Porting 3D Movie Maker to Linux | Hacker News Reader

Porting 3D Movie Maker to Linux

benstoneonline.com

161 pointsspeckx39 comments

Next logical step would be WASM, I suppose. Then I could easily show everyone in the world 12-year-old-tombert's masterpiece "Fatso Man and Tarzan Baby".

ETA: I'm gonna give it a go with Claude tonight. Need to justify my $100 membership somehow.

UPDATE: About an hour with Claude gave me this: https://3dmmex.pages.dev/

It actually works reasonably well from what I can tell, though I haven't thoroughly tested it.

Here's the WASM source to those interested: https://github.com/Tombert/3DMMEx_WASM

Doesn't work on brave on mobile, says fonts are missing Maybe you can bundle the fonts?

You can actually click "ok" and just continue anyway.

That said, yeah, I'll see if i can bundle the fonts tonight.

Just an update, fixed this by using the Comic Relief font and placing that in there.

My 12 year old 3DMM masterpiece was "Super Poo in the Super Loo". I was surprised this wasn't more popular, so much fun

Honestly there's a huge void online for a new xtranormal

Agreed. Now that 3DMM is open source, someone should make a video about how Kubernetes is Web Scale.

For anyone too young to catch the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

The most fantastic video I've ever seen created in Microsoft 3D Movie Maker is 'Grandpa Found the Car Keys': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGJKeESLBpQ

A very impressive use of the tool to achieve a pretty impressive amount of style within the limitations.

Your point stands, it's very impressive. But Dragon in America was a cut above even that. Just look at the "chase scene" starting at 10:00 (even just 15 seconds should be enough to make my point)

https://youtu.be/i5IJCAhiBhw?si=qsTJgv6MsfjXmEXU&t=600

For anyone not familiar with 3DMM, there was no facility to move "the camera" to any apparent camera movement was just moving each primitive object, as far as I know, one piece at a time.

This was probably made by a couple sixth graders with too much caffeine using the parents' computer on a Friday night.

Awesome! I can now ditch Windows. The year is finally here.

Nice for you, but as a not-so-creative - I can't function without Fine Artist and at least creative writer 1.

TPM tamper detection and bitlocker disagree. Backup your key first...

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/back-up-your-bit...

Just about any *nix platform is a better experience now, but many Steam games are still windows only. =3

Are you suggesting there are games that are not 3D movie maker that are worth playing?

A lot of legacy applications will not work in Wine.

86box is a great option for old programs and games... no herculean porting efforts required. =3

https://github.com/86Box/86Box

A lot of them will.

And 86Box it's a joke compared to the raw performance you can get with DosBOX-X with the dynamic recompiled and some updated W98SE machine in order to RE some old games to run under ScummVM (the Spanish "Touch Games" from Bialplen made for these touch friendly arcade machines with solitaires, Trivia games and such).

I don’t care about products, I just want my 3D movie maker at a silky smooth 120fps as it was intended

Do you find you have issues recognising sarcasm?

Who is sarcasm?

More info from the other chap involved in the port:

https://www.ilande.co.uk/2026/04/06/porting-3dmm-to-linux-pa...

https://www.ilande.co.uk/2026/04/17/porting-3dmm-to-linux-pa...

I wrote about it here:

https://www.theregister.com/oses/2026/05/13/linux-gains-more...

I had forgotten how much time I spent with this software until I saw the screenshot. Thanks for the port!

Kid pix was the time sink for me

And then there’s this: https://kidpix.app/

Here is the blog series from the dev working on the Linux side of the port. (It was a group effort - both authors are very clear about the contributions from the other, it's really nice to read a story like this!) https://www.ilande.co.uk/2026/04/06/porting-3dmm-to-linux-pa...

I used 3dmm throughout my high school making movies for school projects and side projects for laughs.

This is an absolute gem! Thank you!

Does anyone know why the 3DMMForever project stalled? Was technical or was it just a general lack of interest?

This one looks to be the active fork, https://github.com/benstone/3DMMEx

i should have read the article first...

I remember this source was released a while back and some people hacked it together to run on modern Windows.

Yay!

wow, such an amazing job! really a gymkhana of libraries to port/change. makes me think in the (unknown future) portability of the software I create today

That’s excellent. Now do comic chat!

Man, that client was the bane of any IRC Chan-op's existence when it came out.

As a kid without internet, I didn’t even know it was a chat! I liked printing stupid comics

I had never heard of this piece of software before. I would be very interested in trying it out on Linux.

RIP Pozin

Hold up. Pozin died? There's a name I haven't heard in a long time

Brings me back! Well done!

That's peretty cool!!

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