Alternatives
Products that do what I recovered one of my earliest ZX-Spectrum games from an audio cassette does
Recently, I managed to recover some of my earliest work from the ZX Spectrum era from an old audio cassette. It is a mini-game, that I created as a teen, called "Atomix," written in BASIC with a mix of Z80 assembly — some of which I coded myself, while other parts were disassembled from existing games. I put the game in an modern emulator and recorded a screencast. See the video in my linkedin post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7288665...
- 1IB
Hi HN, I’m a chemical engineer and I manage logistics at a refinery down in Texas. Whenever I try to explain downstream operations to people outside the industry (including my kids), I usually get blank stares. I wanted to build something that visualizes the concepts and chemistry of a plant without completely dumbing down the science, so I put together this 5-minute browser game. Here's a simple runthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is-moBz6upU. I pushed to get through a full product pathway to show the V-804 replay. I am not a software developer by trade, so I relied…
Mar 2026 · fuelingcuriosity.com
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May 2026 · github.com
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Hey everyone! Long time lurker, first time poster. I've just reached beta in my game BoxByte Lyte. -What is it- It's a free 3d arcade game for hardcore players that uses color matching in interesting ways. Also it's a one button game, well movement and one button. Cool huh? The final release will be free too. -What I need- This is a very challenging game, so I really need to balance the difficulty so that it's still hard but not impossible. It would be great just to hear your experiences of the game and how far in it you got. -Where can I report bugs?-…
2015
- 4RE
Hi HN, When browsers killed NPAPI plugin support, thousands of early 2000s web games were effectively lost to time. Macromedia Shockwave, in particular, was a closed-source, highly complex, and largely undocumented beast. So a few friends and I spent the last two years doing something arguably unhinged: rebuilding the entire Director engine from scratch. Today, we're finally sharing dirplayer-rs. Repo: https://github.com/igorlira/dirplayer-rs We intentionally stayed quiet on this until we had undeniable proof that it was actually possible. With our latest v0.4.1 release,…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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2014 · gabrielgambetta.com
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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
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This was an interesting porting project for a few reasons (IMO): - The original game is/was awesome and, from a programming perspective, a wonder -- smooth scrolling arcade game on a 128kb Mac in 1984... - The port was done with a lot of help from AI (mostly Claude Code, but some Gemini CLI as well). I'm a programmer; it wasn't vibe-coded. But I couldn't have done the port of 68k assembly without it. FWIW, Claude seemed better at actually porting the 68k assembly but Gemini was better at finding bugs. YMMV. - I love Redux and Redux Toolkit for state management. For the port, I put the…
Sep 2025 · continuumjs.com
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Hi folks! I know NES emulators have been implemented countless times, in practically every language imaginable. However, having an LLM fully replicate the spec purely from memory—without referencing existing code—is still a significant challenge. It requires the underlying model to have strong anti-hallucination capabilities and solid long-term planning to keep from going astray. Because of this, building an NES emulator makes for an excellent LLM stress test. Here is how the emulator was built: Data Gathering: I asked Codex to download the necessary developer manuals and test suites. It was…
Feb 2026 · github.com
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I am a 50-year-old who left a FAANG Engineering Manager job to build a sci-fi game. I just released Outsider, a sci-fi narrative game with multiple endings. If you want to support my work, the game is now 15% off (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/). I've always wanted to create a game. I moved from Brazil to the US to work at Big Tech, but after a career of customer focus, mission alignment and 360-degree feedback, I wanted to experience solo game development. While FAANG can be soul-crushing at times, I had a great manager and an amazing team. The pay and…
Nov 2025
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Hi HN! This is my first game — something I’ve always wanted to do. It’s a small browser game built with Phaser 3, React, and the phaser template (https://github.com/phaserjs/template-react-ts/). I made it in 2 days (like 8 hours in total real time) using gemini-cli. About 90% of the code was generated with AI, but I learned a lot by making fine tweaks. It only works on PC since it’s a typical WASD + R (reload) shooter. I’d love feedback on: - Gameplay (is it fun, too hard?) - Ideas for new features Thanks in advance! ps: I used cubes as a prototype, but now I kind of…
2025 · cubic-zombies.pages.dev
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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
