Comment by bredren
1 day ago
One of the features is “no vibe coding, classic development style.”
I think that’s kind of interesting, especially when building a retro enablement.
But I wonder does this mean no AI was used at all? Even for say, code review?
No judgment either way just curious for clarification.
This is from the original authors of ZSNES. I think they know what they're doing.
smartassery aside LLMs are pretty shit at esoteric stuff like this. Especially retro stuff in my experience they mainly tend to get super excited about how awesome and retro it is & reiterate misunderstood factoids about it that it knows that aren't that important/that you probably know already. Like showing it to a Reddit comment section.
> This is from the original authors of ZSNES. I think they know what they're doing.
ZSNES is popular because of legacy and nostalgia. It was very fast and came at just the right time, but the developers aren't quite coding gods. Their expertise on the SNES is no match for late/later developers like Near and Sour.
With Super ZSNES, being a Unity project, you can get a fairly clear decompile of the IR, and the code doesn't seem all that impressive. It's alpha-quality, but generally coded like the original ZSNES was. Optimization is completely missing and accuracy is still out of whack, but synchronization is improved and it's doing a little better job of counting cycles. "GPU-powered" is a big stretch. ~~They're only taking advantage of it for fixed-function perspective transform on mode 7~~ Scratch that. It borrows the line-based algorithm from bsnes-hd, including the trick to interpolate the transform variables between mins and maxes. So the only GPU feature it uses is blending for bump-mapping.
Funny, we now enter the era of "Made with Handcrafted Code" or "Handmade" . Same way as furniture, carpets and any other "handcrafts" are made now... or Lamborghinis
it's doubly funny because once the tools are released to public i bet majority of those high-res mods will be ai generated.
I find the specific singling out of vibe coding interesting for a different reason; thinking back to just last month, I recall one of the rationales behind the huge DLSS5 backlash was it ruined the artists original vision. And here we are a month later being amazed at an emulator that literally lets any casual player do just that through a funky point and click interface!
I guess if they added in an MCP server there would probably be a riot.
> But I wonder does this mean no AI was used at all? Even for say, code review?
Would that be surprising to you?
Why do you ask?
I’m just curious if you are so dependent on LLMs that the idea of not using them at all seems extreme to you
1 reply →
It only makes sense for hobby projects where the outcome is just an excuse for the journey. I mean if the point is to have fun coding, you want to do it yourself.
there is no way to measure it. The source code isnt available. Better a "classic development style" closed source or a "vibe coded" but open source?
"no vibe coding" is different from "no ai". I'm not sure where the authors are going with this. No autocomplete? What level of autocomplete? No "deep learning"?