AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Reviving a 20-year-old puzzle game Chromatron with Ghidra and AI
Hello HN, I'm sharing a little open-source utility I wrote recently. I'm a huge fan of Brendan Gregg's "BPF Performance Tools" book. However, every time I SSH into a fresh server, most of the diagnostic tools aren't installed there and installing them can be really annoying. I decided to use Nix package manager and LLMs to make this process straightforward. My utility first downloads a "toolbox" of Linux utilities (built with Nix), runs Brendan Gregg's famous "60-second Linux analysis" playbook and then summarizes the results with an LLM. So "60-second Linux analysis" now becomes a single…
Chromatron is a revived version of a 20-year-old puzzle game where players manipulate light and color beams to solve challenges. The creator reverse-engineered the original game using Ghidra and AI to reconstruct the… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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A replayable arcade shooter where you control a snake of heroes. - a327ex/SNKRX
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
I've been exploring new ways of testing Ghidra processor modules. In this repo, I was able to emulate NES ROMs in Ghidra to test its 6502 specification, which resulted in finding and fixing some bugs. Context: Ghidra is used for reverse engineering binary executables, complementing the usual disassembly view with function decompilation. Each supported architecture has a SLEIGH specification, which provides semantics for parsing and emulating instructions, not unlike the dispatch handlers you would find in interpreters written for console emulators. Emulator devs have long had extensive test…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
We’ve been building infrastructure to spin up browsers for AI agents. Originally, we built[0] it as a pool of warm Docker containers running Chromium, exposing: - Chrome DevTools Protocol (for Playwright/Puppeteer) - noVNC (for live view) We’ve been following the unikernel space for a while, so we decided to see if we could get our image on one. We went with Unikraft Cloud[1]. Here’s how it did: - Boot-up time: 10–20ms (vs. ~5s for Docker containers) - Near 0 CPU/memory consumption when idle - Still ~8GB RAM when active (headful Chromium) Potential use cases: - Standby mode during…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4MP
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 →
- 5IM
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 · its alternatives →
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"Game" is a stretch, but I put together this repo containing a pure Rust app which uses SDL2 and compiles to WASM (and can be run in a browser). Older resources were a bit out of date and a bit too verbose for my purposes, so here's a minimal working example.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Been having a lot of fun reading an SC2Replay collection through nom parsers, serializing into Arrow files so that pola.rs can read them and perform data analysis with jupyter lab, plotly or interact with SQL operations, etc. Looking for feedback and ideas on what to progress on. For example, "through history, are my timings getting better?". etc. Also would love to have ideas on what libraries to use to perform forecasting.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8AR
My background project for the last two years has been re-implementing my 2004 C++ shoot'em up game in TypeScript + WebGL, and it's finally done (just in time for the 20th anniversary!) Play the game online: https://nicollet.net/blog/darklaga/darklaga.html Technical article about the remake: https://nicollet.net/blog/darklaga/remake.html I have tested Firefox, Chrome and Edge on desktop and mobile (no access to a device capable of running Safari). It's amazing how much difference 20 years makes: the hardware is so much more powerful, the web…
2024 · nicollet.net · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
- 10
A charming pixel art platform adventure, reminiscent of the good old 16-bit days. Served as the foundation for the retro-platformer Tiny Thor.
2023 · store.steampowered.com · its alternatives →
- 11
So, after years of abandoning Rust after the hello world stage, I finally decided to do something substantial. It started with simple line rendering, but I liked how it was progressing so I figured I could make a reasonably complete PSX style renderer and a game with it. My only dependency is SDL2; I treat it as my "platform", so it handles windowing, input and audio. This means my Cargo.toml is as simple as: [dependencies.sdl2] version = "0.35" default-features = false features = ["mixer"] this pulls around 6-7 other dependencies. I am doing actual true color 3D rendering (with Z buffer,…
2025 · totenarctanz.itch.io · its alternatives →
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I'm an "ideas person" who messes around with AI on a low budget. I got tired of watching my tokens vanish and context windows filling up while agents fumbled around trying to find the right thing. Agents don't flail like they used to with shell tools, but there are still weak/blind spots and back-and-forth episodes — especially when using tools in combination/sequence. So I built "tilth" today. Or rather, AI built it — every line is Opus 4.6. I spent a lot of my precious tokens getting it to "not shit" (at least several of the different vendors' AI overlords assure me it's not…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13IR
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...
