BrowserHack

Another interesting technical detail is that the nethack code contains a lot of synchronous stuff, which is generally hard to port to the web (where events must be short-lived). To get around that, the port uses Emscripten's emterpreter-async option to build (as you can see here: https://github.com/coolwanglu/BrowserHack/blob/master/build.... ). That runs the application in a little interpreter designed for Emscripten output; the interpeter is capable of pausing and resuming code, so synchronous code isn't a problem. More details on emterpreter here: https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Emterpreter

This is fucking nuts! All of the game code is Nethack's original C: https://github.com/coolwanglu/BrowserHack/tree/master/src Porting is mainly accomplished by defining a windowing system for 'web' (mostly in C), right next to the definitions for 'X11', 'Qt', etc: https://github.com/coolwanglu/BrowserHack/tree/master/win And compiling through LLVM via Emscripten, resulting in a browser-runnable JS target: https://github.com/coolwanglu/BrowserHack/tree/gh-pages. Absolutely incredible work all around. ---- That said, fuck tilesets. ASCII graphics master race.