[Gawen Arab]

Hey all,

I've been hacking on EDuke32 again, and this one's a bit of a personal milestone.

I first tried to get it running in a browser about 10 years ago, back then there was no Asyncify and WebAssembly wasn't really a thing yet, so I ended up writing my own stack-unwinding scheme to let the engine's synchronous main loop yield to the browser event loop. Single-player sort of worked, but multiplayer was hopeless: just to slow to be playable.

Ten years later, Asyncify and WASM have matured to the point where it's actually viable. So I picked the project back up, and I'm happy to share where it's at: it runs in the browser, and multiplayer works now (WebRTC under the hood).

Try it here: https://gawen.me/webduke

I'd like to upstream this properly rather than sit on a fork, so I'm splitting it into focused, reviewable MRs against master. The first is the foundation: EDuke32 compiled to WebAssembly with Emscripten

Feedback very welcome, and thanks for keeping this engine alive all these years.

Come get some. 😎

[stillTodd]

First - this is freakin' awesome to see.

On my system and at the moment, it is too slow to play, about 2 FPS. I run FireFox if that means anything.

I need to upgrade my system anyways (it's a 11yo fanless tablet thingy running Win10) and wondered if there were any minimum suggestions for CPU (architecture, speed, # of cores), amount of RAM and/or GPU if germane. For that matter, I was considering upgrading to something like Mint.

Any thoughts? I'm big on fully depreciated business Thinkpads, especially the ones with that little red button in the middle of the keyboard.

[Gawen Arab]

stillTodd, on 02 June 2026 - 05:01 PM, said:

First - this is freakin' awesome to see.

On my system and at the moment, it is too slow to play, about 2 FPS. I run FireFox if that means anything.

I need to upgrade my system anyways (it's a 11yo fanless tablet thingy running Win10) and wondered if there were any minimum suggestions for CPU (architecture, speed, # of cores), amount of RAM and/or GPU if germane. For that matter, I was considering upgrading to something like Mint.

Any thoughts? I'm big on fully depreciated business Thinkpads, especially the ones with that little red button in the middle of the keyboard.

Thank you! that means a lot to hear!

The 2 FPS makes sense, and the good news is it's almost certainly your CPU, not athing exotic. A couple of things worth knowing about how this runs:

First, it's CPU-bound and single-threaded. The browser runs the game as a WebAssembly module using teh software renderer, so the GPU is barely involved: it's just blitting the final image to a canvas. That means single-core speed (clock + IPC_ is what matters, not core count and not the graphics card. An 11-year-old fanless tablet is going to be a passively-cooled, low-power chip (likely Atom/Celeron class?), which is the worst case here: weak per-core performance and thermal throttling. That's your 2 FPS.

Second, RAM and GPU are non-issues. It needs a few hundred MB, and any integrated graphics from the last decade is plenty.

Third, try a different browser first: give a shot at Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Edge, Brave). Firefox is great but the 2 engines have different WASM JIT characteristics and it's genuinely worth A/B testing on the same machine. Something it's a real difference. If you do switch browsers, I'd love to hear what FPS you land on.

On hardware: honestly, almost anything modern will fly. A depreciated business ThinkPad with a Core i5 from the last ~6 years (T480/T490 or similar; yes, with the 🔴) will run this.

[stillTodd]

1.2GHz Intel Core M-5Y71 (update: this is now working fine by switching to Chrome)

It is cool to have the form factor (tablet + keybed w/ports, better speakers and 2nd battery, removable/hot swappable) and they can be pretty cheap on ebay. I will look into a more modern T series. Not a fan of the flat keys on some of them.

I'll try on Chrome this evening in a sec and report back.

update: perfectly playable in Chrome. I just whipped through half of Hollywood with zero fuss. I need to know how to display the fps to get a solid figure to you.