2025 · its alternatives →
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It's free and open source. The aim is to have more transparent access to wine prefixes and the surrounding tooling (winetricks, proton configuration, etc...) per game in comparison to Lutris. Same features like statistics (time played, times launched, times crashed, and so on) per game is available in the app.
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
When I was much younger, I used to play a Korean MMORPG called Helbreath, and I also hosted a bunch of private servers for it. I eventually moved on, but I always loved the game’s aesthetics, its 2D nature, and its atmosphere. That may just be nostalgia talking. The community maintained private server and client, which to my knowledge were based on leaked official files, were written in fairly archaic C++. If you’re interested in the original sources, I’ve included the main client and server files, Client.cpp and Server.cpp, in the reference folder. I always felt that if the project was…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I built LunarBasic because I wanted a modern recreation of BlitzBasic from back in the day. I wanted it to have good step debugging features, and I wanted it to compile down to a native binary with no external dependencies. I do know there's an open source BlitzBasic out there but I wanted something simpler and more concise. It does have a "pro" feature set, but for the foreseeable future, anyone joining up will have the pro version in perpetuity (eg I'm not trying to sell anything here). It's early (v0.8.0). Would love feedback on the language design and compiler output, especially from…
Aug 2026 · lunarbasic.com · its alternatives →
- 17
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 · its alternatives →
- 18
I hereby present my little tiny pet project that entertained me for the past six months. In this post, I briefly present Maginet and its technical components. It is a turn-based strategy game that is built using Rust and compiles to WebAssembly with HTML5 bindings, which works on mobile and desktop alike! It comes with many game mechanics and components, including an AI opponent and online cross-platform multiplayer. There is so much to discuss even for a project of a smaller scale, but I am nevertheless excited to share a little bit about how you can actually build a game in Rust,…
2023 · evrim.zone · its alternatives →
- 19
Classic physics engine algorithms — SAT collision detection and Morton Z-curve indexing — become viable on-chain primitives only where the execution model supports dynamic object access at runtime. Here's why EVM, Solana, and Aptos can't run them, and Sui can.
Apr 2026 · docs.merca.earth · its alternatives →
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Hi all, I've been working on tooling that can reverse the work of a linker. It allows one to take bits and pieces of an executable and delink them into working object files, which can then be reused as-is to make new programs or libraries, without having to decompile or disassemble them first. The readme has links to my blog demonstrating some of the use-cases. The most impressive one so far is making a port of a ~100 KiB Linux a.out i386 program to a native Windows PE i386 executable, despite not having access to its original source code or even decompiling it. Currently, 32-bit i386 and…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
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…
2025 · continuumjs.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Hi HN, I’m one of the devs behind StarDesk, a P2P-first remote desktop we’ve been building for ~1 year. We started this partly out of frustration: some popular RDP tools haven’t seen meaningful updates in a long time, and long-standing issues are often left unaddressed. As devs, we really dislike software that stagnates once it “works well enough”. StarDesk is our attempt to do it differently. What we focus on: -P2P by default (relay as fallback) -Low RTT + low jitter > chasing max bitrate -Encoder / input path tuned for real-time interaction -Modern E2EE (TLS/DTLS) UX-wise, setup…
Jan 2026 · stardesk.net · its alternatives →
- 23AW
I’ve spent the last few days prototyping a browser-based game engine stack designed for instant-load, "Roblox-for-Teens" style deployment. The goal is to lower the floor for AA indie devs who want high-fidelity physics and instant web distribution without the overhead of Unity or a heavy Godot export. The Stack Engine: A headless WASM/WebGPU implementation. I’m currently using custom flags and selective streaming to bypass standard browser memory and execution limits. Physics: I’ve ported Jolt (Guerrilla Games) but modified the solver to mimic the original Blam! engine (Bungie/Halo…
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
- 24
an experimental 2D/3D game engine for the terminal - GitHub - andrewmd5/glyphion: an experimental 2D/3D game engine for the terminal
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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