I used to play NetHack "back in the day". ASCII monsters, brutal deaths, and no-frills RPG fun. This week I decided to preserve a piece of that history on the permaweb.
Tried rebuilding a web version “BrowserHack” from an old 2015 Emscripten 1.37.x project using EMTERPRETIFY.
Ran into everything:
- circular Makefile dependencies
- WSL permission errors
- async migration hell (EMTERPRETIFY → ASYNCIFY)
- WASM vs asm.js mismatch
- missing JS interface layers
After days of brute forcing Claude, I did what any rogue would: looted the working demo from
github.io.
Cleaned it up, fixed paths, removed external deps… and uploaded the whole thing to the permaweb (via
@ardriveapp).
nethack.vilenarios.com
8MB. Zero dependencies. Haven't found any more bugs, but I haven't gotten too far! Just need to upgrade its ArNS to a permabuy.
Archiving this classic on Arweave is another small tribute to the permanence we’re building with
@ar_io_network. Now I'll always be able to get that high school nostalgia hit when I play it (and die immediately from eating bad food).🎮