[mambodog]

I did the browser port of BasiliskII which this wraps (https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii) as well as the port of PCE (another Macintosh emulator) used on archive.org.

I see a lot of people asking why someone would distribute an Electron-wrapped version of a program you could run natively, and I see it as an extension of the the same reason why I ported these emulators to the browser in the first place: accessibility. While you can install BasiliskII natively, it's a bit of a pain, especially if you are not super technical. If you find a binary floating around online it may not work for your OS version. Wrapping it in Electron is one way to ameliorate the OS compatibility issue; Chromium has been battle-tested across many OS versions. Ideally BasiliskII would have a better OS compatibility story (as well as being more portably distributable with data files) but, like many open source projects, it doesn't have a lot of maintainer-time to make this happen.

[brundolf]

Maybe one day more things will have been written in modern languages that treat cross-platform builds as a first-class concern (Rust, Go, etc.), and this kind of "boxing" won't be as necessary. Until then, I think your approach is very sensible for getting something fun into as many people's hands as possible :)

[gilgoomesh]

Basilisk is written in C++ (a portable language) and it’s a cross platform project.

This JS boxing is mostly for this type of “hey look, it runs on the web” demo. Slower, but clickbait.

[splatcollision]

Pathways into darkness demo is broken, please fix :)