Alternatives
Products that do what New retro portal website in HTML 3.2 with loads of content including HN does
So I was bored and made a retro late 90s style portal website in HTML 3.2. Works with old browsers starting from Netscape Navigator 1.1 (but also has TLS and a tiny bit of CSS for modern browsers). Basically I tried to answer the question "What now?" after you get your late 90s retrocomputer up and running. Where's the fun in games anyway? This thread in HTML 3.2: https://home.goto95.com/hn/item/36148940
- 1IM
Hey HN, I made this free browser extension that modernizes the Hacker News design. I previously launched Modern for Wikipedia [1] here back in December, and it seemed like the obvious next choice to build one for HN too! So I've taken what I learned from building that, and have spent all my spare time this year building Modern for HN. I realize this won't be for everyone, but it was a fun project to work on, and I'm really happy with the result so far. Hope you like it too! Lots more planned for future updates, and suggestions welcome :) [1]…
2022 · modernhn.com
- 2RT
2024 · github.com
- 3THThe HN Arcade▲352
I love seeing all the small games that people build and post to this site. I don't want to forget any, so I have built a directory/arcade for the games here that I maintain. Feel free to check it out, add your game if its missing and let me know what you think. Thanks!
Jan 2026 · andrewgy8.github.io
- 4
Retro web template based on 90's style
14d ago · retro-portal.malkomich.workers.dev
- 5
- 6BH
Hey HN, We’re Philip, Amby, and Declan, and we made “multiplayer virtual computers” that you can embed anywhere, including 3D spaces. We decided to build this because we noticed that embedding third-party apps and websites can be a nightmare due to incompatible platforms, security issues, and poor UX. Adding multiplayer functionality to these embeds makes this problem exponentially more difficult. On the backend, we’re spinning up a VM and running a resource-optimized fork of Chromium which we then stream to participants via WebRTC. Since we’re hosting the servers running the applications,…
2022 · threejs-example.hyperbeam.com
- 7AP
Heya, I’m working on a portfolio website simulating a 90’s UNIX style computer using React and ThreeJS. The style is mostly inspired by SerenityOS, macOS and compromised I had to make to get it to work well within a browser. :ˆ) I appreciate any feedback or suggestions.
2024 · joeyderuiter.me
- 8RR
RetroTick parses PE/NE/MZ binaries, emulates an x86 CPU, and stubs enough Win32/Win16/DOS APIs to run classics like FreeCell, Minesweeper, Solitaire and QBasic, entirely in the browser. Built with Preact + Vite + TypeScript. Demo: https://retrotick.com GitHub: https://github.com/lqs/retrotick
Feb 2026 · retrotick.com
- 9IR
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
- 10HX
Hello HN, sharing my weekend project. I'm a fan of retro GUIs and fan of HN, so I built an alternative HN front end that resembles a Window XP desktop with an old Outlook email client. Archive and github links if you get 500 errors: https://web.archive.org/web/20220122190454/https://hackerxp.... https://github.com/assemblylanguage/hacker-xp
2022 · hackerxp.com
- 11IM
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
- 123P
2022 · henryheffernan.com
- 13UG
Hi all, I'm currently working on my hobby project, and one of the fun constraints I put in was to build using as less dependencies as possible. I chose Go as it has a really good standard library, and all went well for building backend. But for frontend, I was wondering whether I should break the constraint and go for React. I tried options like Web Components, but I really didn't like the ergonomics and I didn't want to use jQuery either. Out of curiosity, I was exploring Go's html/template package to see if I can write UIs in a React-like manner. I found most of the online docs using…
2024
- 14IM
Primarily built this to learn how NextJS works and also a bit about Tailwind CSS. Also has request caching using the WebCache API + expiration which is quite a hacky implementation. Let me know what you think! Source is at https://github.com/say4n/hn, pull requests welcome!
2023 · hn.sayan.page
- 15RG
Created some free sites to play online versions of retro MS games like Minesweeper, Solitaire and others such as Sudoku & Tic Tac Toe. I learned about Cloudflare's Pages at same time to host all the code at no cost.
2023 · retrogmz.com
- 16AN
Checking on some old material to provide some cross-referencing[1] I got this message: We've temporarily limited requests for old items. I've always taken it for granted that HN contained useful information that I'd be able to retrieve whenever I found the need, but this has brought me up short. Perhaps older discussions will eventually become unavailable. Will Google cache still have them? Will the Wayback machine still have them? How convenient will they be to find in the future. Probably this is a temporary glitch to prevent some overly enthusiastic crawler from bringing the site to a…
2012
- 17RE
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
- 18HN
I love the look of HN on Christmas Day, but I never feel like I get quite enough of it in just one day. To rectify this catastrophic problem, I created a browser extension to give me the Christmas HN experience from the day after Thanksgiving until the first work-day of the new year. I also added a fun "extra festive" mode that enhances the festivity level of the site beyond it's normal look. I love it, but I expect it to be controversial :-D It's pretty easy to `git clone` and install it (instructions for Firefox and Chrome in the README.md). I haven't put it in the extension stores as I…
Dec 2025 · github.com
- 19
Hi everyone, french web dev here, About 10 years ago I did a little party game in the browser inspired by Achtung die Kurve genre, it reached HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9494619) and everything went crazy, it's still largely played in open-spaces all over the world today. This past year, I've been working on a sequel: https://curvytron2.com is live. Same goal as the first one: challenge myself, perfect my skills, have fun and give back to the internet community the best way I know; by just putting a free little fun game out there. No ads, no tracking, no…
Jun 2026 · curvytron2.com
- 20MS
Hello HN! I've been working on http://underthesite.com for the last month and now think it is ready for some full strength HN feedback. What do you guys think? It crawls up to 10 pages of a given site while you wait, looking for community-provided CSS / XPath selectors and regular expressions. Additionally, I'd like to appeal to you to submit matchers for technologies that you care about. Technologies are easy to add, so add your favorite jQuery plugins, analytics tools, client-side node.js wrappers, what have you. I'm going to be running a large crawl in the next few days and want to make…
2011
- 21NP
Since it appears to be retrocomputing day on HN, I thought I'd post my pet project. It's a collection of modern peripherals for retrocomputers. I started collecting a list of upgrades for my ideal dream Mac SE/30 and grew from there. The site is currently mostly focused on Apple II and Mac stuff since that's what I grew up with.
Aug 2026 · newold.computer
- 228B
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
- 23TO
Since the HN devs seem to be in dev-mode, I thought I'd put in one more little request. :) This one line of code, added to the head of HN's html, will make the site actually usable on mobile devices: Here are the before and after pics of the front page: http://imgur.com/rMYfqwN,mwPDMvB#0
2014
- 24TH
Hi HN, I needed a distraction from the new and scary thing I was working on this weekend, so I grabbed HN's stylesheet, extracted CSS variables for every colour it defined, then re-applied them back onto HN using its own selectors (plus some extras for bits of HN which are styled inline, and some separation between header and content styling), allowing it to be themed with variables. After using them to implement a dark mode (and a pure black variant for OLED), plugging everything into my existing HN browser extension which already lets you apply custom CSS, and making it handle theme…
Apr 2026 · github.com
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →