God of War on PSP recompiled to WebAssembly, running in the browser at 60 FPS
God of War on PSP, recompiled to WebAssembly and running in the browser
A project that recompiles PSP games to WebAssembly, bypassing emulation. God of War: Chains of Olympus runs in Chrome and Firefox at 60 FPS, up to 4x resolution, with working audio and touch controls. Ghost of Sparta also boots. The author explains performance tuning and the challenges of static recompilation, high-level emulation, and WebGL2 rendering.
The first playable build ran at 6 frames per second. Most of the way to 60 came from finding out where the time actually went rather than from making the renderer faster.
- wren6991
> PSP games running in the browser without an emulator. The game's MIPS machine code is translated ahead of time into C++, compiled to WebAssembly, and linked against a small reimplementation of the PSP's operating system and graphics chip that draws with WebGL2.
Feels slightly pedantic to point this out, but this describes an emulation stack. A lot of emulators are already doing some kind of lift+JIT on the target's machine code (just not through WASM)
- pier25
I wonder how long it'll take until Sony takes this down
- fb03
AI is completely cracking up the emulation bubble. We're not even emulating things anymore, we're just reverse engineering things and directly porting games. This is an awesome timeline for old game preservation. These fuckers aren't profiting from the games anymore, yet they won't release their IP, or update their old games to newer, more accessible platforms. So I really appreciate the work these kinds of developers have been doing.
- sigma5
I remember trying to emulate this game on my i7 laptop a decade ago. It was running like 15 FPS.So for me this look like magic.
- mamonoleechi
if you liked this topic, you might be interested in https://thegamingemporium.com/recent/