Slashdot Mirror
JavaScript Gameboy Color Emulator
Prosthetic_Lips writes "A programmer named Grant Galitz has released a GameBoy Color emulator written in HTML5/JavaScript, and it will run ROM images stored locally. What's amazing is that it runs the games at a playable speed. We discussed a different, but similar project six months ago, but it seems like this one is pretty complete at this point. It's also open source."
Holy shit someone made JavaScript useful?!?
Well, if you can visit this site on the phone with a modern browser for example...
Finding that your machine is fast enough? Noticing that previous generation native software runs at a good speed, providing you the security of physical barriers and an uptime which doesn't require you to rely on hundreds of cooperating network, storage and service companies? Worried that it's too easy to trust the admins in your own office more than any number of competitors, foreign governments and bored hackers?
Then you want... THE CLOUD. Turn your PC into a graphical terminal and turn the UI and responsiveness clock back 15 years. Show off to your friends that, thanks to the uniquely layered framework making up THE CLOUD, only you have a machine modern and beefy enough to emulate a 4MHz Z80. You too can have what you had with Windows 95, today!
Maybe they want it to run on Windows 8.
Just because it's not obscured, doesn't make it open source. The author retains copyright, and still has the right to place it under any licensing terms he/she likes.
I've no issue with stuff being online. I love the Internet, it is a major part of my life both in terms of entertainment and profession. However let's be straight as to when it is and isn't useful. This "Let's do everything in a webbrowser," shit is stupid. No, let's not. There is nothing wrong with local, native apps and indeed there's efficiency advantages to be had.
Maybe someday we'll have processors so ridiculously overpowered it won't matter, you'll be able to run everything in a very high level language, all sandboxed up, with all kinds of crazy overhead and still have great performance and do it on less than a watt. However until that day, I think there's plenty of room for more efficient things on your computer.
That is all, of course, not to mention any of the security or privacy concerns you note.
I like the progress of technology but I dislike the fadism. People get in to these various fads with no real thought of if they are a good idea for everything. Currently "the cloud" and 3D video top my list of stupid fads. Not that having remote, distributed, data storage and computing is useless in all cases, but we had that before "the cloud." "The cloud" is rather ill defined and just seems to be BS speak for "Let's do everything somewhere else online because... well I don't know but it is an awesome fad!"
Seriously people, use the right tool for the job.
There's a lot of developers out there still afraid to use anything other than C++ for a basic desktop application because, "those other languages are slow".
Euhm. JavaScript *is* slow. In this case, it runs a technology of 13 years ago in a platform-on-a-platform. On hardware that is a zillion times faster than a handheld game computer. I have the feeling computers get more and more sluggish the last years, just because of all this eye candy and layer-upon-layer.
Remember C64 boot times? It was subsecond. Granted, it loaded almost nothing, but it is also 30 years ago. But even the iPad (dedicated hardware, relatively small OS footprint) needs several tens of seconds to boot.
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
So am I the ONLY one that sees this and thinks "Wow, if they can run an emulator in nothing but HTML V5 and JS what kind of malware will they be cooking up with this tech?". Excuse me for being a bit of a party pooper but I fix infected machines all day and nearly all new infections I see are JavaScript based either by using browser trickery (you should really see the Windows Update site they have cooked up for Firefox, it is REALLY good) or some sort of drive by download.
So maybe its me, maybe I'm wrong, but I've been thinking for years instead of bolting ever more onto JavaScript maybe, just maybe, we should be looking at a new language for the web? Maybe something that automatically starts in a "penalty box" until it passes inspection, and doesn't allow a single page to be made up of sometimes dozens of scripts from all over the place?
Because frankly all these tricks like sandboxing and low rights mode just seem to me to be band aids on bullet wounds. JavaScript has been around since 1995 and the web is a vastly different (and nastier) place now than it was then. There has to be some way to let sites have their bling bling bullshit without making the user run untrusted code on their machine.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.