levelsio reports 100,000 users in two days on a free site

@levelsio says his retro computing preservation project passed 100,000 users in the last two days. The day before that post, he says 80,000 people were inside Windows 3.1 or Windows XP in their browsers, chatting to MSN and AOL Messenger AI bots, playing 3D Pinball or Quake. Every game and app on the site, he says, is full or almost full to the limit.

The part worth reading twice is how long it took to get there. He started the projects two years ago out of boredom, wanting to do something other than build another SaaS or AI app. Getting Windows 3.1 running properly in a browser took months. Adding a dial up internet connection so it could browse the web was so hard with the AI of the time that he says he went around in circles until he found @bai0, who he describes as the only person in the world who got that working, and asked for help.

Windows XP took six months of reverse engineering to run on v86, the emulator by @copy_sh. levelsio says that was only possible because modern models like Opus 5.5 are good enough to figure it out. Classic games came the same way, ported to WASM, with Quake III by @lukathedev, plus multiplayer servers so strangers can drop into the same session.

The method, not the traffic

For two years, he says, pretty much nobody cared. He tweeted the projects into the void and was fine with it. What changed is not his marketing, it is that AI-assisted reverse engineering and WASM ports have become good enough that, in his words, pretty much anything is portable to WASM on web now. Add a server over WebSockets and people are instantly using it together.

The spike is also a useful reminder that distribution and revenue are separate problems. levelsio built the thing as a non-commercial preservation project, an interactive online computer museum, and he is explicit that it will never earn anything. The transferable bit for a founder is the porting trick, not the audience numbers, since an old desktop app with a loyal user base is now a browser product a solo builder can ship.

@levelsio

@levelsio

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This is one of my first projects to take off that does not, can not and will not make money because it's non-profit, and that's fine