Comment by fb03
8 hours ago
AI is completely cracking up the emulation bubble. We're not even emulating things anymore, we're just reverse engineering things and directly porting games. This is an awesome timeline for old game preservation. These fuckers aren't profiting from the games anymore, yet they won't release their IP, or update their old games to newer, more accessible platforms. So I really appreciate the work these kinds of developers have been doing.
> This is an awesome timeline for old game preservation.
It's not preservation though, it's basically remastering. We'll still need to preserve as much data from the original games (including, if possible, original source assets and source code). And yeah, I have no qualms about the legality of it all, a proper legal definition of the concept of abandonware would be nice though.
Original source assets isn't really feasible imho, could be custom toolchains and specific compiler versions that things were built with (and breaking on others), sure IF you manage to collect everything to rebuilding (probably needing some kind of VM image to preserve for rebuilding), what's the difference from just making sure the rebuild binaries is capable of running with the prepared assets?
(I'm not looking forward to people automatically AI-upressing of old games, I'd just prefer them to render-upscale and be faithful to the resolutions the games were built for back in the day).
Tbh, I think it's not an awesome timeline. AI is kinda motivating everyone to do everything on their own instead of gathering up and contributing to one (or two) projects, which is something I'm worried about in Open Source software as a whole. If we were using AI to contribute to a single decomp, making it as good as it could possibly be and gathering knowledge about the game, it would probably be much, much better. Instead, we are getting a mountain of shoddy, vibe-coded ports
I’d argue pre ai we have a mountain of shoddy unfinished ports. And getting communities to converge a few projects was not a thing that happened that often. There are a few exceptions (like blender) but in most cases there are dozens of unique solutions and hundreds of forks for most things.
> AI is kinda motivating everyone to do everything on their own instead of gathering up and contributing to one (or two) projects, which is something I'm worried about in Open Source software as a whole.
I think the people who are relying upon AI the most, might not contribute to OSS anyway. I can certainly say I am in that boat because I do not have software development skills and I do not want to learn how to do it. However I am very much using AI to write alternatives to some software I use like Kodi, because I can have something bespoke to my needs and perform "better" in terms of metrics that I care about, which may not align with metrics the contributors care about.
Have you tried making a skin for Kodi? Awful experience, poorly documented, and something only a handful of the community can do. They tend to perform poorly because of an over dependence on python plugins, have many foot guns, and can feel sluggish and unresponsive. But I can say make me a media player that looks like Netfix and pulls trending from trakt, and in one shot have something working on Android TV that performs far better for me.
There maybe arguments that AI couldn't have done that without OSS like Kodi to train on but I dont think thats accurate.
In theory it would be great if we had a bunch of experts reverse engineering these things and making better decomps but in reality most people find the work miserably boring, no one's gonna pay you for it, and it almost never happens.
Kaze Emanuar has done so much great work in optimizing Mario 64's engine over the years (check out his YouTube videos, they're fantastic) but guys like him are such an anomaly, I'm fine if robots are breathing new life into retro games and empowering consumers to be able to play these games in more ways instead of paying the IP holder every ~7 years to play a (likely lazy) port of a game they already own on a new system.
> AI is kinda motivating everyone to do everything on their own instead of gathering up and contributing to one (or two) projects, which is something I'm worried about in Open Source software as a whole.
A huge reason for that is the knee-jerk reaction of some communities (gaming especially, for some weird reason) at AI usage. So people build for an audience of one (maybe sharing with their closed friend group), and move on with their lives.
It's not that weird.
In the US at least, the gaming industry as a mismanaged trash fire. Workers are underpaid and unemployment is high. Executives are regularly shuttering studios responsible for highly acclaimed games and touting AI as the solution to all the problems. Given this framing, the way to support the studio making your favorite games is to make it clear that you don't want to replace everyone with AI. In fact, no AI use at all. It's one extreme in response to another.
From a hobbiest perspective, it's not great either. Translation projects that have been in the works for years have gotten beat to the punch by (extremely shoddy) AI projects helmed by people who don't speak the language they're supposedly translating. In one recent case, a half-completed human translation was stolen, finished with AI, and presented as an original work. Decompilation projects have had similar issues; AI use isn't disclosed until people start discovering that the result isn't accurate to the original.
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i don't agree. i'm in a pretty large discord server dedicated to some of these game mods - there's like 20 people in voice chats and multiple people streaming their work, which is kind of unheard of for programming discords. thousands of users in total. people are sharing prompts and guides, progress videos, trying other peoples work. a lot of mods are based on some core reverse engineering work that was done, and is now being built upon.
> AI is kinda motivating everyone to do everything on their own instead of gathering up and contributing to one (or two) projects, which is something I'm worried about in Open Source software as a whole.
Ah, yes. Thank goodness the FOSS community never generated many different tools for the one purpose before, right? \s
I wonder, with how aggressive most copyright holding companies are, if there is going to be a push to hold AI companies liable for reverse engineering like this. It possible AI companies designate it as forbidden knowledge, and “realign” models to not allow it
Isn't this technically illegal to reverse engineer and share? It's awesome but I feel like it'll hasten big companies to lobby and make some harsh laws around this type of thing. I'm surprised Claude/Fable allows this? Or do we trick them to do it?
It’s legal to have a ROM of a game you actually owned and ripped. This is simply allowing the ROM that you actually own to be played on a different console, the web.
In this case, the user is distributing the ROM which is illegal. But the method to make it work on the web is fair use. The legal way to do it would be a website where users “insert” their own rom and the website simply lets you play that ROM on the web.
there is no ROM in the linked github repo
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Also pedantic but: it’s jurisdiction dependent
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> Isn't this technically illegal to reverse engineer and share?
Software engineers are devoid of copyright and trademark laws and want everything to $0 and will become the new starving artists without knowing it.
Don't be surprised to see far more mass layoffs in the games industry.
I understand where you are coming from, but look at what else copyright protection has brought: studios and publishers are so insecure that they want to lock consumers out of 10+ year old games so that they don't have to compete with (their own) past games.
Maybe putting some pressure on making games that are actually new and different isn't a bad thing.
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I don't think reverse engineering or open source is creating the starving artists.
Also, video game programmers are already starving artists comparatively. To many people want to make video games to exploitation is rife. Only publishers benefit from your rhetoric. At least artists get royalties
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> This is an awesome timeline for old game preservation
How? The ISOs/ROMs were already preserved and playable on emulators on newer platforms
They are playable on current platforms. Will they be playable on platforms ten, twenty years from now? Some games and systems might slip through the cracks. It's a never ending process
> cracking up the emulation bubble
and cracking up the cracks bubble. Denuvo, a very popular and until recently quite successful DRM solution was cracked repeatedly over the past year or so via AI which caused the company to try to sue this anonymous cracker.
It's great for people who want to point and hype. Terrible for people who actually wish to play and preserve games, though.
To add some context, in this case, PPSSPP exists and is certainly no less accurate, and you can get a psp and games for a reasonable amount of money.
It's like not this represents something like a cycle accurate Cave CV1K board, which are very expensive and imperfectly emulated.
Nothing will happen.
Been working on this same idea for Super Smash Bros. Melee on the GameCube! Also runnable in the browser: https://github.com/nikhilunni/melee
Port is about 80% done, but completely mechanical with AI and an oracle (the Dolphin emulator)