I remember about 20 years ago there was a (IIRC) Java Applet-based multiplayer clone of Zelda: A Link to the Past that was sort of a forerunner the to MMORPGs we see today. It changed names to Graal Online because of the lawyers.

Thinking back to it, it was really ahead of its time, not only because it was massively multiplayer, but it had a great level editor and was doing user-created content in the late '90s.

--edit--

Oldest I could find on the wayback machine is from 1999, but that's a later version that was a standalone exe. http://web.archive.org/web/19991012175711/http://graalonline...

--edit 2--

Here's a nice writeup: https://graal.in/t/graal-zelda-online-historical-thread/1420...

Zelda Classic holds a special place in my heart.

My older brother downloaded it thinking it was just a Zelda 1 clone. I discovered it had a quest editor. And it was a very magical moment for me.

I spent hundreds of hours never completing any of my projects. It was the first online community I ever joined and actively participated in.

Eventually I yearned for for power and discovered Dark Basic. Now I’m a software dev.

Zelda Classic was a major spark in my life. And it’s a really cool piece of software. 100% original code, (obviously the default assets are lifted… from another project). It’s got to be a 20 year old project at this point.

TIL about Zelda Classic which has apparently been around a long time https://www.zeldaclassic.com/development-history/

Very cool port, I like that it tries to integrate it into the browser features instead of calling it a day after compiling. The lack of D-pad support is a bit jarring considering gamepads are supported but it was still very playable.

I'm ashamed I haven't heard of Zelda Classic. As a Nintendo fanboy (my github handle is kintendo), I thank you!

Also thank you for this work! When WASM was first announced this is the kind of project that I envisioned we'd see more of. Instead, everything has been mobile-centric and app-centric but you give me hope.

Just today I ended up giving up on HTML5 gamedev because of the Chrome extra frame of lag issue:

https://www.vsynctester.com/

If you have Godot or Unity or some other game engine that does web exports, try playing the native and web versions back-to-back of any game that draws a software mouse cursor, and don't hide the native hardware cursor so you can compare how much the software cursor lags the hardware cursor.

The cynic in me says Google deliberately adds lag to browser games to guard the multi-billions of Play Store game revenues. Web audio has 300ish millisecond latency on many (not all) Android devices.

Thank you! I had never heard of Zelda Classic before, but I'm also not much of a Windows gamer. Porting it to WASM indeed lets me play this when I wouldn't otherwise -- thank you! Awesome work!!

Wow, the link[1] to the custom games ("Quests") made using the engine shows a lot of things that look fun to play.

1: https://www.purezc.net/index.php?page=quests&sort=rating

Very neat to see this isn't just a re-implementation but provides some modernization by providing extra menus, and persistent storage. Great work. Helps make me feel a little less bad to download multiple MBs for what would otherwise be a small emulator + 64KB ROM :) edit: typo

This is as awesome as it is illegal :)

God speed to OP.

https://torrentfreak.com/images/storman-judgment.pdf

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4615448-Nintendo-Lov...

It reminds me: a decade ago, I had the idea of porting Baldur's Gate 2 to the web: http://lumakey.net/labs/battleground/demo1/

I initially played with EMSCRIPTEN as well, starting from GemRB, an open-source reimplementation of the engine. But that was boring, as I wasn't really getting any sense of how things were working under the hood.

So I started reverse-engineering the various file formats (a website called IESDP had most things figured out already) and converting them to PNG, JSON and other web formats. At that point I only knew PHP which made it a pain to work with binary data. Then, I started rebuilding the game from scratch: pathfinding, streaming huge maps using small tiles, animations...

10 years later, there's still that one single room and single character that were implemented, but it was still fun times.

This is an awesome explanation about how to port a real (and tricky) native project to WASM/Emscripten. Sadly, the game itself seems to crash in Safari after walking around for a bit.

This is amazing work.. And infact this is the first "Chrome APP" I have allowed to be installed!

>WebGL does not support that, so the entire shader needed to be redesigned

I'm blown away how WebGL has come along. But then theres people like this. Great job!

Not on the web but there is a game engine dedicated to zelda-like game https://www.solarus-games.org/en/games

No word of it a lie, one reason I bought a Switch was to have access to Zelda again.

I am 52 years old.

Oh this is super exciting! I used to be on the dev team for ZC as Joe123 back when I was a teenager, I mostly worked on the scripting language. I left the community about 10 years ago and I haven't seen anything about it since then. It'll be great to have a play on this sometime

This reminds me of The Mana World

https://www.themanaworld.org/

An MMORPG based on the game Secret of Mana, started around 2003-2004.

Is there any work to unbundle web assembly applications from the browser? And further, break apart the monolithic web platform API bundle into something like device drivers?

Because let's say you just wanted a 2d game engine using SDL without shaders and using the mouse. Why do we need to drag the entire browser with 1000 APIs and features into it?

Just add something like a framebuffer and mouse input to web assembly. Distribute via IPFS or something.

PURE GENIUS the photo at the very end showing the gadget connecting a smartphone with an Xbox controller:

https://hoten.cc/images/zc/gamepad.jpg

On sprites, the Fanwor project has some which are lookalike to the ones of the Zelda for the NES.

https://git.tuxfamily.org/fanwor/fanwor.git

Great writeup!

Trying it out, it does not load in Firefox 81 (potentially due to some restrictive security setting here?) but runs great in Chromium after an update.

I absolutely remember printing off a guide in color to work with Zelda Classic as a kid so I didn't tie up the phone lines with the internet

And I have trouble compiling Apache from source.

Awesome!

One very minor suggestion: Can you tell me what keys to use (in the UI)?

I figured out the arrow keys, but I just don't know what keys map to A & B.

Do you want Nintendo to have a bad day? Because this is going to stress them out now.

Considering how DMCA-happy Nintendo is I'm surprised this is till up.

I assume there will be a world-editor and multiplayer

The site's theme makes code unreadable when the OS color scheme is Light: https://i.imgur.com/2Sduvye.png

This is happening because the CSS uses `prefers-color-scheme` media queries – you can't use those and also have a site theme switcher.

Doesn't load, but its the thought that counts