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Our space game has a built-in RISC-V emulator that runs Linux

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This is 1 of 282 launches in indie interactive simulators and games — see how it stacks up on momentum and crowding →

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Details

External ID
49931993
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Our space game has a built-in RISC-V emulator that runs Linux
Website domain
againstallodds.games
Launched
Oct. 2, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
94
Upvotes percentile
0.9
Tags
—
Fetched at
Oct. 6, 2026, 5:01 p.m.
Updated at
Oct. 6, 2026, 5:01 p.m.

Description

(Edit: original URL was https://againstallodds.games/, but we've switched it to https://againstallodds.games/blog/2026/10/03/our-risc-v-emul... in response to user requests for explanation.)We're a tiny indie studio, all with a background in the demoscene and for about 3 years now we're developing a space planet terraforming game called SEEDS - Echoes Beneath the Sands.Our protagonist Naxiah is stranded on a small, desolated planet. You're working for an intergalactic distributor of seeds and terraforming equipment, to kickstart new planets in far away galaxies. You must deliver seeds and utilities to an unchartered region, but on your way, you crash on a small planet. Luckily, you have some equipment with you in the ship, so you're able to spawn a base and survive. But for how long? And is the planet really deserted..? :) Well, of course not, there are aliens and other space creatures. And of course, there's ROBO RB-23, which accompanies your adventure.The game is written in Object Pascal and uses our own game engine PasVulkan, our own physics engine, as well as our own RISC-V 64-bit emulator PasRISCV. We love to build stuff, a lot of these things are FOSS.The emulator is quite complete (even with RVV, but that's way too slow emulated to be useful) and runs a stock kernel (6.18.3 as of today). We're using Alpine Linux for our base distribution. All our in-game programs to interact with the planet are native RISC-V Linux programs.We also have our own (free and open source) scripting language POCA (class and prototyped based, JS/Lua inspired, which makes it quite easy for us to script things like HUD, animal behaviour, our story flow graph, etc.We have most of the wiring ready for players to be able to program and reshape and populate the whole planet in automation, although it's not our primary concept for the game (building stuff by hand, making the planet beautiful is also fun). As it's a normal Linux system, you'll be able to use Ruby, Python, or even Rust, C, C++, and Go to change and automate your world.We're also thinking of making a bunch of small games which you can play inside the game, in the base on a computer, on an arcade machine, or in the spaceship. And of course, it also runs DOOM. We already prototyped a small 2D space shooter and a small arcade game, both playable within the game. We also feature a table with hologram games to be played, e.g. chess and a certain block game. We also plan to make this hologram game engine available from the computer, which means, you'll even be able to program own hologram style games.We generally want to make the in-game computer more hackable in future, so that people can create and share their own little games.Currently, it's only a sandbox game (with beginnings of automation), to build stuff with our pre-made items. You can also assemble these to other, ready-made and shareable bigger items. This is the foundation for us to further develop survival and complete our story mode.Our game is still under active development, and we finally got our Steam page ready. We have tons of other things planned, but right now, it's more about polishing and quality for the Early Access.You can watch some videos and screenshots on our website. And we'd love to read your thoughts about his. It has been quite a ride, so far..

Enrichment

Niche
indie interactive simulators and games
Vertical
Media & entertainment
Function
Dev tools
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
risc-v linux emulator inside a space game
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

No Developing a 3D procedural terraforming sandbox game featuring an in-game fully functional 64-bit RISC-V hardware emulator running an unmodified Linux kernel requires elite low-level systems and graphics programming.

What it would actually take: The game engine requires custom voxel or heightmap terraforming shaders and physics, likely built in C++ or Rust with custom graphics pipelines. The defining technical challenge is implementing a cycle-accurate or high-performance 64-bit RISC-V emulator (RV64GC) with virtual memory management (MMU), peripheral emulation (UART, virtio-gpu, virtio-blk), and terminal/GUI piping into in-game 3D rendering buffers to boot Alpine Linux. This demands deep demoscene-level systems programming and hardware virtualization expertise.

Discussion

7 comments analyzed.

Concerns raised: Landing page reads like generic survivalcraft lacking technical details

Feature requests: Technical blog posts explaining game and emulator internals, Links to open-source engine and emulator repos

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 339 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #61 of 340 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 334 days after the earliest competitor.

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