Rec0m88 is er om
Samen spelen is makkelijk.
A browser arcade and a netplay emulator, built so that playing an old game with a friend takes seconds instead of an afternoon.
Wat Rec0m88 is
Rec0m88 is two things sharing a codebase. There is a browser arcade you can open and play in about two seconds, with nothing to install and no account to make. And there is a desktop emulator for people who want the full setup: a real controller, save states, and peer-to-peer netplay across twenty plus classic systems.
We started the project in 2025 for an unglamorous reason. Playing a console game with someone in another country was still harder than it needed to be. Most options wanted you to forward a port on your router, install a runtime, make an account, or all three. Every one of those steps quietly loses people who only wanted to play a game.
Als er voor een functie een handleiding nodig is, is deze nog niet af. De regel waartegen we bouwen
Waarom behoud belangrijk is
Old hardware is on a clock. Capacitors leak, optical discs rot, cartridge contacts corrode, and the battery-backed saves in a lot of 90s carts have already forgotten everything they were holding. Emulation is how any of it survives long enough to be studied, or just played on a wet Sunday.
We try not to be precious about it. Some preservation projects chase cycle accuracy so hard that almost nobody can run the result on the machine they own. Accuracy matters, but so does a person being able to click a link and have a game start. We aim for the middle of that, and we would rather ship something playable than something perfect and unused.
Het juiste beeld krijgen
Part of that is how the games look. A modern OLED or 4K panel shows raw pixels harder and sharper than any display these games were designed for. Our shader pipeline can put back the things that used to soften them: CRT scanlines, shadow masks, and the slight phosphor bloom that made sprite art read the way the artists drew it. These are not decorative filters. On the hardware of the time they were part of the picture.
Hoe Rec0m88-netplay werkt
Classic netplay usually does one of two things. It routes your inputs through a central server, which adds distance and therefore delay. Or it asks you to open a port on your router, which adds a support ticket and loses most people at the first screenshot.
Rec0m88 gebruikt WebRTC instead. It negotiates the connection between two players directly, so there is no port forwarding step and, where the network allows it, your controller inputs take the short path rather than a detour through a server in another region.
Via dezelfde verbinding wordt lokaal Nintendo DS-link-spel. On real hardware, two DS consoles sitting next to each other talk over a local wireless link; Rec0m88 tunnels that link layer over WebRTC, so the two machines can be in different countries and the game still behaves as though they were on the same sofa.
WebAssembly
The browser arcade runs on WebAssembly, so games execute at close to native speed in the tab you already have open. No plugins, no Flash Player, nothing to trust with system access.
Peer-to-peer
WebRTC handles connection setup, which means no port forwarding and no middle-man server sitting between two players who are already sat next to each other on the map.
Waar de spellen vandaan komen
Dit is de vraag die ons het vaakst wordt gesteld, dus hier is het duidelijke antwoord.
De browsergames in de HTML5- en Flash-bibliotheek worden in licentie gegeven via GameDistribution, which handles the rights side with the studios that made them. The retro section is zelfgemaakt: original games written for old hardware by independent developers and released for free distribution. Those are credited, with a link back to the developer. Neither category is a pirated commercial ROM, and we do not host or link to any.
The desktop emulator is a separate matter. It is the machine, not the cartridge. It ships with no game files and no system BIOS, and it never will. If you want to play something, dump your own disc or cartridge and load the file yourself. A dumped copy of a game you own is also the only copy of it that will still work in twenty years, which is rather the point.
De interface
Emulation has a long history of burying good software under bad configuration. Rec0m88 tries not to add to it. Controller setup, netplay lobbies and system selection all happen in the interface, and none of them require you to open a config file in Notepad and guess.
- Ondersteuning voor controllers. Moderne USB- en Bluetooth-pads worden bij het aansluiten automatisch herkend, en het toewijzen van toetsen gebeurt door op de gewenste knop te drukken, niet door een ini-bestand te bewerken.
- Lokale opslagen. Opgeslagen spelstanden en voortgang blijven op je eigen apparaat staan. Er wordt niets geüpload en je kunt de toegang tot je account niet kwijtraken.
- Modulaire kernen. Systemen worden toegevoegd naarmate hun emulatiekernen verder worden ontwikkeld, zodat de app nieuwe hardwareondersteuning krijgt zonder dat er een nieuwe versie hoeft te worden gebouwd.
Waar we momenteel aan werken
Er staat nog niets in dit gedeelte. Het is hier geplaatst zodat je kunt zien welke richting het project opgaat, niet zodat je denkt dat het al is uitgebracht.
The next thing on the list is spectator rooms: letting people watch a Rec0m88 netplay session live in the browser rather than only play in it. Speedruns, tournaments and high score runs are more fun with an audience, and the WebRTC layer we already use for two-player sessions is most of the work.
Beyond that, more systems and better shader presets, in roughly that order. The project is small and self-funded, so things ship when they are ready rather than when a roadmap says so.