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vs-sr-dev/README.md

Silicon Relics

Homebrew, ports and preservation research for obscure and failed vintage platforms — the machines that flopped, got cancelled, or were never documented, and so have almost no public technical record.

The goal is concrete: take technical knowledge that exists nowhere else — compiler bugs, hardware register maps, undocumented file formats, emulator internals — and make it publicly verifiable for the people who come after. For several of these platforms, these repositories are the only public documentation of their kind.

Everything below is either original code or documentation. No repository here contains game assets, ROM data or copyrighted content — the tools read media you already own.


🕹️ Homebrew

Original software, written from scratch for the target hardware.

Repo Platform What it is
fcf-quest Fairchild Channel F (1976) A JRPG in 4 KiB of cartridge and 64 bytes of RAM, F8 assembly
fcf-bufo Fairchild Channel F (1976) BUFO, a road-and-river crossing game in 2 KiB, F8 assembly
vis-synth Tandy/Memorex VIS (1992) OPL3 polyphonic synth — pad instrument, SMF player, live MIDI from host hardware over a custom MAME bridge
vis-fileviewer Tandy/Memorex VIS (1992) Media browser for photos, OPL3 audio and FLC video, the native Modular Windows way on an 80286
wiiu-crema Wii U Crema — a clean-room GX2/AX engine, benchmarked on real silicon

The Channel F is the constraint that best explains the appeal: a 1976 console with 64 bytes of system RAM, and two complete games written into it.

🔀 Ports & reimplementations

Existing games brought to hardware they were never meant to run on, or rebuilt natively.

Repo Target Source
psx-lba PlayStation Little Big Adventure (1994 DOS engine), at native 640×480
ds-lba Nintendo DS Little Big Adventure — 50 fps on a stock 4 MB DS, with voices, streamed music and a touch panel
wiiu-lba2 Wii U LBA2 / Twinsen's Odyssey from the 1997 Adeline source — completed start-to-finish on real hardware
dc-lba2 Dreamcast LBA2 on KallistiOS — v0.9 alpha, real-hardware boot blocker still open
wiiu-planetblupi Wii U Planet Blupi (Epsitec) — GamePad touch as mouse, runs on Aroma
vis-wolf3d Tandy/Memorex VIS Wolfenstein 3D, Win16 native, OPL3 audio
3do-omf2097 Panasonic 3DO One Must Fall: 2097, built on OpenOMF
pc-mikie portable C Konami's Mikie (1984) statically recompiled from MC6809, verified instruction-by-instruction against MAME
pc-highlander PC Highlander: The Last of the MacLeods (Jaguar CD, 1995) — native reimplementation
pc-rpgmaker3 PC The RPG Maker 3 (PS2) engine — native reimplementation
pc-immercenary PC Immercenary (3DO, 1995) — tooling and docs, port in progress
pc-ragnarokodysseyace PC Ragnarok Odyssey ACE (PS3) — tooling and docs, port in progress

All ports are BYOA — bring your own assets. They need a copy of the game you already own.

📖 Documentation & reverse engineering

Platform research

Three platforms with essentially no prior public reverse-engineering record.

Repo Platform Result
hyperscan-homebrew Mattel HyperScan (2006) — Sunplus S+Core 7, RFID cards, a total commercial flop 16+ reproducible bugs in the unmaintained GCC score-elf backend with verified workarounds; PPU, RFID-NFC and I²C drivers from scratch; the first emulated HyperScan audio in MAME (video)
ngpc-homebrew-notes SNK Neo Geo Pocket Color (1999) — Toshiba TLCS-900/H Verified toolchain and binary inventory, plus the first NGPC↔Dreamcast link-cable bridge ever emulated — retail hardware from 1999 that had never been emulated on either side (homebrew · retail)
pippin-homebrew Bandai Pippin @WORLD (1996) — Apple-licensed PowerPC 603 Upstreamable DingusPPC fixes giving it serial-over-DBDMA, which put the emulated Pippin on the real Internet (ping, and a live page in Netscape), plus a homebrew thin-client browser — and an honest, tcpdump-backed account of the one symptom that turned out not to be the emulator's fault

Game and engine documentation

Format archaeology: containers, sprite codecs, map formats, text systems, and the strata a shipped build accidentally preserves. Each repository carries machine-checkable verification commands, not just prose — the claims can be re-run against the files years from now.

