awsmc

Live multi-touch demo!

awsmc is a highly-customizable virtual console, targetting web-capable platforms.

About

Heavily inspired by WASM-4, this is a language-agnostic game engine with a GPU-accelerated framebuffer, that can run on any web-compatible platform (web, mobile, desktop). Unlike Wasm-4, this console opts for customizability rather than a coherent and stable experience. This includes a full any-sized RGBA framebuffer, and multitouch support, all accessible and customizable from code.

The main inspiration for making this is that I want to make my game https://wasm4.org/play/kittygame/ be similar to Downwell (https://downwellgame.com/), which deviates from WASM-4's built-in gamepad, 160 by 160 display, etc...

But I also want this virtual console to work for anyone who:

• wants to make pixellated-ish GBA-like games with a simplistic API.
• Which can port to mobile, web, desktop (and maybe someday console?? :o)
• Who want to be able to do it all in their language of choice that compiles to Wasm.

Create your own game

First, install Bun. Next, install your programming language of choice that compiles to WASM. For instance, you can build the demo game at src/game.c by installing Emscripten. Then:

# Grab this game engine onto your computer
git clone https://github.com/CanyonTurtle/awsmc.git

# Enter the folder
cd awsmc

# Install web dependencies for bundling
bun install

# Compile the game to a WASM file
emcc src/breakout/breakout.c -o build/cart.wasm -I src -s EXPORTED_FUNCTIONS="['_configure', '_update']" -s STACK_SIZE=8mb -Oz --no-entry -Wl,--stack-first

# Bundle the WASM file & spritesheet into a playable HTML file.
bun run awsmc.ts bundle build/cart.wasm build/index.html src/breakout/breakout.png

Now open build/index.html. You don't even have to "serve" the site - just opening in a browser will do. If all goes well, you should see a playable game!

Publish your game

Your HTML file is now a game! You can host this file on your site, or even email the file to someone and they could just play it.

Acknowledgments here.

How does this work?

To best understand how this console is designed, read the spec here.

But what about...

... Sound? Netplay? Language templates? PNG to source code helpers? And, all of the other amazing features of WASM-4? I mean, why wasn't this just a proper fork of WASM-4?

Sound is planned, netplay is in conceptual stages. I want netplay to also be built in, but have a different design (explicitly-stored runback state instead of just gamepad stat, or idk maybe all the input would be passed around. Also not sure how I want to do discovery of peers, whether to have a lobby server, etc...). PNG to SRC is planned. Language templates is planned.

Honestly, maybe this would have worked as a WASM-4 fork. I guess I was eager to make my own for the sake of learning, and I thought building ontop of minimal dependencies + Bun would be forward-thinking. Plus there's the whole API-breaking configurable memory layout thing... so yah!