So while indulging my SEGA kick, I came across something super cool, a blog dedicated to reverse engineering and porting outrun to C++, Reassembler!

Now this is pretty awesome in that not only does it work (and boy does it!), his Outrun! project, CannonBall runs on OS X, Windows, Linux, and can you believe it, javascript. (you need an OutrunB ROM for this, as it loads all it’s sound, music, graphics and map resources from an Outrun rom set).   You can read about his javascript porting adventure here, the TL;DR version is that he used emscripten to  convert clang’s LLVM bytecode into javascript.  Boy does this seem to open up quite a few possibilities as javascript compilers seem to get better and better on the browser side.  I happily get 60fps on my MacBook Air with Chrome.

Even better he’s got another project, LayOut, which lets you build your own maps for CannonBall!

For fun, be sure to check out his Easter Eggs section, there is quite a bit of stuff hiding in these old ROMs.  Not to mention there is enough other gamestuff in them, that SEGA didn’t build each game for their boards in a vacuum.

All and all, I’d say it’s a good read!