4 comments

  • stuffoverflow1 hour ago
    Yorhel was also the creator&#x2F;developer of ncdu among many other open source projects. He was a big open source advocate. The sites he hosted (vndb.org and manned.org) have automated database dumps and source code fully available. Recommend to check out his website <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.yorhel.nl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.yorhel.nl&#x2F;</a>
  • indrora2 days ago
    This is probably a niche topic on HN, but for those of us who play Visual Novels, VNDB is a massive resource for getting the setup right for older and obscure ones that require odd hardware or configurations. The early days of VNs were all on DOS&#x2F;V and Sharpx68000 systems with quirky configurations. VNDB catalogs so many of them and things that are &quot;Mostly&quot; VNs for historical purposes.<p>Without it, we wouldn&#x27;t have the modern wave of VNs that have become popular today (Hatoful Boyfriend, Doki Doki Literature Club, etc.) nor some of the offshoot genres that have become popular.
    • Benjamin_Dobell1 hour ago
      I must admit, this is one area I&#x27;ve found LLMs to be surprisingly strong. They&#x27;re REALLY good at reverse engineering obscure platforms, languages, game engines; and quickly throwing together super hacky tooling.<p>I was able to reverse engineer the PS4 edition of &quot;New Game!: The Challenge Stage&quot;, which was never released in English. I&#x27;ve now fully translated it, added proper text wrapping and additional text boxes where text would now overflow. Along the way I&#x27;ve fully decompiled (with byte exact recompilation) the Squirrel scripts for the entire game, built atop the game engine of a now largely defunct game studio. Prior to this I hadn&#x27;t even heard of Squirrel scripting language. I had most of this done in under 24 hours.<p>I&#x27;m not in any way a part of the visual novel community. I just did this because I enjoyed the New Game! anime way more than a near(?) middle aged man probably ought to.<p>P.S. My condolences to Yorhel&#x27;s friends and family.
    • kageroumado2 days ago
      This website is a remnant of something long gone: simple yet capable HTML websites that just work. I hope it will be preserved, or at least the database made public so it won’t get lost.
      • fau1 hour ago
        It is public, and more! There&#x27;s even an interface allowing you to run your own queries directly against a synchronized copy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;query.vndb.org&#x2F;browse" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;query.vndb.org&#x2F;browse</a>
      • indrora1 day ago
        There&#x27;s a whole team behind it running, so VNDB isn&#x27;t going anywhere fast.
  • anonymous9082131 hour ago
    RIP. VNDB is a truly incredible resource and the world is a better place for its existence.
  • wang_pp81 hour ago
    [flagged]