AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Fossilware – a community archive of retro hardware, software, and games
i built a small site to collect memories of the things we grew up with: floppy drives, Game Boys, cassette tapes, forgotten software, classic games. the tech stack is React, Supabase and Vercel. fair warning: the items on there right now were seeded by AI to get things started. the goal is for it to grow through community submission. there's a submit form, no account needed. i'd love to gather some early feedback and get some more ideas. something i was thinking about in the future is having users create accounts to favorite items and comment their own personal experiences with items. right…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1AR
Software and hardware projects for fun from a guy who loves retro computing
2019 · internalregister.github.io · its alternatives →
- 2
Finally got my hobby OS up and running on real hardware. I love the old IBM thinkpads, so thought it was the perfect machine to get it working on. Been working on it for quite some time now, but this has been a big milestone!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3IM
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 · its alternatives →
- 4
I sometimes pick up random projects just because I can, this was one of those times. I made it as a week long project a while back this year but never shared here, so thought to go for it haha. I created a game inspired by Doom and the backrooms called The Backdooms under 2.4kb in minified html. (for reference, this entire post would be around 1.8kB haha) I had to use a not popular way of using GZip with Zlib headers (had to write my own script for compressing it, also in the repo) to eventually convert it a size 40 QR code that works right in your browser using Decompressionstream API. This…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Looking at websites such as Clerk, I began thinking that design engineers might be some kind of wizards. I wanted to understand how they do it, so I started reverse-engineering their components out of curiosity. One thing led to another, and I ended up building a small library of reusable, animated components based on what I found. The library is built in React and Framer Motion. I’d love to hear your feedback
2025 · reverseui.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Retro Gears▲68A mix of retro, pixels and Micromachines on steroids
2016 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Archeopad▲61Mixture of Tetris, thought-provoking puzzles & playing field
2016 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
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- 11
A list of popular/awesome videos games, add-ons, maps, etc.
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Watch the history of 2D platformers unfold in one game
2015 · store.steampowered.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Evoland▲73A short story of adventure video games evolution
2015 · evoland.shirogames.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Evoland 2▲62An homage to traditional RPGs, travel through time and games
2015 · evoland.shirogames.com · its alternatives →
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CodeSandbox▲21An online React editor with a focus on sharing
2017 · codesandbox.io · its alternatives →
- 18PI
2013 · blainsmith.com · its alternatives →
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I was looking for apps to track my retro game collection and everything looked.... really dated and not great. So I spent the last 5 months making my own. I've made a lot of apps for other people over the years, but this is the first one I've made for myself. iOS and Android. Let me know what you think!
May 2026 · retrodex.games · its alternatives →
- 21
Just published my personal website v1 with some 8-bit style design that gives people nostalgia. Check it out at https://yzhx.xyz/. You can also find the source code on my GitHub. Here are couple of takeaways from the project: - It is a Next.js app built from the template (https://github.com/chronark/chronark.com). I made many changes, but I appreciate the components that came with the template! - The pixel art in the background is from Brandon James Greer on YouTube (https://youtu.be/cxjX8O6YSHI). Please do check out their work on YouTube;…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22E
Hello everyone, A couple of months ago I was introduced to Excalidraw and fell in love with it instantly. The only thing I didn't like was that I couldn't easily save my whiteboards and had to put everything in one whiteboard which started to lag my PC after a while. So I made ExcaliHub. It's exactly as it sounds: a hub for Excalidraw. It's free, open source, and I aim to keep it that way. Thanks in advance for any feedback!
2024 · excalihub.dev · its alternatives →
- 23
I'm working on the Survival Crafting RPG that you would have played on your Apple II back in the '80s. You can think of it as Valheim's gameplay crammed into the tile-based UI of the old Ultima games. It has a procedurally-generated open world with towns and NPCs to talk to, all the resource gathering, mining, crafting stuff you'd expect in a modern survival game, and some good old fashioned dungeon crawling to boot. I've been working on it off and on for the last several months. It's complete up through the Bronze Age (in Valheim terms). Let me know what you think!…
May 2026 · stravaeger.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Made this during COVID. I was into PICO-8 at the time and saw someone ported DOOM to it. I'm more of a text adventure guy, so I decided to port ADVENT. Basically I wrote a FORTRAN-to-Lua transpiler. The hardest part was figuring out what version of FORTRAN the source code was written in, finding a manual, cramming it into the limited cartridge space, but most of all, wrapping my mind around the data file format. Always admired Will Crowther for making this. Very fun project. I recorded myself during the whole process but I never posted a video. Future work maybe.
2024 · lexaloffle.com · its alternatives →
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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 →