For some reason the opening settings page made me think this would be someone who just told claude to make a monkey ball style game.. maybe from seeing too much of that on HN. forgive me for that, this is awesome.
As far as i can tell it's not even an emulator or a decompilation running in emscripten or anything like that, they remade the game in TypeScript. love stuff like this https://github.com/sndrec/WebMonkeyBall
I don't see much of a reason to keep a copy of node_modules on the git repository considering they can be reinstalled for deployments and it is generally bad form.
sndrec (the author):
Thank you for this - I'm newbie at webdev so I wasn't sure what was and wasn't needed. I'll merge this soon.
In 2006 the iPhone was announced without an App Store and Apple’s party line was to just build/use web apps.
Fast forward to 2008 and the App Store is launched along with Super Monkey Ball – a day one app – the perfect game to demonstrate the power of a true native app that could _never_ be achieved on the web.
I was in the market looking for some fun iOS games, things that I could play casually, pick up in a moment, load quickly, and not be burdened by the ridiculousness of modern gameplay and incentive mechanics. To my surprise, it was very hard. I couldn’t find anything. This is exactly what I’m looking for.
Apple has had some good chips, but is not a high priority for game developers. If you are on ARM, than the emulation performance hit will heavily limit what kind of games are playable.
The gyro permission request doesn't work on iOS since it's not tied to user input.
If you're feeling brave, you can paste this into your phone's javascript console to add a button that requests permission.
var b=document.createElement('button');
b.textContent='Gyro';
b.style='position:fixed;z-index:999';
b.onclick=()=>{DeviceOrientationEvent.requestPermission();b.remove()};
document.body.appendChild(b);
The GTA Vice City in browser was also really impressive, but it seems it has been taken down. How much of an advantage has AI got on decompilation projects? Complex assembly seems to be still done to some degree by hand these days (see - ffmpeg), and I wonder how big of a training set you could provide. I have wondered if it was possible to take the re3/reVC code and the assembly and use it for training data to get GTA San Andreas on macOS.
GTA Vice City and San Andreas were released on iOS more than a decade ago. I tried installing the mobile version on my Mac with Apple Silicon. It launches fine (if I remember right), it just needs an update for the controls to work, since it was made for touch. I haven’t tried hooking a gamepad to the Mac, maybe that would solve it.
It seems like Rockstar could make a relatively minor update to officially support macOS and sell a lot of additional copies. At this point, they could simply not support Intel Macs and I don’t think anyone would mind.
The experience of re3 and reVC were dramatically better than the new remastered versions, or the iOS sandbox version (which has no clean keyboard binds).
I'm really at a loss to explain why there aren't more web games of this quality. It's totally feasible to make these, and yet they are so rare. I've ported a couple of games myself (https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/, https://thelongestyard.link/cave-story/), but there ought to be hundreds like this.
I tried to put on a movie while I was home for the holidays and my brother instantly complained that the drone shot made him motion sick. Was weird to me to hear that a stationary screen could upend someone's vestibular senses.
So. this code was most likely generated with AI trained on community decompilation efforts, possibly without their knowledge. I know that the community has not yet reverse engineered custom model skinning for the game, so it does not appear here because it wasn't in the training data. Why would somebody who has supposedly already implemented billboard object support, or as the code calls it "flipbook objects", couldn't just stick a similar animated billboard texture inside the ball? probably because they have no clue how the code actually works or is structured.
It's genuinely impressive that generative AI has advanced to the point where this was possible, but it also feels like this was built backwards, extremely niche mechanics in the game are rendered nearly perfectly, where the base elements of the game had this been built from the ground up are implented wrongly or completely absent.
not trying to be negative, friend. I think clearly the author of this put a ton of effort into this project to make it functional, and I am acknowledging that. But, there are no disclosures about this anywhere from the author when so much of the work has been done by AI. I find this especially concerning when you realize the author is soliciting money for this project on X and other places.
Well this was a fun way to see that Firefox on Linux finally fixed the shader cache being broken (at least for NixOS). This is great.
