Re:Show HN: Play DOS Wing Commander co-op in browser (11 yea...
by chengesu on Monday October 19, 2026 @10:56PM
(#50160823)
An impressive saga! I enjoyed hearing about the the different tools involved at different stages of your development here.
Is all the networking and job queuing happening synchronously from the game's point of view, or do you end up with potential latency when the commands come in from pilot B?
It's wild to me that modern CPUs and networking is fast enough that all this extra stuff can happen the space of what would've been one tightly-scheduled frame of computation when the game was new.
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Re:Show HN: Play DOS Wing Commander co-op in browser (11 yea...
by daniel_rh on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:08AM
(#50162370)
Yes the old game only ran at 15-20 fps and it wasn't even synced to the clock! This endeavour also added time sync and I chose 20 fps (which makes some missions harder). Wingman shots are delayed by up to a few frames, but the system has a high latency mode that double-sends steering commands over the lossy layer. The weapon commands are at least synced with where the ships fly.
I haven't tried too much in high latency scenarios (mostly LAN) so we will see how well it holds up online
Re:Show HN: Play DOS Wing Commander co-op in browser (11 yea...
by chengesu on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @08:05PM
(#50189328)
I remember the lack of clock sync. When I got my 486, I had to slow it down to make WC playable. I recall I found a tool which would disable the internal cache, and also turned off the "Turbo" button.