64Digits

Hey everyone,

A lot of us still have folders of old .gm6 and .gmk files that haven't run properly in years. I've been working on a tool that converts them into a web page you can open in any modern browser. You don't need GameMaker or Windows, and you don't have to rewrite anything.

It's called gm-revive and it's free and open source (MIT license):

https://github.com/DFortun81/gm-revive

What it does

It reads a GameMaker 6, 7 or 8.0 project file, translates the GML code into JavaScript, and pulls out the sprites, backgrounds, sounds and fonts. The result is a folder with an index.html you can open straight from your hard drive, or upload anywhere to share with people.

So far I've restored a bunch of old games with it, including some from friends here. Most of them came out playable on the first try, and every time one didn't, I fixed the tool rather than the game.

How to use it

You'll need Python 3.9 or newer. Then:

git clone <a rel="nofollow" href="https://github.com/DFortun81/gm-revive">https://github.com/DFortun81/gm-revive</a>
cd gm-revive
python -m gm_revive convert "path/to/YourGame.gm6" "out/YourGame"

Open out/YourGame/index.html and play.

Music (optional but recommended)

MIDI music: browsers can't play MIDI, so the tool renders it to MP3. For that you need FluidSynth, ffmpeg and a General MIDI soundfont (FluidR3_GM.sf2 is a good one). Add –soundfont path/to/FluidR3_GM.sf2 to the convert command. Without these the game still converts, just with silent MIDI tracks.
Tracker music (.xm, .mod, .it, .s3m): if your game played these through GMFMOD, the tool renders them too. That needs an ffmpeg built with libopenmpt. Most full builds of ffmpeg have it.

Check before you convert

Got a whole folder of old projects? Point the report command at it:

python -m gm_revive report "path/to/old games" -o report.md

It lists each project's GameMaker version, whether it should convert cleanly, and anything it uses that gm-revive doesn't support yet.

What works and what doesn't (yet)

GameMaker 6, 7 and 8.0 projects work. 8.1 and Studio projects don't yet. The tool recognises them and says so.
Most of GML and the standard drag & drop actions are covered, along with particles, surfaces, views, paths, ds_ structures, save files and message boxes.
Collisions use bounding boxes only. Precise per-pixel masks aren't supported.
DLLs and extensions can't run in a browser. GMFMOD (GMFMODSimple) has a built-in replacement and so does the WinSkin extension; anything else is skipped with a warning, so games that rely on another DLL will be missing whatever it did.
Code built as text while the game runs (execute_string with a string put together at run time) can't be translated.

If your game doesn't work

Post here or open an issue on GitHub. Include the output of the report command, and the game file too if you're comfortable sharing it. A lot of what's supported now exists because a specific game needed it, so broken games really do help.

It's been a blast seeing stuff from 15+ years ago running again. I'd love to see what everyone digs up.

I've been working on upgrading my old Battlefield AI project and here's a teaser for what it looks like now:

- DF81

DFortun81 15 hours ago

Essentially I found my old game maker source code files, got sad that I didn't have Game Maker anymore nor did they run in the executable format, and then had Claude Code build a converter tool that took GML and converted it to JavaScript.

If anyone wants any of their games converted to HTML5, I can also do that conversion for you and send back the ZIP.

gm-revive: play your old GameMaker games in the browser again

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