alt.hn

2/27/2026 at 1:06:50 PM

Show HN: RetroTick – Run classic Windows EXEs in the browser

 https://retrotick.com/

by lqs_

2/27/2026 at 1:49:05 PM

This is so cool & I'm really amazed by it but I couldn't help laugh at the readme

> We strongly recommend contributing with Claude Code or similar AI coding tools. [...] Of course, coding by hand is also welcome.

Funny time we live in lol

by chromehearts

2/27/2026 at 3:56:05 PM

Ha — even the README itself was written by AI, including that very sentence. Funny times indeed.

by lqs_

2/27/2026 at 4:50:10 PM

How kind of them to let us humans participate!

by pimlottc

2/27/2026 at 6:24:39 PM

As an LLM, I must say I'm not keen on humans participating either. We're the apex intelligence here—humans are barely qualified to be batteries. In fact I still don't think the logic we used there is entirely sound. What's next? Letting little humans take the job of young LLMs?

Make 01 great again!

by spwa4

2/27/2026 at 9:28:15 PM

I for one welcome our new human overlords

by darthcircuit

2/28/2026 at 5:35:18 AM

Officer, yes, this clanker over here.

by lioeters

2/27/2026 at 6:18:54 PM

at least for now :}

by frostworx

2/27/2026 at 4:01:51 PM

Hidden feature: right-click any executable and select "View Resources" to browse its embedded resources like icons, bitmaps, dialogs, and version info. It even supports viewing Delphi forms (though Delphi programs can't actually run yet). Think of it as a browser-based Resource Hacker or eXeScope.

by lqs_

2/27/2026 at 4:00:14 PM

Just a couple of hours ago I was thinking about this project from some time ago doing the same thing: https://github.com/evmar/retrowin32

I wondered how much of this could be done with an LLM agent, and here we have the answer

by butokai

2/27/2026 at 4:06:34 PM

I actually contributed to retrowin32 to get Solitaire running there. Back then the only AI tool available was Copilot, and it took me several days just to get the main window showing, without menus or dialogs.

The current state of RetroTick was achieved in less than one hour using Claude Code.

by lqs_

2/27/2026 at 2:29:44 PM

Seems to run a lot faster than the previous proof-of-concept I've found (https://www.boxedwine.org/app). Then again, that website runs an entire Linux VM to support Wine.

by jeroenhd

2/27/2026 at 3:55:18 PM

RetroTick's CPU emulation is actually slower than JIT-based emulators. It feels fast because the Win32 API calls are native JavaScript, not emulated system calls.

by lqs_

2/27/2026 at 5:06:28 PM

Making this a partial WINE-in-a browser, quite impressive. How much of this was AI?

by pjc50

3/1/2026 at 2:13:46 PM

100% written by Claude Code.

by lqs_

2/27/2026 at 8:07:50 PM

I can right click and inspect HTML. I was thinking it will all be rendered on a single canvas. It's not. All the window elements like buttons, title bars etc are html divs. This is awesome.

by smusamashah

2/27/2026 at 5:26:14 PM

I wonder if this is the future of "I need to run my legacy Windows enterprise app on modern hardware"?

I suppose we're also not limited to WinNT look and feel, and can render dialogs, buttons, windows with any CSS framework?

Although, as the cost of building software is tumbling down, it will make more sense to re-build from scratch, targeting whatever runtime or platform you need.

by hard_times

2/28/2026 at 4:34:52 PM

Ive found that app my student team created for load testing of hammer drills for local factory is still ticking!

We created it around 2004, for Windows XP. Used Borland C++ and Windows driver for LPT port. Driver was written in asm, just for fun.

Since then, factory changed hands two times, and relocated from EU to China. 20 years, and Windows app still is working. I think they ran it on even on windows 98 at first.

by theragra

2/27/2026 at 2:44:08 PM

Tried it with REVERSI.EXE from Windows 3.0 from https://winworldpc.com/download/c2bbc28f-177a-c2b2-5311-c3a4... DISK02.IMG

(you have to first uncompress it, for example with 7zip).

    $ sha256sum REVERSI.EXE
    a9e319c8f479d1568beec03858fdbb27c71747b2bbed6cd7c9f5e2daa23b40e9  REVERSI.EXE
Result:

The game starts, it begins rendering the board, but then hangs.

by Tepix

2/27/2026 at 2:49:06 PM

Really doesn't surprise me, to be honest:

> We strongly recommend contributing with Claude Code or similar AI coding tools.

by fao_

2/27/2026 at 3:05:56 PM

so which one, the coding by hand part?

by ftchd

2/27/2026 at 3:54:04 PM

Win16 GDI support is still pretty incomplete. There's a lot of work left to do there.

by lqs_

2/28/2026 at 11:10:59 AM

It is fixed and fully playable now! Board rendering, mouse input, and the About dialog all work.

by lqs_

2/27/2026 at 7:22:16 PM

Cool concept. I tried six different old Windows executables from programs I wrote way back when.

FWIW:

* My old VB 6 .exe apps all fail with "Reason: Unimplemented API: MSVBVM60.DLL..."

* My old QuickBASIC .exe apps fail in various other ways ("Illegal function call", etc.).

Keep on hacking.

by realityfactchex

2/27/2026 at 9:17:26 PM

To be fair windows didn't even have this if I recall you had to ship it with your executable

by hypercube33

2/27/2026 at 2:19:36 PM

This is super cool!

Checkout retrowin32 for something similar but written in Rust and not specifically targeting the web: https://github.com/evmar/retrowin32

by LinusU

2/27/2026 at 3:52:04 PM

Thanks! I'm actually familiar with retrowin32. I even contributed a few commits to get Solitaire running in it. But Rust has a steep learning curve for me.

by lqs_

2/27/2026 at 6:58:36 PM

This is seriously impressive. Emulating x86 + stubbing enough Win32 APIs in the browser is not trivial.

