Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to asciiQuake
Play Quake rendered as a live ASCII character grid through GlyphCSS, with no WebGL or canvas renderer.
asciiQuake is a playable version of Quake rendered entirely as ASCII characters in a live grid using GlyphCSS, without relying on WebGL or canvas rendering. It's designed for players who want a nostalgic or… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
I've been building a level editor for Quake 3 that runs entirely in the browser: Radiant-style layout, brush and patch editing, CSG, terrain sculpting, and entity editing. It opens and saves .map file and you can play the maps you build directly in the browser using a webassembly build of ioquake3.
Jul 2026 · q3edit.com · its alternatives →
- 2
Quake (1996), faithfully ported to dependency-free safe Rust and compiled to WebAssembly — play the shareware episode in your browser.
13d ago · quake-srp.pages.dev · its alternatives →
- 3
Play a browser Quake port rendered as inspectable HTML and CSS 3D geometry through PolyCSS, with no WebGL or canvas renderer.
Jun 2026 · cssquake.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Render 3D models (OBJ, glTF, GLB, STL, .vox) as ASCII art — in the browser, in React or Vue, or straight in your terminal. A three.js-style API with no WebGL and no canvas: just text in a single <pre>.
Jun 2026 · glyphcss.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Hello HN! We’re a small creative studio specializing in real-time 3D experiences. Netlify approached us to design and build an interactive experience to celebrate reaching 5 million developers. Inspired by the classic game Marble Madness, we created a gamified experience where users control a ball through playful, interactive levels. The goal was to blend marketing content with the look and feel of a game to engage users. The app is built with Three.js [1], using our custom render pipeline and shaders, and uses Rapier for physics simulation [2]. The 2D content is overlaid on the WebGL view…
2024 · 5-million-devs.netlify.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Explore Quake/GoldSrc maps in your browser. Contribute to sbuggay/bspview development by creating an account on GitHub.
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7
- 8OL
Play OpenArena (Quake 3 clone) in your browser with friends! Free FPS multiplayer, no download required.
2019 · openarena.live · its alternatives →
- 9QI
Quake has been ported to the web plenty of times, so that part isn't new. But I experimented with the GitHub Copilot app and Claude Opus 4.8 to take id Software's original source, compiled the software renderer to WebAssembly with Emscripten. The cool part: I added support for procedurally generated levels. So after you clear a level, the slipgate opens and you move onto the next random one... with a new room layout, textures, monster placement, working doors with keys, etc. It's pretty challenging. I also added Soudncloud integration (configurable in Options) so can listen to the new NIN…
Jun 2026 · leereilly.net · its alternatives →
- 10
MeshEdit▲61Model, rig and animate game assets in your browser
Sep 2026 · meshedit.xyz · its alternatives →
- 11
Using a Teletype Model 33 electromechanical terminal (https://twitch.tv/33asr) - ASR33/asciiart/README.md at master · hughpyle/ASR33
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12IB
I've been working on an MMORPG that is now in alpha as a solo developer. Here are the major open source technologies that I use: Blender - 3D modeling software for creating the overall environment and every game object. I've gotten a lot of CC and Public Domain assets from https://poly.pizza GLTF - I export assets from blender to the GLTF asset format JSON - I write a JSON config for every game object that describes things like its name, its interactions, its collisions, etc. Node.js exporter - I iterate over the environment and every asset to create a scene hierarchy. I use…
2024 · alpha.reconquer.online · its alternatives →
- 13D1
I made a Doom source port that runs within a PDF file. I was inspired by the recent HN post about Tetris in a PDF (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218) and I wondered if I could get Doom to run using a similar method. It turns out that old versions of Emscripten can compile C to asm.js code that will happily run inside the limited JS runtime of the PDF engine. I used the doomgeneric (https://github.com/ozkl/doomgeneric) fork of the original Doom source, as that made writing the IO fairly easy. All I had to do was implement a framebuffer and…