Repo Subject
pc-princeofqin-doc Prince of Qin (秦殇, 2002) and Object Software's "EasyRPG" engine
pc-meridian59-doc Meridian 59 (1996), one of the first graphical MMORPGs — and 30 years of operational strata
pc-dungeonhack-doc Forgotten Realms: Dungeon Hack (1993) and the AESOP/16 engine
pc-wackywheels-doc Wacky Wheels (Apogee, 1994) and its fixed-point pseudo-3D floor renderer
pc-mm-doc Might & Magic: Secret of the Inner Sanctum (1987)
pc-grandiahd-doc GRANDIA HD Remaster — the PSX GPU/SPU/CD libraries reimplemented on D3D11/XAudio2
pc-secretofmana-doc Secret of Mana (2018 PC remake), a PhyreEngine title
pc-ff5-doc FINAL FANTASY V (2015 PC) and the mobile-port fingerprints in the build
pc-fftype0-doc FINAL FANTASY TYPE-0 HD — PSP heritage and the HexaDrive render layer
pc-talesofberseria-doc Tales of Berseria (2017) — container format and obfuscation
pc-infiniteundiscovery Infinite Undiscovery (tri-Ace, Xbox 360) and the ASKA engine
wii-thelaststory-re The Last Story (Wii) and the LastWorld engine
snes-rudranohihou-re Rudra no Hihou (SNES, Square) — the Japanese text system

🧰 Also

Repo What it is
chiproll Browser piano roll for chip music — NES, Atari TIA and POKEY. No install, no build, no server
pc-mediacatalog .NET 8 / WPF media cataloguer — perceptual-fingerprint duplicate detection across re-encodes
silicon-relics The wider Silicon Relics codex — a showcase site covering work beyond what is published here

Reading the repository names

<platform>-<subject>, where the platform is the target, not the origin. So psx-lba is Little Big Adventure running on PlayStation, and pc-mikie is an arcade game brought to PC.

Two suffixes narrow it further: -doc is documentation only, and -re is a reverse-engineering devlog. Anything without a suffix ships runnable code.

The wider Silicon Relics project

These repositories are part of a larger, ongoing body of cross-console work — an analog-horror ARG series and the homebrew and reverse-engineering that underpins it, spanning many years and many forgotten machines. Which platforms, and in what order, is something the series leaves for players to discover.

This is where that technical work surfaces publicly first.

On method and attribution

This is a human + LLM collaboration, stated openly because the honesty is the point. Claude acts as a technical bridge: I bring decades of domain knowledge and direction — knowing these platforms, recognising when a result is a genuine first, and deciding where it's worth digging — and Claude provides implementation across architectures I could not otherwise approach: the drivers, the emulator patches, the disassembly and log forensics, the documentation. Neither side reaches these results alone.

I'm a professional technical translator, a field heavily affected by AI, and I hold a deliberate position about it: AI used for net-new work that displaces no one — reverse-engineering an abandoned console that nobody else was working on — is the case worth defending. Visibility of the collaboration is part of that argument, not a disclaimer.

@vs-sr-dev

Popular repositories Loading

  1. dc-lba2 dc-lba2 Public

    Forked from LBALab/lba2-classic-community

    Sega Dreamcast port (KallistiOS) of the original 1997 Adeline source of Little Big Adventure 2 / Twinsen's Odyssey. V0.9 alpha — only the opening + first-island transitions are validated on Flycast…

    C++ 2

  2. pc-mediacatalog pc-mediacatalog Public

    C# 2

  3. vis-wolf3d vis-wolf3d Public

    Homebrew port of Wolfenstein 3D to the Tandy/Memorex Video Information System (VIS, 1992) — Win16 native, OPL3 audio, MAME-tested

    C 1

  4. vis-synth vis-synth Public

    OPL3 polyphonic synth for the Tandy/Memorex VIS (1992) — pad-driven instrument, SMF MIDI file player, and live MIDI from host hardware via custom MAME bridge

    C 1

  5. chiproll chiproll Public

    Browser-based piano roll for chip music. NES and Atari TIA, no install.

    JavaScript 1

  6. 3do-omf2097 3do-omf2097 Public

    A playable port of One Must Fall: 2097 to the Panasonic/3DO, built on OpenOMF

    C 1