Hacker makes original WipEout playable in browser

A hacker has gotten the original 1995 PlayStation game WipEout to work in the browser. He did this based on the game’s source code leaked last year, which made it possible to rewrite the game.

The game can be played on developer Dominic Szablewski’s website. He has that too wrote a blog post about how he managed to rewrite the game so that it compiles on Windows, macOS and Linux. Szablewski used the source code of the original game, which was posted online last year by a group of historians committed to the preservation of games. That made it a dilemma for Szablewski, he says, but according to him, rewriting the source code is fair use and the entire project can be regarded as abandonware.

The game loads in the browser and takes up 144MB there. Most of the source code is in the intro and music; Szablewski has also put a minimalist version online that is only 11MB in size. The game can be played in any browser without the need for add-ons or adjusting settings.

To make the game playable, Szablewski had to rewrite virtually all parts of the game. He rewrote the renderer, memory management and graphics, but also parts of the game itself, such as the hud, menus and sound.

The game was originally written in C. Szablewski says it was difficult to rewrite the game. “The quality of the leaked source code was terrible,” he says. The leak was of the WipEout ATI 3D Rage Edition and also contained a port for Windows. Those ports were all poorly documented, which made it difficult for Szablewski to make something of the game. Szablewski has his own project too posted on GitHubbut says it doesn’t provide any executables with it.