press the keys `z` and `x` on the keyboard to trigger the A and B buttons respectively, I figured that out by pressing on my keyboard the A and B keys and then all the letter keys.

Btw, it seems there's a crash when you choose "Pokemon" in the "Fight/Bag/Pokemon/Run" menu:

https://i.ibb.co/tpVV8q83/poke-fight-menu.png

6 hours agowis

Thanks for the info! I will collect all these reports today and get these issues fixed in the next few days when I can.

6 hours agotripplyons

Z and X are old school emulator keys. I knew right away to use them from the visual boy advance / zsnes days. :D

6 hours agosergiotapia

Funny, I've been emulating games for literal decades at this point, but remapping buttons is one of the first things I did in every one of them, so I never knew the defaults hehe

2 hours agofolkrav
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6 hours ago

I know they're pretty standard controls, but I would suggest letting users remap keys.

Enter is off by itself, so you have to move a hand to press start. Switching to space would solve that.

(I prefer wasd for arrows, and h/j for b/a with y/u or u/I for start/select, but I think most b̵r̵a̵i̵n̵ ̵d̵a̵m̵a̵g̵e̵d̵ right handed people prefer arrows.)

2 hours agonosioptar

I'm left-handed and I prefer ZX for AB and arrows for the D-pad. Which is actually the mirror of how the real Gameboy Advance was laid out.

...Why is the D-pad always on the left on all of the controllers/handhelds anyhow, and the buttons on the right? After all, they're aimed mainly at the right-handed people, right?

7 minutes agoJoker_vD

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

11 hours agohawkice

Yeah, I made sure saving worked correctly

10 hours agotripplyons

I couldn't get trading working but maybe I'm doing something wrong.

an hour agoCSMastermind

First thing I checked as well! I've been Poke-sniped, there goes a few hours.

9 hours agoceroxylon

Certain entities seem to be displayed as numbers for me, like "You received a 6" etc when getting my first potion. Anyone else seeing this bug?

6 hours agotheowaway213456

I have not encountered this, but I will note it down as something to look into. Which potion was it?

6 hours agotripplyons

There's an NPC who walks you to the pokemart and gives you a potion. For me that dialogue was something like "You receive a !" and it then said "You place it in the 23 pocket" -- seems related?

14 minutes agochownie

Really exciting to see more games ported to WASM. For anyone interested, I just did a HN post detailing a port I spent the last 5 days on - Xonotic, an arena FPS. Includes a technical writeup too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48428133

5 hours agoastlouis44

This is super cool. Do you have any code up in a public repo that I could peek at? I've been working on and off on a static recompiler for playstation games, wasm was kind of my end goal.

4 hours agopotsandpans

Thanks man, feel free me to DM me on X if you'd like to discuss further, I am planning to push the code to a repo seeing as Xonotic is an OSS game and requires any changes to also be open sourced. And a Playstation recomp implemented in WASM is interesting to think about!

X link: https://x.com/AlexStLouis10

2 hours agoastlouis44

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.

8 hours agowild_pointer

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

11 hours agoLuc

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

11 hours agofc417fc802

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.

7 hours agoorlp

I get nervous releasing just symbols for a game and here is a full disassembly. I have no idea how tolerant the rights holders are to this kind of stuff. I guess you just roll the dice, but the power is in their hands how far they take action.

2 hours agobottlepalm

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.

11 hours agomathgeek

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

10 hours agoyw3410

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.

10 hours agomathgeek

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.

8 hours agoderefr

Perhaps I'm mistaken but the project doesn't need a copy of the original ROM at all right?

To be clear; I don't really understand the law around this - my own country is based on case law which means that even if I wanted to open source some of my reverse engineered games (I have a few private partial implementations of some old defunct game engines in-progress), the distinct lack of prior cases means, sadly, it's prudent not to release them at all while the companies are still active.

6 hours agoyw3410

How is this a port which requires you to provide my own ROM?

8 hours agoLplololopo

Its not requiring you to provide your own ROM so this demo very sell could get DMCAd but Nintendo layers are surprisingly asleep.

7 hours agogiancarlostoro

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.

9 hours agooompydoompy74

or something decentralised, like radicle (https://radicle.dev)

8 hours agoelmt35

Notably radicle is reportedly compatible with seed nodes that bridge between (ie are simultaneously available on) clearnet and overlays such as tor. (I haven't personally tested this just repeated what I read elsewhere.)

an hour agofc417fc802

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

11 hours agoweird-eye-issue

Currently playing Pokémon Unbound, that is probably best ROM hack ever made. I grow up on 1st and 2nd GB and GBC games so Unbound feels a little bit bloated to me with 8 generations of monsters but man... This project is completely new experience, especially playing on retro hand-held like Trimui Brick Hammer.

