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MAME Running In Chrome

Posted by timothy on from the ok-now-iterate-and-1-and-2-and-switch dept.

An anonymous reader writes to point out this interesting outgrowth of Google's Native Client: a Google engineer has ported MAME 0.143 to the browser-based platform, and written about the process in detail, outlining the overall strategy employed as well as specific problems that MAME presented. An impressive postscript from the conclusion: "The port of MAME was relatively challenging; combined with figuring out how to port SDL-based games and load resources in Native Client, the overall effort took us about 4 days to complete."

3 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Is Google trying to fragment web? by errandum · · Score: 5, Informative

    I don't see your problem. It's not like they won't be supporting the standard, investing on their platform (that they even consider big enough to be your whole PC UI).

    I, for one, like the idea that I can have desktop quality applications running independent of platform on my browser - and wouldn't mind if this became the standard. By uniting all OS'es under this platform, I don't believe that there is fragmentation (what exists now IS fragmentation)

  2. Two BIG differences between NaCl and ActiveX by YA_Python_dev · · Score: 5, Informative

    1) NaCl is free/open source software, both the SDK and the client implementation in Chromium; ActiveX was proprietary and every program required to be signed by Microsoft to run by default;

    2) NaCl is secure (see this IEEE article, it's very interesting) and designed to be portable to different browsers and OSes; you can safely run untrusted code, just like you would do with JavaScript; ActiveX required not only to trust that the controls weren't malicious, but also to trust that they all were free of security bugs: if only a single signed ActiveX control somewhere had a security bug, it could be exploited to p0wn Windows PCs (that's why Microsoft had a growing list of signed controls and another growing list of signed-but-blacklisted controls).

    Native Client is certainly not perfect, but please don't compare it to ActiveX. Entirely different beast.

    Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and not anyone else. IANARE.

    --
    There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
  3. Re:Is Google trying to fragment web? by Justin_Schuh · · Score: 5, Informative

    I can appreciate your confusion, but comparing NaCl to ActiveX doesn't really make sense. Once you instantiate an ActiveX control it runs arbitrary code at your full user privilege. Whereas NaCl is much more accurately compared to the restricted execution environment of a virtual machine, such as Java, .NET CLR, or even JITed JavaScript. It's just that NaCl virtualizes a well-defined subset of an existing hardware instruction set, rather than one developed specifically for it. That virtualization (and the associated instruction validation) is the primary security mechanism, and is typical of a VM environment. The process sandbox is just a defense-in-depth measure (and a very strong one) layered underneath an existing VM sandbox.

    However, there's no reason to take my word for it. If you research it a bit you should find that NaCl has a comparable or (in most cases) a more robust security model compared to the web-delivered execution environments most people are already running.