- Chrome: Best experience. Full keyboard lock support, so Esc works in fullscreen without taking out of fullscreen (hold Esc to get out of fullscreen). This is usefull for bringing up the Doom menu with Esc (like many DOS games).
- Firefox: Runs equally well, but Esc exits fullscreen (no full keyboard Lock say Mozilla).
- Edge: Sometimes runs like crap for reasons I never looked into. If performance is poor, try the others.
- Safari: No idea. If you're on a Mac tell me
RUNNING LIKE SHIT?
- Hardware acceleration ftw. Every shader except OFF and LITE is a proper WebGL2 shader so requires GPU hardware support (OFF and LITE filters are just CSS and don't require WebGL).
- Chromuim-based: Check
chrome://gpu(oredge://gpu). WebGL/WebGL2 should be "Hardware accelerated". - Firefox: Check
about:support. The WebGL renderer in Graphics should name your GPU. - Safari: I don't know. It likely just works for you / you have no control. If not working maybe do a software update?
KEYS & BUTTONS
| Fast-forward | backtick | |
|---|---|---|
| L3 | ×4 | |
| R3 | ×2 | |
| L3+R3 | max | |
| Pause | P | |
| Start+Select | ||
| Save state | Start+L3 | |
| Load state | Start+R3 | |
| Zoom | Alt+Enter | |
| Start+D-pad Up | ||
| CRT Shader | Start+D-pad Right | next |
| Start+D-pad Left | prev | |
| [ ] | prev · next | |
| Eject | all four shoulders |
Save/load states work on NES, SNES, Master System, Mega Drive and PlayStation. P, or Start+Select on a controller, pauses any DOS or console game (freezes the picture so you can cycle shaders).
INTERFACE
- Asterix: An asterix * means the game was a CD and its data will be streamed to you on demand. The size you see is the minimum required to start playing. No asterix and the entire asset is downloaded.
- Eject: EJECT button will quit back to menu, but also capture any HDD delta that occured. This capture is auto-applied on next launch (so your saves and in-game config persist).
- Download: The CONFIG area allwos you to download locally everything you would want from cache: saves, config, custom gamepad bindings, emulator save state, etc. Best to download periodically in case your browser decides to clear its cache on its own (if it wants to reclaim space, for example).
YOUR MEMORY ISN'T WRONG, THEY DID LOOK BETTER BACK THEN
PIXEL-PERFECT
On the Telly (CRT)
That waterfall is drawn as hard stripes. The artists never drew it for pixel perfect rendering, but for CRT displays. CRTs saw some colours bleed together, merging into see-through water.
CRT SHADERS: This site replicates the CRT look through the use of CRT shaders. The shader button (between ZOOM and EJECT) cycles through the shaders (enabled when game running). Each title remembers its own shader. You can also use the keys [ and ] to cycle shaders, or Start + D-pad left/right on a controller.
Two of the shaders aren't actually CRT. XBR-LV2 and XBR-LV3 work out which way an edge runs through each pixel and rebuild it as a clean diagonal instead of a staircase, the nearest thing these games have to running at a higher resolution, since their artwork is a fixed grid of pixels with no extra detail to uncover. I don't like it, but some people prefer this style.
OPINIONATED STUFF UNDER THE HOOD
- Misbehaving robots. Any bot ignoring
robots.txtwill get stuck in an infinite link-pit containing Markov-chained gibberish mashed together from 1984 and Brave New World. Any crawlers slurping up data for AI who don't give a shit about websites' own wishes can enjoy having their language dataset poisioned - No tracking bs. You won't find any analytics, google js, telemetry code, or injected cloudflare bullshit. No cookies, fingerprinting, nothing. It's the web as it was in the '90s, before it got all creepy. Full disclosure, I do sniff whether you're using the Brave browser, it's for a singular purpose (below) and ephemeral.
- Brave. Brave users get a short notice instead of the app. It's a deliberate choice; the notice
explains why. I'm sorry if you're affected (honest). You can workaround it pretty easily (I don't go crazy with
detection, I only care that the message is delivered), just ask an LLM and tell it I'm detecting your browser
with its
navigator.braveapi - Streaming. Large CD games aren't downloaded whole. Disc data is fetched in 1 MB chunks on demand; so a massive game will boot instantly and only the CD sectors required while playing will cross the wire. And once it does arrive your browser will cache. PSX CDs are broken into smaller 128 KB chunks (because reasons). There's also an async, one piece look-ahead because FMVs were stuttering otherwise (the WASM emulators are single threaded and so got syncronously blocked waiting for next chunk to arrive. What's that? WASM has come a long way and you can multithread now? I'm not smart enough to multithread my way out of a SharedArrayBuffer, okay? And before your mind drifts to old hardware let me remind you we're in a browser, this entire solution is an abomination)
- Compression. Everything is pre-compressed at the server with three separate offerings: brotli, zstd and gzip. Your browser is given the smallest, most efficient offering it knows how handle (and each chunk is verified by size and sha).
↓ read on demand in 1 MiB chunks, only the parts the game touches
↓ and every chunk is pre-compressed
SYSTEM
- GPU: detecting…
- WebGL2: detecting…
- Performance: detecting…
- Controller: detecting…
- Cached data: detecting…
Cached data is a rough guide, not gospel. Anti-fingerprinting measures in most bowsers round off numbers, cap them, and can even fake storage estimates.
SAVE GAMES
Saves, pad bindings and settings live in this browser's cache, which the browser can clear on its own. Download a backup now and then.
DOWNLOAD packs a ZIP holding a JSON whose binary values are BASE64'd. UPLOAD restores over this browser's cache.
ROOM
PLAYSTATION INTERNAL RENDER RESOLUTION
PLAYSTATION CPU OVERCLOCK
CONTROLLER NOT DETECTED
Press a button on it, or nudge a stick.
Most browsers hide controllers from a web page until the pad sends something.