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Comment by justnotworthit | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if something like this will ever happen to xbox 360, ps4, etc games. Or if they'll be long unplayable either technically or legally.

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Standalone emulators are continuing to make progress for each of these platforms, but there's still quite some way to go. Once we get those to a level where most games are playable without issues at full speed porting them to the browser would theoretically be possible (no idea about the speed hits though), though I don't expect that to happen for several more years.

As for the Internet Archive itself, they recently set up their Internet Arcade: Turbo Edition [1], a collection of arcade games from the 90s and early 00s that cover the most demanding emulated games playable in the browser on the site (apart from Dottori-kun, of course).

[1] https://archive.org/details/internetarcadeturbo

> porting them to the browser would theoretically be possible

Even then I don't see it working in practice due to the bandwidth and storage requirements.

>Or if they'll be long unplayable either technically or legally.

Technical isn't usually a problem, as cracks and emulators already exist.

Legality is a problem in theory, but in practice it seems it is just ignored? Actually, what explanation does the Internet Archive have for any of this being legal?

Their DMCA exemption granted by the Copyright Office.

https://archive.org/about/dmca.php

That gets them around the "prohibition on circumvention of access controls". I still don't understand how they can then go and distribute the programs without violating copyright. In fact, I'm still pretty certain they are violating copyright.

They will take down content (and keep it archived meanwhile) if the original rightsholders complain.

20 years ago I would have considered the idea of being able to play every dos game ever made directly in a browser without waiting science fiction.

I guess it will happen eventually; I think the biggest concern with preserving games now is the amount of functionality provided server side that is lost (maybe forever) when the game company switches their servers off.

While that may be true (looking at the history of other games) you can also pretty much count on somebody reversing the server side and putting up a reverse engineered server then.

A great deal of online games of the Dreamcast era (so early 2000s) are being resurrected exactly through this method and people are enjoying them to this day: https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/app.php/page/onlinegame...

I considered fan efforts etc, but things like the audio from BS Zelda relies on someone having saved it in the first place.

Currently PS3 emulator is good to go. On latest CPU's like Ryzen 9 you get even better FPS than on an original PS3 system. Also you can play it on 4K. Last of Us (2013) is playable at 50 FPS upscaled to 4K. I suspect in 5 to 7 years a PS4 emulator would do the same.

Is it really emulating though or just doing some kind of lightweight conversion that can run natively on x86? Because a cycle accurate SNES emulator still lags for me on certain games even on a Ryzen 7.

Well, have fun:

https://rpcs3.net/

It's a very real emulator, just nowhere near cycle accurate :)

It will take a lot of effort to reverse-engineer and then emulate whatever backend these consoles have. 90's games were simple, very simple.

...and there would also have to be another huge jump in (mainly single-threaded) computing power to make emulation at native speeds possible in a browser. Those consoles have relatively powerful GPUs and CPUs.

GPU pass through makes a huge difference in running games in a VM. AFAIK current gen consoles are mostly PCs-in-a-box, I am hopeful for the future of emulating them.

Earlier games were written to the bare metal, so copying the hardware was the hard part. More recent stuff is written to APIs, so you can avoid most of that, but the addition of 3D and more complexity means it’s just difficult in a different way.

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