Though I gotta say, I am a little disappointed that there are no monkeys inside the balls. It's just a big ball, at least for me on Firefox and Chrome on NixOS.
The author commented on their ko-fi: "there isn't much to say that would require a big writeup - a lot of the code is already reversed, and anything that's missing can be yoinked from ghidra decomp output and cleaned up, so it's just a matter of transpiling to a different language. plus much of the game's proprietary formats are thoroughly documented by the modding community. time consuming but quite easy if you're just patient haha"
Embarrassingly, I only ever knew this game as Neverball because there was a period when I would only play open source games and this, Xmoto, and tux racer.
dude you like Super Monkey Ball for the HTTP2? Bro, HN, I knew I liked you dude.
Other notes:
Is there supposed to be a monkey inside the ball? That might be lost in portation
The bananas appear to be 'Dole' branded, interesting early example of Product Placement in games.
I like the category of products that are quite simple to make (read cheap) but can be very successful. I know of course that nowadays making something like this would be much easier, but I can imagine at the time it was still very simple for a nintendo console title. It feels like games this simple might have existed for the N64 when 3D was a novelty so building literally anything was bleeding-edge high-tech million dollar projects (PilotWings 64), but in the NGC era games were much more polished and deep than this. I think its every hacker's dream to publish something they coded in a month and have it be an overnight success.
NEVERMIND MOST OF THIS, I JUST REALIZED THIS IS NOT A PORT, BUT A SIMPLER REMAKE
Monkey Ball (without the Super iirc) was an arcade game initially. With a banana-shaped joystick and everything. Then SMB added some extra modes and came out as a release title for the Nintendo GameCube. It was probably intended as kind of a low-budget thing, but ended up being recognized as one of the best games for the system, especially early on.
If you haven't seen Smiling Friends, you're in for a treat. Zach Hadel is a genius.
The mix of 2D animation, 3D animation, claymation, stop motion, live action rotoscoping, and comping in guest animators like Joel Haver and David Post amazing. You know they appreciate the art form.
I've seen the multiple techniques becoming more popular (Wabie shorts), it really showcases a dominance of your craft when you can use multiple techniques instead of overrelying on a simple one. Great comedic/expressive technique as well.
I imagine how it would be with software, you have a whole ass huge website, but out of the blue you download a .jar for Nokia and you have to run it in a nokia or a very niche VM,(Or just in a JVM). Maybe to get a 6 digit verification code so you can log in to an account.
For some reason the opening settings page made me think this would be someone who just told claude to make a monkey ball style game.. maybe from seeing too much of that on HN. forgive me for that, this is awesome.
As far as i can tell it's not even an emulator or a decompilation running in emscripten or anything like that, they remade the game in TypeScript. love stuff like this https://github.com/sndrec/WebMonkeyBall
The website credits include roles for "decompilation" and "porting". So I guess it was decompiled from the original binary and ported to TS.
uh that code looks like claude to me
Pull Request: chore: remove node_modules
I don't see much of a reason to keep a copy of node_modules on the git repository considering they can be reinstalled for deployments and it is generally bad form.
sndrec (the author):
Thank you for this - I'm newbie at webdev so I wasn't sure what was and wasn't needed. I'll merge this soon.
Haha, almost certainly Claude
6 replies →
If anything, it seems that the author used GPT 5.2 (-codex) in Codex, which is actually far more capable at such work than Opus 4.5 in Claude Code.
Can you tell from the pixels?
7 replies →
In 2006 the iPhone was announced without an App Store and Apple’s party line was to just build/use web apps.
Fast forward to 2008 and the App Store is launched along with Super Monkey Ball – a day one app – the perfect game to demonstrate the power of a true native app that could _never_ be achieved on the web.
I was in the market looking for some fun iOS games, things that I could play casually, pick up in a moment, load quickly, and not be burdened by the ridiculousness of modern gameplay and incentive mechanics. To my surprise, it was very hard. I couldn’t find anything. This is exactly what I’m looking for.
