Show HN: PS2 games statically recompiled to WebAssembly

The emulator scene could have all the trust it wants and it was still ruined 99% of the time by people downloading ROMs from the first sketchy site that gave them a file download. At least here what is made quickly by an LLM can have its source reviewed even more quickly by an LLM for a decent assurance. Age always helps though.

I mean I’m kind of curious why you left this comment about WASM decomp, which is about as malware safe as one could possibly get!

I am already running NSA enabled and Chinese malw... ai agents on my PC with full access. As if it will make difference.

I really don't like how AI changed my profession, but hey at least I get my programming hobbies ruined too.

same lol. but hey, ive been able to play the xbox 360 version of NFS most wanted perfectly on steamdeck in one press of a button due to the efforts of the fine folks working on these recomps so ill take a small win here and there. ive heard theyve also got the original forza horizon working too. so im stoked.

No mention of AI at all in this repo.

Mentioned in other comment, but this is what I did at https://github.com/cretz/vitaslop for Vita. Generic ARM-to-WASM transpiler.

yes, and its probably where this should go. The recompiler itself is plain C++ and builds for wasm easily, the heavy part is compiling its output (GoW2 becomes about 670k lines of Cpp), which would need clang running in the browser. The nicer route is to have the recompiler emit WebAssembly directly and let the browsers own engine compile it. I already do that for VU1 microprograms that were not seen AOT. It also solves distribution you'd pick your own ISO and the conversion would happen locally, so nothing derived from the game is ever hosted.

A better question: who would want to play Gran Turismo 3 or 4 without pressure sensitive controllers?

Even using the original ps2 or ps3 controller with the right drivers on PCSX2 doesn't really reproduce the same smooth acceleration/brake curve of the PS2.

Playing them on a keyboard or fully digital inputs is just a miserable experience.

wow, how awesome it would be to play those games with Trackmania-like reload-times (if you restart the race in Trackmania, you're immediately at the starting line again).

I assume it would require some additional patching in those GT / NFS games though...

That's easy enough to simulate, too, isn't it? Just pause the game manually at the right spots to make time to get up, make a sandwich, eat the sandwich, take the dog out, walk the dog around the block, and then use the bathroom before resuming. No worries.

Or without the very-much-needed hold-your-breath moment at startup, where you listen to the sounds to see if the DVD actually loaded correctly. You get a ~1 second moment in there where life itself suddenly stops, before you hear the "viump" that tells you everything is OK in the world.

ITYM "Who would want to play Gran Turismo" [Preparing...] <fwsssssssssss rrrmp fssswsss grmp fsswsss grmp fssswsss grmp> <ejects disc, polishes on T-shirt> <fwsssssssssssssssssssssss> "without long CD" [Preparing...] <aw no not again...> "loading screens?"

And you lose the acoustic error handling too: one seek noise meant resolve(), another meant reject().

It's been 27 years since Napster. People are still making albums and movies. I don't think piracy moves the needle in any meaningful way, not with enforcement anyway.

People who want to support a game studio will buy the game anyway. People who do not want to support the studio will pirate the game anyway. It's the same reason why piracy does not matter at all, those people weren't going to pay for your game either way.

Video game piracy isn't new and indie games have always been trivial to pirate. In fact a lot of indie studios opt to put their catalog up on GOG, which is a famously DRM-Free store.

I don't understand this framing of recomps using the word "stolen". For most games the hard part and the valuable part is not "writing the code", it's everything else.

I mean, how much incentive is there to buy when the studios won't let you legally purchase from them, or at best don't actually consider it a purchase when they do?

Especially when, for games of this age, we're talking about going through the secondary market, and paying potentially hundreds of dollars for a physical copy, without the creators seeing a dime of that transaction to begin with.

The incentive will always be there for games that build an organic community. Good examples are a lot of Valve games.

No mention of AI at all in this repo.

Because good stuff will defend itself regardless. If Pratchett or Carlin was alive, I would still be waiting for his new stuff.. maybe even more so in the age of AI. Hell, I am doing a ton of personal projects now and I am still waiting for new divinity, because by know I trust them to do the stuff right. And this is the point: no more corporate slop! All hail AI slop. Second golden gaming age is upon us brothers!

The market doesn’t want them to invest half a decade to a decade into games anyway

Anything that shows its no longer worth it will accelerate that industry using newer tools to make games faster with multimodal language models powering audio, voice, asset generation, rendering as well as agentic workflows for the manual work humans would still be involved in

right now, AAA studios won’t do it and their audiences wont want them to do it, but any dedicated indie developer that would have never hired the teams of people needed for those aspects can do it. a nearby parallel reality where AAA do it based on no ability to protect high valued IP now looks closer with the decompilation route

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It's really getting annoying. There are a lot of people advertising "decompilations" and "native PC ports" that just turn out to be the emulator packaged into an exe that immediately runs the game... Makes it hard to find actual recompilations of games now.