2025 · doompdf.pages.dev · its alternatives →
- 14KR
I got DOOM running in KiCad by rendering it with PCB traces and footprints instead of pixels. Walls are rendered as PCB_TRACK traces, and entities (enemies, items, player) are actual component footprints - SOT-23 for small items, SOIC-8 for decorations, QFP-64 for enemies and the player. How I did it: Started by patching DOOM's source code to extract vector data directly from the engine. Instead of trying to render 64,000 pixels (which would be impossibly slow), I grab the geometry DOOM already calculates internally - the drawsegs[] array for walls and vissprites[] for entities. Added a…
Nov 2025 · mikeayles.com · its alternatives →
- 15CP
Hi HN! 2d spritesheets for game development are often distributed as a PNG image, sometimes with a separate JSON or XML metadata document describing the layout, including any animation sequences within the sheet. Sometimes there is no metadata document and you have to work it out and manually write custom code to chop up the spritesheet and reference the sprites you want. I think it would be good if it became standard practice to distribute spritesheet PNGs with the metadata inline inside a PNG "chunk" so the whole thing is self-contained. That way artists can just distribute one file, and…
2019 · mccormick.cx · its alternatives →
- 16
A 3D game rendered entirely in CSS/HTML. Relying as much as possible on traditional html/css features instead of modern graphic APIs. Supports lighting, shadows, culling, etc. Can you escape the dungeon?
2020 · pantel.is · its alternatives →
- 17
CPU rendered ASCII art shader writing tool with hot reloading. - danthedaniel/js-shaders
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
TrueType fonts have a hinting VM that grid-fits glyphs. It has a stack, storage area, conditionals, function calls, and it turns out it's Turing-complete. So I built a raycasting engine in the hinting bytecode. The glyph "A" in the font has 16 vertical bar contours. The hinting program reads player coordinates from font variation axes via GETVARIATION, does DDA ray marching against a tile map in the storage area, and repositions bar heights with SCFS. It ends up looking like a crude Wolfenstein-style view. Small visuzlization:…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
ASCIIDENT▲75Open-world sci-fi game with a design made by text characters
2019 · asciident.com · its alternatives →
- 20AA
2018 · burrow.jollo.org · its alternatives →
- 21
This is a GPU "software" raytracer (i.e. using manual ray-scene intersections and not RTX) written using the WebGPU API that renders glTF scenes. It supports many materials, textures, material & normal mapping, and heavily relies on multiple importance sampling to speed up convergence.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22IR
After 25 years of writing software, I was feeling nostalgic for the kinds of things that got me into programming in the first place: the old DOS demoscene. I spent a weekend seeing if I could recapture some of that INT 13H VGA magic using today's web tech, but with the old-school constraints of doing it from scratch. The result is this portfolio of ten classic effects running in a single HTML file. It's all vanilla JavaScript writing to a element, with no external libraries. It was a fun challenge to implement things like: * The color palette cycling and smooth fading in the Plasma demo. *…
2025 · jdfio.com · its alternatives →
- 23
- 24
This tool turns videos into ASCII pixel art. You can use your webcam feed or upload a video, then use the controls to adjust the colors, resolution, text style, etc. Github repo: https://github.com/collidingScopes/ascii It's built with javascript / html canvas. I'll be continuing to work on this, with the goal of improving performance (it can be laggy at high resolutions) and to also allow image input (turn an image into animated ASCII art). Please let me know of any feedback or suggestions!
2024 · collidingscopes.github.io · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Q3Edit – Edit and play Quake 3 maps in the browser alternatives
- Quake ported to safe Rust, playable in browser alternatives
- Quake ported to 3D CSS (no WebGL) alternatives
- An ASCII 3D Rendering Engine alternatives
- A Marble Madness-inspired WebGL game we built for Netlify alternatives
- Explore Quake/Half-Life maps in your browser alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →