Pokémon Emerald in your browser at '100k FPS' — and it's not an emulator, it's the decompiled game

The headline buries the lede

pokeemerald.com runs Pokémon Emerald in your browser, and the title advertises "100k FPS." A low-level hacker in the thread pointed at the part that actually matters:

"what's interesting here, presumably, is that this isn't a wasm GBA emulator (which also exist and work). This is the game itself compiled to wasm. Even though no official source code was ever published, there was a community based decompilation." — Dmitry Grinberg, a reverse-engineering specialist

That's the real story. There's no emulated Game Boy Advance here interpreting a ROM. The community reverse-engineered Emerald into buildable C source (the long-running pokeemerald decompilation project), and tripplyons compiled that to WebAssembly. The game runs natively in the browser as itself — which is why it can hit absurd framerates.

What works, from the people who tried it

"Confirming that saving genuinely works … Wonder if we can get trades working too." — a commenter confirming persistence

What doesn't (yet)

The biggest gap is sound, and the person fixing it announced themselves:

"Working on a fork that has audio. If anyone wants to have Claude continue it, be my guest!" — the maintainer of the audio fork

And it's still an alpha build — a reproducible crash turned up fast:

"it seems there's a crash when you choose 'Pokemon' in the 'Fight/Bag/Pokemon/Run' menu" — a commenter reporting the battle-menu crash

Why it's more than a toy

Browser emulators for old consoles are old news. Compiling a decompiled commercial game to WASM is a different category — it means the game's logic is now portable source, hackable and forkable, not a binary trapped behind an interpreter. The crashes and the missing audio aren't failures of the approach; they're the visible edge of how much of a 2004 cartridge a volunteer community has faithfully reconstructed in C. The framerate is the gimmick. The provenance is the achievement.