This is how you know that most coders that use claude never read the code, nor their own READMEs.

Theres a lot of lying going on with these types of AI projects. What I want to see is more 100% matching decompilation so that people who dont use AI can modify the rendering eyv glue and port them to new platforms

its still under development, system components will compile to cpu and VU1 modules will translate to gpu shaders

Fair point, the IOP is interpreted. Its the PS1-class I/O CPU, and here it only runs the driver modules a game ships on its disc (sound engine, pad, memory card). The IOP kernel and the 20 core Sony libraries are reimplemented natively. In a God of War2 fight that interpreter is about 2% of cpu time, so it hasnot been worth recompiling yet for me. Its the same relocatable module problem i already handle for SN systems overlays, so its on the list. The EE game code is fully recompiled AOT (a missing function is a hard error, there is no interpreter fallback), and VU1 microprograms are recompiled per game, with a JIT and an interpreter only for programs not seen before. Whats left is hardware; the GS runs on the GPU, plus DMA, VIF, SPU2 and CDVD. Every recomp has to model that part, the same way N64Recomp uses RT64 for the RDP as i checked.

Actually, it's more grey area than you think. See 'interoperability exception'. It does break copyright and EULAs however.

As legal as archive.org collection of DOS games playable in browser, by which I mean not at all. But defunct game studios rarely sue.

i actually developed the project to play my own game dumps remotely via VPN from my home server; making it publicly available is not legal and will be consequences:)

Thanks for pointing this out! i found the issue and fixed it

the GS was the biggest one, i emulate it in WebGPU compute shaders, and texture sampling alone takes about a third of the GPU time, so at 2x GoWw is gpu-bound on an integrated gpu. On the cpu side, VU1 microcode and the GS front end each take roughly a quarter of the time, so both run on their own threads. another one was synchronous GPU readbacks in GT4, and about a thousand tiny effect draws per frame in GoW2 combat batching and caching fixed most of them, and it holds 60fps at native resolution

I won't be surprised if we see mention of this by the end of 2026.

The games themselves are copyrighted, no?

But you can't clean room the art and assets.

Why would you want this to work on a dedicated gaming device that can emulate the titles outright?

Have a look at Decky loader and Emudeck.

There is already a native Linux build (Vulkan through wgpu, SDL2 window, audio and gamepad support), so it can run on the Deck as a non-steam game, and the browser build should work in desktop mode too. Two things are missing, the native host still runs on one thread (the VU1 and GS threads only exist in the web host so far), and since i cant distribute anything built from a game, you currently have to convert your own ISO on a PC. Decks GPU is less than half of the laptop iGPU i test on, so 1x resolution is the realistic target for now.Please keep an eye on the repo update, i'll release the relevant update for u.

Man, the netbooks were amazing for their time, but even by 2008 standards, they were not powerful computers.

At the time you needed a fairly capable gaming PC for PS2 emulation, which is a far cry from the igpu in an atom. Given a PSP is basically a cut down PS2, I don’t think emulation on that calibre hardware is an achievable goal. An atom doesn’t even have a hardware programmable vertex shaders, on windows I don’t even think they had GL 2.1.

I never thought I’d see the day where an atom would be vintage tech, and people would still be rocking said vintage tech. It’s amazing you’ve kept it running and usable. Modern PCs can’t even keep up with modern OS, and you’re still rocking the good old days of single core single thread. Rock on!

I agree with the sentiment, however it needs to be at least OpenGL 3.3, and take advantage of shaders.

I don’t think it’ll happen. The market is too small, and the token costs don’t seem worth the potential upside.

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Thanks:) it isn't cycle-accurate, and for the games i have tried so far it hasnt needed to be. EE code is translated AOT, and each block subtracts its instruction count from a cycle budget. Interrupts, timers, DMA and vblank are events on one emulated clock, delivered at block boundaries, so the order is right and the timing is approximate. Most games sync on interrupts and semaphores rather than cycle counts. When one does depend on timing, it shows up as a specific bug i can fix.for example, ran off an HBLANK timer I had set to the PAL period on an NTSC game. VU programs are not really part of the executable; games upload them over DMA. So i record each microprogram the first time its uploaded and compile it aot, and in the browser i JIT any program i havent seen to wasm. The pipeline details games actually observe are modeled: MAC/status/clip flags become visible four instructions late (getting that wrong put blotches on GT4s cars), and PS2 floats, which are nott IEEE (no inf/NaN, clamping instead), are done bit-exact. VU1 runs on its own thread, synced to the EE through the VIF/GIF streams