demake
one source project compiles to any retro game console ROM
Details
- External ID
- 49195251
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- demake
- Website domain
- geosona.com
- Launched
- Aug. 6, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 40
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8420698924731183
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
Description
This started life as a graphics tool for a specific problem: gen AI can make retro-styled sprites but can't follow exact hardware constraints of pixels and colors.While building this I liked the idea that I can fan-out to any retro videogame console or handheld's specifications.I then devised my own declarative language - Demotic - to express the game you want to build as concisely and naturally as possible without implementation detail. To work on different machines, you use relative units, like vw, vh, vmin, vmax.It has a web UI, CLI and NPM package. Still a work in progress.
Enrichment
- Theme
- graphics rendering and visual tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- cross-platform compiler for retro game consoles
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Compiling unified project assets and code into valid binary ROMs across diverse retro consoles requires deep hardware-specific knowledge of tile architectures, palette constraints, memory mappers, and assembly/machine code.
What it would actually take: A functional system requires custom transpilers or cross-compilation toolchains targeting distinct CPU architectures (e.g., 6502, Z80, 68000) alongside strict low-level graphics quantization and palette allocation algorithms matching each console's PPU/VDP constraints. It requires specialized knowledge of vintage console memory maps, header structures, interrupt vectors, and display timing limitations.
Discussion
8 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: GB Studio, Common Lisp web packages (CLOG), Resident Evil PSX engine, Parasite Eve engine
Concerns raised: Input handling bug with simultaneous left/right key presses causing paddle to stick, Rounding errors across different screen sizes, Unclear UI affordances for discovering examples, Single script doesn't account for hardware capability differences between console tiers
Feature requests: Device capability guards for SNES vs NES vs Game Boy hardware differences, Dynamic sprite/enemy count scaling based on system capabilities, Edge-aware pixelation for AI-generated pixel art upscaling, Platformer and adventure game demos/support, Declarative syntax for platform-specific art style targeting
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 129 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #26 of 130 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 276 days after the earliest competitor.
- I used AI to built static recompilers for 5 retro game systems · hn · 2026-05-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- PS5_RetroArch · github · 2026-09-18 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Fossilware · hn · 2026-03-20 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Level · hn · 2026-07-13 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- amiga-game-kit · github · 2026-09-25 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- My biggest solo-project: Game engine with its own programming language · hn · 2026-05-25 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Anime Chibi Art Generator · ph · 2026-09-11 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- 2d platformer game built with Codex (zero code) · hn · 2026-02-16 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.39
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.