Then I start to explore another Pokémon hacks and find out that those project has big fan community that are very enthusiastic about bringing new features to classical Pokémon formula. Documents/wiki on web are more detailed than original games has!

For example R.O.W.E mix all kind of modes that you can select, connect Johto and Kanto maps togather, gives you options to limit avalible generations of Pokémon's, so as veteran you can feel more like home.

Another hacks that I need to explore more - Pokémon Gaia and Pokémon Odyssey.

5 hours agot0bia_s

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.

7 hours agonosioptar

This is awesome! It would be neato if you could export and reload your save file, I clear my browser data a lot.

6 hours agovesche

Yes, this has been a highly requested feature! This will be the next feature for me to add after addressing the bug reports.

6 hours agotripplyons

I crashed opening the Pokemon bag on the first fight

2 hours agoorliesaurus

So you’re saying I have 1900 Game Boys in my pocket everywhere I go AND don’t have to buy batteries?

AND - I didn’t have to blow air on the cartridge connector for it to work?

Is this the future?

3 hours agocadamsdotcom

Any way to get sound?

11 hours agogobdovan

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

11 hours agotripplyons

Working on that at the moment. I have a private branch and have something nearly working. Will hope to share soon.

(Not original creator of the port!)

an hour agoWeetile

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).

10 hours agofirefax

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

9 hours agojeremyloy_wt

I chose Pokemon Emerald because it is my favorite of the games that have been disassembled!

8 hours agotripplyons

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.

7 hours agogiancarlostoro

Yeah to be clear, I replaced the internal battery. I don't know if the issue is that it isn't seated properly, it was working for a spell. But I can't solder and don't want my first project to be a 1st gen copy of Pokemon.

Anyways, I just want a "known good" emulator for the game boy. It could be a GBA emulator since that's backwards compatible, but I just want something simple to play Pokémon.

To be clear I was weirded out because an emulated copy glitched out, not the physical one. Physical one just had a battery issue.

an hour agofirefax

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

10 hours agopatrickcorrigan

This is amazing. Are the left right up down controls a bit wonky? If I cycle through the letters in the name select menu it seem to buggily not actually go through it?

5 hours agoarthurcolle

Next step: 100% browser javascript pokémon emerald.

11 hours agooceansky

New LLM benchmark?

7 hours agovorticalbox

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

7 hours agoianm218

WASM is not for games specifically, it's for anything that needs native performance but also needs to run on the web.

6 hours agoprinny_

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.

11 hours agodmitrygr

Yes, it a recompilation of a community decompilation!

11 hours agotripplyons

I think the official source code was leaked, several times.

6 hours agorootsudo

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

12 hours agoeigenspace

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

11 hours agoparasti

Crashed when using a potion vs May :(

7 hours agoNavaie

Thanks for the info, I will look into this! I got past that battle and further into the game in my testing, but I don't think I've tried using an item in battle yet.

6 hours agotripplyons

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.

10 hours agodanielrmay

Question to WASM and low level nerds: is this the sort of things LLMs are good at? Since the end verification is stable and conclusive and you can just "goal" this project into existence until this somewhat objective verification is met.

4 hours agosimianwords

29 FPS for me, what hardware are you using to get a hundred thousand FPS?

10 hours agoInnittech

iPhone 13. Did you change the slider at the bottom?

9 hours ago_vertigo

Yeah, just found that. Now I'm getting 3000+FPS on my ancient Thinkpad T520.

8 hours agoInnittech

What kind of mods and new features could be added?

8 hours agodeadbabe

Nintendo lawyers intensifi

8 hours agozuzululu

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

11 hours agoitsthecourier

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

11 hours agomathgeek

Alternatively, you could have downloaded an existing one. What you did is just a roundabout way of acquiring one of the many WASM Rust GB emulators in the training set. Except it probably now has several problems from reconstruction. You didn't learn anything new from the process. It's just wasteful in several ways.

6 hours agoBearOso

bro, I learned a lot, I did it step by step and discussed everything with Claude, then used the knowledge to build an emulator at work for a rtos machine (WIP)

5 hours agoitsthecourier

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

11 hours agotripplyons

how much docs did you need to supply?

5 hours agoitsthecourier
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