WebNES
A mobile web app that does things native apps can’t
Conrad Kramer says things like “I’ve been to five hackathons,” but if you press him, he’ll loosen his humility and tell you about his wins. First place at PennApps. First place at HackNY. Third place at HackMIT. First place at MHacks.
On its own, this is impressive. These are all “Division I” Major League Hacking events, with hundreds, if not thousands of hackers. It’s rare to win one, let alone four. But Conrad’s only been going to college hackathons for six months. He’s only ever not won once.
Oh, and, by the way—he’s not even a college student. He’s still in high school.
So I’m pretty eager to see what he’s building this time around.
The team consists of students from Cherry Hill East High School: along with Conrad, there’s Jared Wright and Evan Klein, who are both seniors, and Bogdan Vitoc, a sophomore. They all had some programming experience before coming to PennApps—Jared had an internship under his belt—but this is their first hackathon.
I ask Jared how he ended up here. “Conrad’s a friend of mine, and we’d always been bouncing ideas off each other, always talking about hacking and building stuff,” Jared says. PennApps, it seems, was an easy sell.
So then I ask him what his first hackathon has been like. “It’s been a new experience,” he says, and then adds, “to have a day where I don’t sleep at all.”
So what have they been working on, so sleeplessly?
“We built a web-based NES emulator, for mobile. So it’s a website, and you go on the website on your mobile device,” Jared says.
“Apple has an app store, and they have restrictions on the app store, like, you can’t have an emulator in the app store. But the web is open, and you can’t block things on the web,” Conrad explains. “This is one of the first web apps where it can do something that a native app can’t. And it’s in the form of a game, so it’s playable and people like it.”
I’m not especially familiar with NES emulators, but they assure me it’s a “normal” emulator, with touch controls. “You can pretty much play NES on your phone,” Conrad says.
It’s true—the web app is slick. At the end of the day, it’s easy to forget that I’m talking to high school students. I ask, with genuine curiosity, what their parents think. Jared and Conrad shrug it off—as seniors who have both held internships, their parents are pretty used to this kind of thing.
What about Bogdan, the sophomore? Conrad smiles. “His mom wasn’t going to let him take the train. So she took him to the train, and we, you know, shook her hand and told her we’d take good care of him.”
Check out Web NES at webn.es.
