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Comment by rocky1138 | Hacker News Reader

The comment in TFA about exporting the saved game data via URL is a great idea. Imagine being able to send someone to a specific point in a videogame by URL or share an old Wordperfect document, including the content, via a huge URL.

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It wouldn't work. Most browsers have a limit of about 2000 characters. Assuming a base64 encoding, it means you have about 1K of available data (since most saves have a power-of-2 size), far from being enough for any real game (especially if you want a save state, instead of an actual save - that would require to store the entire emulator state, which are at least a few megabytes tall).

State could be stored to something like Amazon S3 and referenced using a unique ID, which would then become part of the URL given to the user.

BrowserFS actually supports Dropbox integration already... so you could do the same with a Dropbox shared folder.

(Sidenote: I'm the author of BrowserFS, and helped implement this feature.)

I suppose that's true. But, remember, a lot of old console games used passcodes instead of saved states. So for some of this, it might actually work!

Depends on the browser but there's usually a 1k character limit which isn't a great deal of state. Perhaps that's counted badly so you can get 1000 char * 4 bytes for unicode, but I wouldn't bet on it being handled the same in different browsers anyway.

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