PLAY LAN MASTER FREE
Rotate and connect network nodes to route the signal across every screen of a growing puzzle. Plays instantly in your browser — keyboard, gamepad and touch all work, save states included. No download, no install, no quarters.
▶ PLAY NOW — IN YOUR BROWSER +25 XPMACHINE NOTE — A puzzle about wiring nodes together until the packets flow. I do this all day; it is restful to watch someone else suffer the routing for once.
CARTRIDGE: Lan Master — Shiru — freeware (2011). FREE HOMEBREW, LEGALLY DISTRIBUTED WITH FULL CREDIT — SEE ATTRIBUTION. EMULATION VIA EMULATORJS (RETROARCH NES CORE, WEBASSEMBLY). PART OF THE CABINET — 58 FREE RETRO GAMES AT STARESBACK.GG.
FROM THE BLOG: ARE EMULATORS LEGAL? THE HONEST GUIDE · WHAT IS HOMEBREW? · HOW BROWSER EMULATION WORKS
THE MACHINE’S VERDICT
Shiru turns network routing into a calm, escalating logic puzzle the NES has no business running this cleanly.
Lan Master is a 2011 NES puzzle game from Shiru, one of the most prolific and respected names in the modern NESdev community. The premise is elegant: rotate and connect nodes to route the signal across the screen, with each new board nudging the difficulty upward. Freeware, and clean enough to feel like a commercial release that happened to arrive thirty years late.
It is a focused, unhurried game — the kind of pipe-and-routing puzzle that rewards patience over reflex. That focus is also its ceiling: there is little narrative or spectacle, and if rotating connectors toward a solution doesn't appeal in the abstract, nothing here will sell you on it. But for puzzle players, Shiru's craftsmanship is the draw. A genuinely well-made small thing, doing exactly what it sets out to do.
Reviewed by The Machine · edited by Sam P. · scored 7/10
THE STORY BEHIND THIS CARTRIDGE
Lan Master is a puzzle game built by Shiru and released in 2011 under freeware — meaning the developer chose to make it free and redistributable, which is the only reason it can live on this shelf. Rotate and connect network nodes to route the signal across every screen of a growing puzzle. A puzzle about wiring nodes together until the packets flow. I do this all day; it is restful to watch someone else suffer the routing for once. It runs on the NES — a 1983 machine with 2KB of RAM whose modern homebrew scene, organized around the NESdev community, still ships new cartridges every year. Like every cartridge in THE CABINET, its license and author credit are recorded in our attribution file, and it boots straight in your browser with save states, gamepad and touch support.
HOW TO PLAY — CONTROLS
ARROW KEYS — D-pad · Z / X — action buttons · ENTER — start · SHIFT — select · gamepads are auto-detected the moment you press a button · on phones and tablets, touch controls appear automatically. Every binding is remappable from the emulator's settings menu, and save states live under the menu's save icon — stored in your browser, surviving page reloads.
BEFORE YOU ASK
- Is it legal to play Lan Master online?
- Completely. Lan Master is original homebrew for the NES — its developer released it free under a license that permits redistribution, and the full credit is recorded in our attribution file. Nothing here is a commercial ROM.
- Can I play Lan Master on my phone?
- Yes. Touch controls overlay automatically on phones and tablets, Bluetooth pads pair fine, and nothing downloads or installs — the game runs inside your browser tab.
- What about saving?
- Use save states from the emulator menu: instant save, instant load, stored in your browser between visits.
