I saw a post about someone porting the old 3D Movie Maker software to Linux. I used to love playing with 3DMM as a kid, and I was excited to be able to easily play it on Linux, so I cloned the repository, compiled it, and indeed did have considerable fun remaking 12-year-old-Tombert’s masterpiece “Fatso Man and Tarzan Baby”. I expect the Academy will be knocking on my door any minute and I can quit this sham of a “software” career.
However, immediately after that excitement I also realized that there’s no reason that it has to be specifically ported to every platform. WebAssembly has gotten become fairly performant, and more importantly, it’s portable on basically every platform now as well. Instead of manually writing a port of every game to every platform, why not outsource this task to the browser makers, especially for twenty-five year old software that doesn’t need 2026 CPU speeds?
I have basically no life and I seemingly never leave my house anymore, so I fired up Claude, and asked it to port the game to WebAssembly with Emscripten. After about an hour of back and forth, I eventually got it working, and now 3D Movie Maker is available to be played in the browser.
I was blown away at how well it worked, and with so little effort, but it shouldn’t be that surprising. The Transformer was actually devised specifically for the use of translation, and while natural language is different from software, it still has enough overlap to make sense.
After that, I wanted to know what else I could port, so I decided to try another open source game that I liked: Abuse. It was roughly the same process: I cloned the repository, spent about an hour with Claude, and then deployed it to Cloudflare Pages.
Now I’m hooked; I want to take basically every game I can get the source for and get Claude to make it work within WebAssembly, and that has been eating my entire weekend.
Short one today, I just thought it was pretty cool and wanted to share. I am working on a bigger project that I will write about soon enough, but I wanted to get something else out there that I thought was interesting.