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Comment by thorax | Hacker News Reader

On my 2 year old laptop on Vista + Chrome 5beta, it runs just as fast as it did when I played it sitting at a TV screen eons ago. It's really quite impressive.

... or, rather, it's really quite depressing once you realize this is 25-year-old technology finally making its appearance into (some!) browsers without requiring plugins.

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Why is that depressing? I find it amazing and exiting.

Why do you find it amazing? I saw this first probably 10 years ago with java applets. Is it more amazing because applets are unfashionable?

applets don't work on [insert random browser on device]

yeah, but as people have noted this doesn't work on anything other than the latest builds of chrome and safari. Still impressive but this is not exactly a compatibility win.

But this is an implementation based on open web standards. It'll eventually work on mainstream Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and maybe (if <canvas> is supported and planets align) IE9.

http://twitpic.com/8w3xr :)

getting code to work is easy, getting the largest most influential tech companies to cooperate on building a platform for you to deliver applications that work on most devices in the world entirely for free with no real financial incentive.

thats a plain miracle.

No, it's because Applets, like Flash, are a narrow, specific, proprietary setting. Nobody has ever questioned that Java can handle something like that.

The interesting part here is that it is showing that browsers and JavaScript, with a very different approach than Flash or Java, can now handle this sort of computationally intensive, graphics intensive application without any OS-specific plugins.

> computationally intensive, graphics intensive application

Wake me up when that means something from only 5 years ago and not 20.

I suspect a pure Javascript Gameboy Advance emulator is not too far off :P

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