Apple has had some good chips, but is not a high priority for game developers. If you are on ARM, than the emulation performance hit will heavily limit what kind of games are playable.
https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases
https://github.com/Moonif/MacBox/releases
Note, Steam will also natively run on many Apple ARM systems now, but again the compatibility of game titles will be sparse. Have fun =3
The gyro permission request doesn't work on iOS since it's not tied to user input. If you're feeling brave, you can paste this into your phone's javascript console to add a button that requests permission.
var b=document.createElement('button'); b.textContent='Gyro'; b.style='position:fixed;z-index:999'; b.onclick=()=>{DeviceOrientationEvent.requestPermission();b.remove()}; document.body.appendChild(b);
Looks and feels great, but is missing the monkey in the ball? :(
Super Ball!
Ball
The GTA Vice City in browser was also really impressive, but it seems it has been taken down. How much of an advantage has AI got on decompilation projects? Complex assembly seems to be still done to some degree by hand these days (see - ffmpeg), and I wonder how big of a training set you could provide. I have wondered if it was possible to take the re3/reVC code and the assembly and use it for training data to get GTA San Andreas on macOS.
GTA Vice City and San Andreas were released on iOS more than a decade ago. I tried installing the mobile version on my Mac with Apple Silicon. It launches fine (if I remember right), it just needs an update for the controls to work, since it was made for touch. I haven’t tried hooking a gamepad to the Mac, maybe that would solve it.
It seems like Rockstar could make a relatively minor update to officially support macOS and sell a lot of additional copies. At this point, they could simply not support Intel Macs and I don’t think anyone would mind.
The experience of re3 and reVC were dramatically better than the new remastered versions, or the iOS sandbox version (which has no clean keyboard binds).
You’re supposed to fork and/or save it.
I'm really at a loss to explain why there aren't more web games of this quality. It's totally feasible to make these, and yet they are so rare. I've ported a couple of games myself (https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/, https://thelongestyard.link/cave-story/), but there ought to be hundreds like this.
Oh man, this nerd sniped me. This brings me back to my childhood :)
I feel like it’s more sensitive than the original but this is a solid job.
I think it's because the Game Cube had a proportional joystick, and using a keyboard is 100%
For me, it's not really the same without the monkey yelling when you fall off the level. (example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIs7bCOCQj0 )
Adjust the input falloff thing and it is actually usable on mobile
Seeing the translation from the decomp to ts is pretty interesting. Makes me wonder how one would actually write it these days
Cool. There's this from 13 years ago
https://experiments.withgoogle.com/world-wide-maze
(only a video is still up)
I tried to put on a movie while I was home for the holidays and my brother instantly complained that the drone shot made him motion sick. Was weird to me to hear that a stationary screen could upend someone's vestibular senses.
Seeing this, I understand.
So. this code was most likely generated with AI trained on community decompilation efforts, possibly without their knowledge. I know that the community has not yet reverse engineered custom model skinning for the game, so it does not appear here because it wasn't in the training data. Why would somebody who has supposedly already implemented billboard object support, or as the code calls it "flipbook objects", couldn't just stick a similar animated billboard texture inside the ball? probably because they have no clue how the code actually works or is structured.
It's genuinely impressive that generative AI has advanced to the point where this was possible, but it also feels like this was built backwards, extremely niche mechanics in the game are rendered nearly perfectly, where the base elements of the game had this been built from the ground up are implented wrongly or completely absent.
I know HN is riding the LLM hype, but this codebase has no LLM in it.
So. Certainly didn't expect this much toxicity and negative attitude this early in the morning.. I think that's enough HN for me today.
not trying to be negative, friend. I think clearly the author of this put a ton of effort into this project to make it functional, and I am acknowledging that. But, there are no disclosures about this anywhere from the author when so much of the work has been done by AI. I find this especially concerning when you realize the author is soliciting money for this project on X and other places.
Are gyro controls broken?