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Hi I'm the developer of UX-App if you have any questions then fire away :) Just thought I'd give you all some background. I'm a high school teacher by day and developer by night. I was bitten by the start-up bug a few years ago and UX-App is my first product launch. In between a full time job and a 5 month old at home it has taken about 3.5 years to complete the project. I'd like to think its a unique product that holds its own against the existing competition and even has some features that no other tool has. My favorite aspect is the visual code builder which allows designers to easily…
2015
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Thirteen years ago, I had an idea: build a bomb from different stages and materials, call in an airdrop over a zombie-infested city, and let physics do the rest. Set off chain reactions through fuel stations and car wrecks. The catch? There are survivors down there too, so every strike is a balancing act. I’ve always loved messing around with physics demos, and in my head, the core loop was already fun. So I built a few prototypes, but none of them stuck. I never clicked with Unity, and every attempt eventually died. Every couple of years, I’d check the App Store, Steam, or just search…
Jul 2026 · store.steampowered.com
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I built a website for games that catch my eye or have something interesting going on. I made it for fun but then updating became a habit. Maybe you'll find your next "must-play" game here? GitHub repo: https://github.com/RaycatWhoDat/games-list
Nov 2025 · alistof.games
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We did a "Show HN post" 6 months back of our startup and we're very excited to show everyone how far we've come as well as the lessons we've learnt so far! It's been a roller-coaster so far and we think there's lot more of the same to come! We did apply for Ycombinator funding but got turned down :( But may re-apply soon :) For those that don't know, our startup is called Scirra and we make Construct 2 which is an HTML5 game engine (http://www.scirra.com). Our engine allows anyone to make HTML5 games without knowing any programming. It's only me and my brother working on this and we're based…
2012
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You can check the game here: https://select.supply/game/mindmaze. Curious to learn your feedback. I personally loved the game so much!
Apr 2026 · medium.com
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Hi everyone! I'm one of the developers behind this project. I wrote it with my two brothers, Daniel and Ricardo. For years the three of us have been curious about how multiplayer games work, which is why we decided to work on this project. Our goal was to gain a deep understanding of how different players can share the same 3D space, which is why we wrote our own tiny game engine instead of using something like Unity. We wrote the engine using C++ and OpenGL, and we then compiled it to WebAssembly using Emscripten so that it would run effortlessly on web browsers. We are really excited about…
2022 · play.moonlightmuseum.io
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Hi hn, Its been a while since my kid has been dreaming to make videogames, as you know, the entry bar is high, too many technical details are involved. A few months ago, we started making games, we have tried many different ways, from dragging blocks to write code with a high-level library to make it simple, it is still too much work. Getting into the AI boat, I decided to give it a try for making games, turns out that it works super nicely, still, you still have many technical concepts involved, what language should the game be written in? where do you store the file/assets? how do you…
2024 · playcodeai.com
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For anyone interested in how to build a beat-em-up game similar to the old arcade simpsons / ninja turtle games, I just open sourced a very short and fun arcade game that fits in a 64x64px frame.
2024 · gadgaming.itch.io
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Hey everyone, I'm Fabio, a very long time lurker here. Today I want to celebrate and share with you, again, a game that I conceived more than 8 years ago. I shared it last week with all its history (if you're curious) [1], but it just stayed in the "shownew" and never reached the main "show" page, hopefully this time it'll do better (:crossed_fingers:)! What changed since last week? Today I've also published the mobile apps for both iOS and Android (last week it was just web), which are also my first mobile apps ever. So I believe it's still a worthwhile post and something to show :) I'd…
2024 · fiftygame.com
- 22CA
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
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Read an article yesterday about the H.264 codec increasing their licensing fee by an astronomical amount. And as always, my first shot was how hard could it be to try and build a codec which could be that efficient. I've personally been on a drive to improve my ability to one-shot complex features, products, or make even surgical changes. It's been a few months since I've been doing that, and honestly, results have been great for both work and work/life balance. This was a fun experiment. It burned through tokens, but it helped me identify some more improvements I could make to my…
Apr 2026 · github.com
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I wanted to learn more about RAG implementations, so I built something to solve the constant digging through manuals whenever we play a game. It's fairly simplistic, but actually has worked pretty well for some of these conflicts. Everythings Open Source on GitHub if you're curious (or have ideas), and I'd love to hear feedback from fellow boardgamers!
2024 · gamegame.ai
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