Despite all "hate" against AI in the (retro)-gaming scene I'm genuinely excited to see these kind of projects (not sure if this one involved any kind of AI) and emulation.

From a technical perspective emulation is absolutely amazing, it requires deep technical knowledge, an excellent understanding of the source system and the optimisations are on another level.

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qwerpy 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I browsed through a few random files in that repo. There are high-quality code comments everywhere I looked. AI is the perfect tool to do this sort of thing. Can you imagine a human sitting down and documenting a million lines of decompiled code from a dev team 20 years ago?

Boggles my mind that there is hate for AI in retro-gaming. It's all about making existing things work. If it works and plays well, who cares if Claude did it in an afternoon or some human who spent a year of his life. In fact, I'd rather have Claude do it. Humans will get bored, get involved in community drama, disappear, etc. Unfortunate for the humans who are seeing their life's contribution to the scene made obsolete by a few kilowatt-hours in a datacenter, but good for the rest of us.

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rtpg 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

the comments are really not high-quality. There's a lot of words in places where only a few would be much clearer.

This isn't to say it's impossible to guide good context-aware commenting style from.an AI, but there would be much terser/usable comments on all of the weapons source for example.

The biggest problem with this stuff is, as usual, that the people guiding the AI don't know what "good" decomps etc look like IMO. AI tool usage tends to reflect ones own tastes and understanding.

	▲	qwerpy a minute ago \| parent [-]
		Are the comments wrong or just not concise? I looked at https://github.com/adonis-singh/re4/blob/master/src/wep/objM... Can't really decipher what line 21 is saying so I concede there could be some slop in there. But the comments on lines 27-30 seem to be informative and give some context that the code doesn't have. Granted, I'm not an expert on RE4's source code, but the comments look helpful enough.

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NobodyNada 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As someone heavily involved in the retro gaming tech space, I've seen a lot of people using AI there and it's really disappointing to me. You're right that it takes a lot of technical knowledge and deep understanding of the system, and the whole point of the endeavor is the process of getting that knowledge and becoming an expert in the system. It's a hobby, not a job; the end goal of a working emulator or whatever is just motivation to carry you along that process of learning.

So having Claude one-shot a NES emulator is almost pointless to me. You're using and looking at source code for an emulator you didn't write -- and you can learn from that, but it's not the same thing and doesn't require you to really understand a CPU the way you would by, say, observing a deviation in game behavior and staring at trace logs to figure out the exact instruction you emulated incorrectly.

It's not all bad -- AI is a great research tool and can automate some of the tedious parts (writing out an instruction decoder by hand is miserable). But using it to just...skip over the effort of doing a project defeats the whole purpose of doing those projects in the first place.

I don't want to be gatekeepy or curmudgeonly or "back in my day..." about it. But for me, my entire career path is due to skills and knowledge I learned spending several years of my life as a teenager figuring out how to write an NES emulator as a relative beginner to programming. And so I feel like using AI for this is depriving the next generation of that learning process. In addition, there are only so many retro games, and fewer popular ones. There's only so much unexplored territory to discover, and doing it with AI deprives another person of that experience and deprives that game's community of someone who might have been able to find a "home" working on projects related to that game.

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ronnier 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I really think the hate is just masked jealousy, now project managers, tpms and line managers can submit rather substantial code. That wasn’t possible before and it took away some value from devs (I say this as a dev of more than 25 years). I watch PM fix issues now instead of waiting for a dev. I understand the anger but these tools are not going away

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phatfish 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

As long as they are the ones on the Sev 1 bridge when shit is down 6 months later I'm happy for them.

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12397 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Of course it was possible before.

You could put an Einstein paper on a photocopier, mask the author, put your name in the place and publish. Except everyone would have thought you are an idiot.

You could clone the Linux kernel, erase all copyrights and release under Idiux. Except everyone would have thought you are an idiot.

Now that there are laundering machines financed with unlimited printed and previously stolen money a large number of developers affirms and praises the idiots.

	▲	qwerpy 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You went to the trouble of creating a throwaway account just to post a poorly thought out strawman comment? AI might be right up your alley, could help you improve the quality of your output.

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bigyabai 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In the early days of emulation, there were tons of low-quality and imprecise emulator backends. If you wanted to play a dozen SNES games, you usually needed a half-dozen emulators to get them all to boot to the main menu. They were disparate efforts usually led by 1 or 2 people that wanted to get a Super Famicom game to run, and then gave up on implementing or fixing support for other games.

We live in a golden age of emulation because that attitude died out. With more powerful computers (and less hack-oriented development) it became possible to properly emulate a complete console with a high level of accuracy. For preservationist purposes, accurate emulation is much more important than being the first to emulate a game, or even being able to decompile it. The only reason that we can point and laugh at low-quality efforts like Nintendo Switch Online is because the community cares even more than Nintendo did. The reason Wine/DXVK/Proton works so well is because it didn't fracture itself into a thousand downstream forks to fix one specific game. It's a holistic effort.

A lot of the hand-wringing comes from a justified place that doesn't want to see emulation backslide into a bazaar-like community. You're free to disagree with their logic and vibe-code a thousand game decomps, but in all likelihood emulation will be a more popular choice for the foreseeable future. Lots of people emulate stuff on their iPhone or Steam Deck, almost nobody is playing a game decomp on it though. I can't imagine AI tipping the scales on decomp popularity, especially among average Joes.