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igorlira
dirplayer-rs
Rust2026–2026
igorlira / dirplayer-rs

dirplayer-rs

A web-compatible Shockwave Player emulator written in Rust

5Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
428GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A web-compatible Shockwave Player emulator written in Rust

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by week5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2026-03-08 14:20:07 UTC to 2026-05-09 00:33:41 UTC. Weeks start Monday, UTC.

0122026-03-02 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-03-09 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 commentsMar 22026-03-09 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-03-16 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 2 submissions, 0 comments2026-03-16 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-03-23 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-03-23 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-03-30 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-03-30 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-04-06 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsMar 302026-04-06 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-04-13 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-04-13 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-04-20 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-04-20 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-04-27 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-04-27 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-05-04 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-05-04 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-05-11 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsMay 4

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Mar 22026-03-02 00:00:00 UTC2026-03-09 00:00:00 UTC110
Mar 92026-03-09 00:00:00 UTC2026-03-16 00:00:00 UTC220
Mar 162026-03-16 00:00:00 UTC2026-03-23 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 232026-03-23 00:00:00 UTC2026-03-30 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 302026-03-30 00:00:00 UTC2026-04-06 00:00:00 UTC101
Apr 62026-04-06 00:00:00 UTC2026-04-13 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 132026-04-13 00:00:00 UTC2026-04-20 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 202026-04-20 00:00:00 UTC2026-04-27 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 272026-04-27 00:00:00 UTC2026-05-04 00:00:00 UTC000
May 42026-05-04 00:00:00 UTC2026-05-11 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

5 sources
The blog post reminds me of similar efforts with Shockwave. There's people building decompilers, and runtimes, and if you join enough Discords, you will notice the people in them are cross-contaminating between communities if you will, they share insights with one another, in their efforts towards specific goals. They're hyper focused on making one game or another come back. There's Habbo Hotel, and Coke Studios, as well as other games. The Coke Studios effort is interesting because there were no "private servers" developed at the time, unlike Habbo which had many, and there are Shockwave Xtras that no open runtime supports currently. There's several attempts at a full runtime as well, that run in-browser. Projector Rays (decompiler) really was the biggest release to date, and recently people have been really hacking at it, to some extent
Read the rest
AI has helped to reverse engineer bytecode far as I can tell. For anyone curious, one of the runtimes is called DirPlayer: https://github.com/igorlira/dirplayer-rs
In Significant progress made on Xbox 360 recompilation
igorlira·Mar 8, 2026Submission

Show HN: Reverse-engineering Shockwave to save early 2000s web games (Rust/WASM)

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, we have full hardware-accelerated graphics. Complex games are booting natively in the browser and are fully playable. A few childhood favorites, actually playable right now: Habbo Hotel: https://dirplayer.com/habbo LEGO Junkbot: https://dirplayer.com/junkbot LEGO Worldbui
Read the rest
lder: https://dirplayer.com/worldbuilder We chose Rust and WebAssembly because we wanted a native, plugin-free way to play these games without relying on ancient executables. Parsing decades-old, untrusted binary blobs and undocumented bytecode is a memory safety nightmare, making Rust an easy choice. It also gives us predictable performance with zero GC pauses, keeping frame rates smooth. The biggest headache by far has been Lingo, Director's scripting language. It's massive. It heavily supports 3D graphics, embedded Flash content, and the worst part: Xtras. Xtras were external distributable plugins compiled from native C code. Figuring out how to make those play nice in a modern WASM environment has been a serious challenge. We did, however, successfully implement the Multiuser Xtra so games can create socket connections (which is how Habbo is working!). We still have a long way to go to support full 3D and the massive ecosystem of third-party Xtras, but the foundation is solid. None of this happened in isolation. We built on years of prior work from the Shockwave reverse-engineering community: folks who have been poking at Director's internals for years, and their prior projects, tools, and research made this possible. Happy to get into the weeds in the comments: the RE process, decompiling ancient binaries, the weird quirks of Director's VM, the Rust architecture, whatever you're curious about. And genuinely: what old Shockwave game do you wish still worked? Drop it below and we'll see if we can get it booting.
16 points · Open discussion

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