Four things built to find out whether they could be. None is for sale, and each one says where the real engineering stops.
What does the web look like as a bulletin board?
bbsLive
Type a URL and it comes back as a 1992 board: numbered menus, ANSI colour, CP437, pictures redrawn as block art. The page is taken apart into a semantic model and rebuilt in 80 columns by 25 rows, because that is all a board had.
Built with - bbs
Rust compiled to WebAssembly
TypeScript, on a canvas
Cloudflare Pages
A Pages Function that relays bytes only
Inspect - bbs
A semantic model derived from the HTML the server sent, not from the layout
Navigation furniture, cookie banners and boilerplate thrown away rather than styled
Live conferences reading Hacker News, Wikipedia and GitHub
The relay never returns a screen - every glyph is decided in the core
LimitIt reproduces a board, not a page, so it is judged on being singular rather than on repeat value. An experiment, not a business.
An acoustic modem simulator. Run it on two machines and they open a real Bell 103 connection over their sound cards, after a faithfully performed dial-up overture.
Built with - modem
Rust, no_std core
One crate, a terminal binary and a browser AudioWorklet
Cloudflare Pages and Workers KV
Terraform
Inspect - modem
The overture at real timings: 350 and 450 Hz dial tone, DTMF, double-ring ringback, and 2100 Hz ANSam with phase reversals every 450 ms
Bell 103 FSK at 300 baud carrying real bytes - 1270/1070 Hz originate, 2225/2025 Hz answer
Cross-validated against minimodem, so the waveform is checked rather than just heard
A status bar that shows DEMO MODE whenever the link is wired rather than acoustic
LimitThe screech everyone remembers is a 33.6k V.34 handshake, and this is not that. The overture is performed, the training after it is an impression because there is no channel to negotiate, and everything after CONNECT 300 is real.
USB-C connectors are identical and their capabilities are not. Windows negotiates all of it on every connection and then shows you almost none of it, so portmark reads it back out.
$ portmark --human
Adapter 0x343C:0x0000
DisplayPort Alternate Mode: entered successfully
Video yes, DisplayPort is active through this adapter
Port 1
Downstream facing port, over USB Power Delivery, drawing power,
supply offers up to 65W, drawing 5V at 3A (15W).
Negotiated 5V at 3A (15W)
Supply offers
- 5V at 3A (15W)
- 20V at 3.25A (65W)
Built with - portmark
C# on .NET 10
One self-contained win-x64 executable
A console tool and a WPF tray app
Windows UCSI
GitHub Actions
Inspect - portmark
The negotiated Power Delivery contract, DisplayPort Alternate Mode and e-marker cable data
JSON with the raw bytes included, so you can redo the decoding yourself
Decoders tested against byte vectors captured from real hardware, so the suite passes with nothing plugged in
LimitNothing is ever inferred from the shape of a connector. Where your PC's controller does not report something, it says so and says why - "this PC's controller does not report cable information" rather than "this cable has no e-marker". It costs the tool some confident-sounding output, and that is the point.
Can a 1988 game's own rules be read back out of the disk?
rockfordLive
A C# reimplementation of Rockford: The Arcade Game, the 1988 MS-DOS Boulder Dash spin-off, reverse engineered from the original floppies. A port of the original's own simulation rather than a game that plays roughly like it: every rule cites the instruction it came from. The picture is the enhanced presentation's welcome screen, drawn from scratch rather than taken from the game.
Built with - rockford
C# on .NET 10
Blazor WebAssembly, and a terminal front end
Python for the extractors
Cloudflare Pages
Inspect - rockford
A FAT12 extractor that reads the disk images without mtools or a loop mount, so the analysis is reproducible
The scan the original runs - 22 rows of 40 cells, dispatching on a cell byte through the executable's own handler table
Ten simulation steps a second, because the original waits six ticks of a 60 Hz interrupt
Every claim marked confirmed, inferred or unknown, with the unknowns listed rather than guessed at
Limit"Matches" here means matches the disassembly as read, not verified against a running game - there is no recorded differential replay yet. What is published is the research: both playable builds sit behind a password, and the repository stays private, because either would distribute the original's sprites and cave data.
Rockford and Boulder Dash are registered trademarks of BBG Entertainment GmbH, which holds the intellectual property today. This is an unofficial, non-commercial technical study, not affiliated with or endorsed by BBG Entertainment or First Star Software, and it distributes no game data.
These were built to answer a question. If you have one that matters commercially, bring the workload and the constraints and DBHQ can scope the work around them.