This would be prefect for iPhone gyro controls, but I’m not getting it to work.
Edit: never mind, the permissions are broken:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46791545
Well this was a fun way to see that Firefox on Linux finally fixed the shader cache being broken (at least for NixOS). This is great.
Though I gotta say, I am a little disappointed that there are no monkeys inside the balls. It's just a big ball, at least for me on Firefox and Chrome on NixOS.
Is there any info how this was done?
The author commented on their ko-fi: "there isn't much to say that would require a big writeup - a lot of the code is already reversed, and anything that's missing can be yoinked from ghidra decomp output and cleaned up, so it's just a matter of transpiling to a different language. plus much of the game's proprietary formats are thoroughly documented by the modding community. time consuming but quite easy if you're just patient haha"
Another poster commented that it was likely done with Claude.
I completed stage 10 and it shot me into space but the timer kept going and then counted it as a failure and restarted the map.
skill issue
Really blown away at how well this works on mobile. Awesome stuff
Man, this really takes me back. I loved that game!
Is there a chance Super Monkey Ball will finally see a Dreamcast version?
This is awesome. Monkey Target was my favorite part - I hope that makes it in one day.
WHERE THE MONKE IN THE BALL?!
And the "Aaaah!" when you fell.
Welp, there goes my productivity for the next week
how does something like this work so well but scroll-based animations on mobile still choppy?
Thanks, got to stage 10 without messing with any of the settings on iPhone!
forgot how much fun this game is. really takes me back
It almost works on my phone but glitches out. Pixel 7, Chrome browser
Embarrassingly, I only ever knew this game as Neverball because there was a period when I would only play open source games and this, Xmoto, and tux racer.
so good!
Absolute cinema!
Hahahah no wayyy
I miss the "woop woop woop woop" noise you get when you move though, and it feels a little fast somehow?
dude you like Super Monkey Ball for the HTTP2? Bro, HN, I knew I liked you dude.
Other notes:
Is there supposed to be a monkey inside the ball? That might be lost in portation
The bananas appear to be 'Dole' branded, interesting early example of Product Placement in games.
I like the category of products that are quite simple to make (read cheap) but can be very successful. I know of course that nowadays making something like this would be much easier, but I can imagine at the time it was still very simple for a nintendo console title. It feels like games this simple might have existed for the N64 when 3D was a novelty so building literally anything was bleeding-edge high-tech million dollar projects (PilotWings 64), but in the NGC era games were much more polished and deep than this. I think its every hacker's dream to publish something they coded in a month and have it be an overnight success.
NEVERMIND MOST OF THIS, I JUST REALIZED THIS IS NOT A PORT, BUT A SIMPLER REMAKE
Monkey Ball (without the Super iirc) was an arcade game initially. With a banana-shaped joystick and everything. Then SMB added some extra modes and came out as a release title for the Nintendo GameCube. It was probably intended as kind of a low-budget thing, but ended up being recognized as one of the best games for the system, especially early on.
This is immediately what my mind went to.
If you haven't seen Smiling Friends, you're in for a treat. Zach Hadel is a genius.
The mix of 2D animation, 3D animation, claymation, stop motion, live action rotoscoping, and comping in guest animators like Joel Haver and David Post amazing. You know they appreciate the art form.
You've probably already seen the gif of this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zxL77g1em4
I've seen the multiple techniques becoming more popular (Wabie shorts), it really showcases a dominance of your craft when you can use multiple techniques instead of overrelying on a simple one. Great comedic/expressive technique as well.
I imagine how it would be with software, you have a whole ass huge website, but out of the blue you download a .jar for Nokia and you have to run it in a nokia or a very niche VM,(Or just in a JVM). Maybe to get a 6 digit verification code so you can log in to an account.
Amazing!
We're only 2 years away from "Claude, Make GTA VI!" /s
Looks fun but keyboard doesn't seem great for this, it feels like it needs an analog stick. Note I've never played the original.
Perf wise it seems bang on.