Ported the 1999 game Bugdom to the browser and added a bunch of mods
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I think the very first video game I ever played was Bugdom by Pangea Software, which came with the original iMac. There was also a shooter called Nanosaur, but my 7-year-old heart belonged to the more peaceable Bugdom, which featured a roly-poly named Rollie McFly needing to rescue ladybugs from evil fire ants and bees.Upon seeing the port to modern systems (https://github.com/jorio/Bugdom), I figured it should be able to run entirely in-browser nowadays, and also that AI coding tools "should" be able to do this entire project for me. I ended up spending perhaps 20 hours on it with Claude Code, but we got there.Once ported, I added a half-dozen mods that would have pleased my childhood self (like low-gravity mode and flying slugs & caterpillars mode), and a few that please my current self (like Dance Party mode).EDIT: Here are some mod/level combinations I recommend* https://reallyeli.com/bugdom/Bugdom.html?gravity=0.3&video=s...* https://reallyeli.com/bugdom/Bugdom.html?level=3&visual=2&gr...* https://reallyeli.com/bugdom/Bugdom.html?level=8&flying_slug...
HN · launched Feb 9, 2026 · 23 upvotes (top 29%) · 2 views
Niche: retro gaming emulators and ports · 98 launches, 4 in the last 7 days ▼ -33% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 98 launches in retro gaming emulators and ports →
Could you build this?
No Porting a legacy 1999 3D game written in C/C++ to WebAssembly/Emscripten requires deep reverse-engineering of vintage Mac/PC binaries, graphics APIs, and memory management that AI coding assistants cannot independently accomplish.
What it would actually take: A real version requires decompiling or obtaining the original source code (Pangea Software open-sourced parts of their catalog), porting OpenGL/QuickDraw 3D graphics calls to WebGL via Emscripten, and restructuring asset pipelines for browser loading. Modding hooks require deep knowledge of C/C++, game engine architectures, and binary/memory manipulation. This demands specialized retro-gaming and graphics systems engineering expertise.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Nanosaur
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 329 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #103 of 330 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 94 days after the earliest competitor.
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