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Products that do what Chronos, 2 terminal games through 50 years of hacking history does

CHRONOS I and CHRONOS II: two terminal-native games about the history of computing and hacking. Real machines, real commands. Free, in your browser.

  1. 1AF

    I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…

    2022

  2. 2WA

    Hi HN community, I’m Zach, founder and CEO of Warp, and am excited to show you Warp, a fast Rust-based terminal that’s easy to use and built for teams. As of today, Warp is in public beta and any Mac user can download it. It works with bash, zsh, and fish. The terminal’s teletype-like interface has made it hard for the CLI to thrive. After 20 years of programming, I still find it hard to copy a command’s output; I always forget how to use `tar`; and I always have to relearn how to move my cursor. To fix fundamental accessibility issues, I believe we need to start innovating on the terminal,…

    2022 · warp.dev

  3. 3
    Hyper 2455

    The second generation of the Hyper terminal

    2018

  4. 4AD

    To try it out, simply build the project yourself from source, or use attached bootable ISO image of the system (in Releases on Github) and run it in QEMU. https://blog.vxn.dev/rou2exos-rusted-edition

    2025 · github.com

  5. 5

    I posted once before but wanted to share again because a lot has changed. There's now a fairly strong bot to play against (contributed by a community member) and also correspondence games. The combination of these things helps a bit in finding people to play against.

    10d ago · voronoigo.com

  6. 6

    A debugging-native language model

    Dec 2025

  7. 7RA

    Play: https://p.migdal.pl/chromatron-oxide/ Repo: https://github.com/stared/chromatron-oxide/ (educational purpose only) The original: https://www.silverspaceship.com/chromatron/ Full story in the blog post.

    Mar 2026 · quesma.com

  8. 8

    Build Worlds. Shape History. Publish Legends.

    Mar 2026 · chronostates.io

  9. 9IM

    I've posted this game here before, hopefully a repost is fine as the game has changed quite a bit (improved AI, improved mapeditor, much quicker gameplay, etc). Game is based on JavaScript/Canvas and WebSockets. On the browser side the map is pre-rendered (as a background image), just the mobile units/buildings and animations are dynamically rendered. The lobby server is made in node.js, but the game server is C++ for performance reasons (mainly the pathfinding). I found the C++ WebSocket libraries out there to be too difficult to use so I made my own based on the rfc. Overall I…

    2022 · battle-of-flags.com

  10. 10IM

    Hi, As a 8-bit C64 game coder in eaarly 90ties and currently mostly FE-focused dev, decided to give a go to a simple retro game archive. This is purely fun project - so i decided to post it to HN, mayne it'll resonate :)

    2023 · polishpixels.com

  11. 11IM

    Hello HackerNews, I'm Kaamkiya, the author of this program. It's a collection of minimal games made for terminals, like 2048, Hangman, and even two player games like pong. They're all text-based, but they can actually be quite fun. If you want to test it right now, you can do this: go run github.com/Kaamkiya/gg@latest I started this project out of boredom, honestly. I was bored, and when I'm bored I like to code or play video games. So I coded video games. I kept them really minimal though, because I'm not great at gamedev and thought it would be easier to contribute to text-based…

    2024 · github.com

  12. 12
    SSHTron98

    Multiplayer Tron in your terminal

    2016

  13. 13
    WePlayDOS205

    Play classic DOS games in browser

    2024

  14. 14IB

    I built Chronoscope, a project to explore the world through time. I've been wanting to do this for a while, after being inspired by Ollie Bye's "History of the World" video several years ago. I'm not the first person to have done this - resources like OpenHistoricalMaps are amazing. But, I noticed there were a few disparate datasets / academic databases online, so I combined them together as best as I could (I've linked all sources in the app). To make it more interesting, I also included: - Notable events from the time period (geolocated where possible), sourced from wikidata - Ancient…

    Mar 2026 · shiphappens.xyz

  15. 15

    Time travel! Adventure! The timeless RPG for iOS

    2015

  16. 16HY

    hiSHtory is a better shell history. It stores your shell history in context (what directory you ran the command it, whether it succeeded or failed, how long it took, etc). This is all stored locally and end-to-end encrypted for syncing to to all your other computers. All of this is easily queryable via Control-R and via the hishtory CLI. This means from your laptop, you can easily find that complex bash pipeline you wrote on your server, and see the context in which you ran it.

    2022 · github.com

  17. 17TP

    Hey everyone, I have been trying to build a terminal based app for sometime now and this is an attempt at trying to build a chess app that one can play right inside terminal. I was inspired by `chess-tui`[1] which is a rust based project and was looking to build something similar using python. Luckily I stumbled upon textual[2] recently and it made my task of building this far more easier than I thought. [1] https://github.com/thomas-mauran/chess-tui [2] https://github.com/textualize/textual

    2024 · github.com

  18. 188C

    Hi everybody! Due to Covid 19 pandemic I was forced in my home, so I revamped my book https://8bit.gioorgi.com It is a huge collection of information about the 8bit comnputer era (1980-1985) up to the NES console. I collected information from various source including “The 8bit Guy” videos and specific site (like C64 wiki, nesdev etc). I am using docusaurus to give a pleasnt look to the whole site. Please give me you feedback (and happy new year btw)!

    2021

  19. 19AN

    A few of us here are probably familiar with the original Xbox modding scene and the iconic xbins FTP server. Recently, I came across an amazing tool called Pandora by Team Resurgent [0], which got me thinking about how incredible something like this would have been 20 years ago. Just to clarify, I had no involvement in creating Pandora—I’m just inspired by their work. For those who aren’t familiar, getting access to xbins involves a rather dated process. You need to connect to a channel on an EFnet IRC server, message a bot for temporary credentials, then plug those credentials into your FTP…

    2025 · uppercut.chadbibler.com

  20. 20HA

    This project is a tool for engineers who live in the terminal and are tired of losing their command history to ephemeral servers or fragmented `.bash_history` files. If you’re jumping between dozens of boxes, many of which might be destroyed an hour later, your "local memory" (the history file) is essentially useless. This tool builds a centralized, permanent brain for your shell activity, ensuring that a complex one-liner you crafted months ago remains accessible even if the server it ran on is long gone. The core mechanism wants to be a "zero-touch" capture that happens at the connection…

    Jan 2026 · github.com

  21. 21IT

    Make time make sense. Create and share beautiful interactive timelines from plain text. Also available as an Obsidian plugin. Developers can render Chronos timelines in their apps with chronos-timeline-md library on NPM

    Oct 2025 · clairefro.github.io

  22. 22
    Chronos83

    A simple Pomodoro timer for macOS 🍅

    2018

  23. 23

    CLI Todo app for hackers

    2015

  24. 24MP

    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

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