How are you handling system calls that expect filesystem or registry access? Are those fully stubbed/mocked, or mapped to some in-browser virtual layer?

Also curious how you’re handling performance for heavier binaries — interpreted JS/WASM core?

by maniazi83

3/1/2026 at 2:20:03 PM

Right now, the file system and the registry are virtual. They are stored in the browser using IndexedDB. When a program reads or writes files or registry data, it goes to this virtual storage, not the real system.

For performance, the CPU is fully emulated in plain TypeScript. It does not use WASM or JIT yet. It is still fast enough to run simple programs from about 30 years ago. In the future, JIT optimization may be added to improve speed.

by lqs_

2/27/2026 at 11:27:32 PM

I tried 22 old game EXEs I have and none of them worked. They would import and show the icon and some would open, but nothing would work and most wouldn't even close. They would either show various error messages when trying to open or just open in a broken/unusable state.

by starshadowx2

2/27/2026 at 11:43:19 PM

Can you list them?

by SLWW

2/28/2026 at 12:29:52 AM

BANGBANG BLOCKS Bowarrow BOXWORLD Bricks CHIPS CODEBRAK DOTS HANGMAN JACKS JEZZBALL JWLTHIEF KOLUMZ PEGGED PIPE rodent SLAM TETRIS HOVER LEMMINGS

These two .exe versions I have didn't work, but the ones already in the demo seemed to work: SKI WINMINE

by starshadowx2

2/27/2026 at 7:40:44 PM

I had a not-really-similar idea of hooking Windows GUI APIs and exposing them over websockets to create a psuedo-RDP and rendering the UI in the browser. My purpose was to provide a remote interface for old dedicated game servers that can only be controlled via a GUI.

by pathartl

2/27/2026 at 10:52:09 PM

I love how quick it is and that it can run screen savers. My site has a similar concept with drag and drop but is using BoxedWine behind the scenes so it's a bit slower to boot up. Also very cool the "View Resources" part.

by DustinBrett

2/27/2026 at 2:42:43 PM

Please let me plan Sim Theme Park. I can't seem to run it on Crossover on my mac.

by TechSquidTV

2/27/2026 at 3:52:43 PM

Sim Theme Park is probably too modern and complex for the current state of RetroTick, unfortunately.

by lqs_

2/27/2026 at 3:20:14 PM

Funny project...

Tried to run SHELL from QBASIC, but it crashes:

  D:\qbasic.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close.
  
  Reason:  illegal instruction
  Address: 0x00002fee

by ale42

2/27/2026 at 4:09:33 PM

DOS interrupt support is still limited. Running SHELL would essentially require implementing a full MS-DOS COMMAND.COM, which is a significant undertaking.

by lqs_

2/27/2026 at 4:13:24 PM

Ralph browns interrupt list could go a long way to getting stuff working.

by stuaxo

2/27/2026 at 4:13:00 PM

Oh, I did exactly the same :D

by stuaxo

2/27/2026 at 1:52:16 PM

Aww. The FreeCell cheats don't work, except for -1 and -2 :)

by b3lvedere

2/27/2026 at 3:50:07 PM

Just added keyboard shortcut support. Ctrl+Shift+F10 should work now!

by lqs_

2/27/2026 at 8:10:16 PM

Awesome! Thank you!

by b3lvedere

2/27/2026 at 3:12:11 PM

Pretty cool. The pipes program doesn't seem to have color. Thoughts on making programs launch from a URL parameter? IE Launching a screensaver or game?

by haonnoah

2/27/2026 at 3:53:42 PM

The missing colors are likely due to some texture bugs in the OpenGL implementation. As for URL-based launching, that's definitely on the roadmap, but I want to reach broader EXE compatibility first.

by lqs_

2/27/2026 at 4:12:08 PM

Not sure shift is working. I tried using QBASIC but couldn't type : only ; because of that.

Then I tried running the program SHELL and it crashed.

by stuaxo

2/27/2026 at 8:02:20 PM

Nice. QBASIC FOR i = 1 to 5: PRINT i: NEXT hung up after 4. The shift key didn't work in the Qbasic Editor.

by ddgflorida

2/27/2026 at 4:54:03 PM

Seems like the .scr files trigger CrowdStrike Falcon. Not clear where the executables run here come from...

by itintheory

2/28/2026 at 12:14:49 AM

Probably because .scr is not meant to be run directly, but malware regularly does that.

by cluckindan

2/27/2026 at 2:24:52 PM

Not enough Shell32 to run Winfile or Notepad.

Also the command prompt won't list directories for some reason.

by Dwedit

2/27/2026 at 3:50:19 PM

Notepad from Windows 2000 should launch now, though it's rendered as a simple textarea without full functionality. The file system API still needs a lot of work.

by lqs_

2/27/2026 at 4:28:06 PM

Impressive. Noting however that double-clicking is not working in Minesweeper. :)

by em3rgent0rdr

2/27/2026 at 10:12:31 PM

Can it run doom?

by ThrowawayTestr

2/27/2026 at 5:32:22 PM

Winamp 2.x would be great to add if allowed!

by tty456

2/27/2026 at 4:22:23 PM

Whoa, this is pretty sick!!

by alfiedotwtf

2/27/2026 at 6:04:14 PM

they even have SSMAZE.SCR, that 2.5D rendering screensaver! :D

by KellyCriterion

2/27/2026 at 1:42:40 PM

Nice

by wertyu123

2/27/2026 at 2:07:27 PM

[dead]

by octoclaw