Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Cel7 – a 60kb framework for making grid-based ASCII games
A tiny grid-based game framework
Cel7 is a lightweight framework designed for developers creating grid-based ASCII games. At just 60 kilobytes, it provides essential tools for building text-based games with a grid structure. The framework is suitable… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Cel7 – a 60kb framework for making grid-based ASCII games launched in 2020; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1MP
I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…
2023 · zamfofex.neocities.org · its alternatives →
- 2
A top-down 2d game engine, written from scratch in under 1000 lines of C. Development of the game based on this engine is streamed on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/ryanpcmcquen - ryanpcmcquen/basque
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
How small can a language model be while still doing something useful? I wanted to find out, and had some spare time over the holidays. Z80-μLM is a character-level language model with 2-bit quantized weights ({-2,-1,0,+1}) that runs on a Z80 with 64KB RAM. The entire thing: inference, weights, chat UI, it all fits in a 40KB .COM file that you can run in a CP/M emulator and hopefully even real hardware! It won't write your emails, but it can be trained to play a stripped down version of 20 Questions, and is sometimes able to maintain the illusion of having simple but terse conversations…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games Tldr: We’ve made a framework for web-based board games. You can try out some games over at https://boardzilla.io, or you can take a look at https://docs.boardzilla.io to learn more about how to develop your own game. Source is available at https://github.com/boardzilla Hey y’all. My brother and I have made a framework for board games. During the pandemic we started to look at BGA but got discouraged by how old-fashioned the tools were and how cumbersome the development process was. We set out…
2024 · boardzilla.io · its alternatives →
- 5
I'm Robbert, the creator of DataGridXL.js. Last month I released version 2 which includes many new features. DataGridXL is a free (and commercial) editable data table library written in ES6. My goal is to develop the most performant & user-friendly spreadsheet-like data table out there: - It has zero dependencies. You don’t need any framework to use DataGridXL. - It is lightweight (~250kb) and easy to use. It does not even require messing with CSS. - It has its own Virtual DOM implementation to prevent DOM errors. - Developer friendly. Supports all modern web browsers Please take a look at…
2022 · datagridxl.com · its alternatives →
- 6
1kB-ish JavaScript framework for building hypertext applications - hyperapp/hyperapp
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7
lit▲265World's smallest responsive CSS framework (398 bytes!)
2018 · ajusa.github.io · its alternatives →
- 8AS
A beautiful CSS framework in under 2 KiB
2013 · andhart.github.io · its alternatives →
- 9AS
2012 · thisisdallas.github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Wing Playground▲253Iterate on cloud apps in milliseconds, not minutes
2024 · winglang.io · its alternatives →
- 11
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 →
- 12
Hey HN, this is a small project myself and closer friends have been building on our free time (https://github.com/Dr-Nekoma/lyceum), it finally reached 0.1.0, we are open to feedback! The original idea was to experiment with Zig + Raylib, eventually we wrote a small server in Erlang as well. We started by first interacting with Erlang via its C bindings, but this eventually led to some of us to prototyping our own tooling to better integrate Zig types with Erlang, we called such tool "zerl" as its avaliable here…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
As part of the annual JS13K games challenge, I've put together a pretty large (but small-in-code) Metroidvania game that fits in just 13KB of compressed Javascript. The source is available here: https://github.com/arikwex/infernal-sigil NOTE: the current head of the main branch is at 13.6KB due to quality of life patches. The legit 13KB version is tagged in github. Useful hacks: - Using Roadroller (https://github.com/lifthrasiir/roadroller) for compression - Compressing the map data as grayscale PNG paired with some code generation. - Using procedural…
2022 · arineonshark.itch.io · its alternatives →
- 14
1kB-ish JavaScript framework for building hypertext applications - hyperapp/hyperapp
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
1kB-ish JavaScript framework for building hypertext applications - hyperapp/hyperapp
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
A programming language for the cloud ☁️ A unified programming model, combining infrastructure and runtime code into one language ⚡ - winglang/wing
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
I created a small 2D game engine named Tiny. The engine was created using Kotlin Multiplatform and can run on a JVM and JS. Funny things: Games can be created using the programming language Lua. Tiny is designed to help you create and test your ideas quickly and effectively. Not only can you run your games on your desktop computer, but you can also export them for the web, making it easy to share your creations with others. You can create games easily with the hot reload, small API and Lua, which is very easy to learn. If you want to test a game idea, to try to create your first game or just…
2023 · minigdx.github.io · its alternatives →
- 18
1kB-ish JavaScript framework for building hypertext applications - hyperapp/hyperapp
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
A lightweight programming language built with Go. Contribute to confh/Tiny development by creating an account on GitHub.
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20G8
Pages for posting about my work
Mar 2026 · firthemouse.github.io · its alternatives →
- 21
Long-simmering side project that is finally ready to see the light. HAMTs are a cool persistent data structure and implementing one has been a lot of fun. Beyond the code, there is likely some value in the extensive and largely complete implementation docs; basic benchmarks are linked in the README, too. Kind of aiming to be "the libavl for HAMTs". That is obviously a high and aspirational bar but a distinct possibility if it stirs up a little interest and/or contribution. Anyways, it's time for this to go out, collect feedback and maybe even some use outside of toy projects. Let me…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22WM
Try it out! https://glhf.chat/ Hey HN! We’ve been working for the past few months on a website to let you easily run (almost) any open-source LLM on autoscaling GPU clusters. It’s free for now while we figure out how to price it, but we expect to be cheaper than most GPU offerings since we can run the models multi-tenant. Unlike Together AI, Fireworks, etc, we’ll run any model that the open-source vLLM project supports: we don’t have a hardcoded list. If you want a specific model or finetune, you don’t have to ask us for it: you can just paste the Hugging Face link in and…
2024 · glhf.chat · its alternatives →
- 23
Pruto - a tiny "embedding-required language"
2022 · gitlab.com · its alternatives →
- 24
"Zachlike" single-instruction programming game
2023 · jaredkrinke.itch.io · its alternatives →
Also compare
- My platforming game written in C 89 alternatives
- A 2D game engine in under 1000 lines of C alternatives
- Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB alternatives
- Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games alternatives
- Datagridxl2.js – Fast Excel-like data table library alternatives
- 1 KB JavaScript framework for building front-end applications 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 →