Comment by mjr00
17 hours ago
> Now they're going to be hit with a flood of half-decent decomps effortlessly generated by anyone with a $200/mo AI subscription, which become half-decent PC ports, which get modding support grafted on. It kinda just... totally eliminates that as a hobby entirely.
It really depends on your perspective of what the point of the hobby is. Were decomps/recomps a hobby because people wanted to make sure their old games could run on modern hardware and be extended with mods etc., or were they a hobby because people enjoyed the actual process of using Ghidra and reverse engineering by hand, and the decompiled game was just a side effect?
Personally I think it's awesome that PC98 Touhou games are getting recomps. Being able to play the series natively on modern hardware, and all hardware for the foreseeable future, is great and preserves the legacy of the series. I understand that for anyone who enjoys the actual act of reverse engineering it feels like cheating, though.
I think people will get over it. Music is a good example. Drum VSTs and piano VSTs are going to sound way better than you unless you're a 99th percentile musician playing on a 99th percentile physical instrument. But people still play the piano and drums, because it's fun. Same idea; the existence of AI doesn't stop people who love the act of reverse engineering from doing it.
I know I am late to respond here, but I would say that I feel like this is the wrong framing. It’s like asking if someone plays football because they like to kick a ball or because they like trying to win the game. The answer is yes, and ….
When people work on projects like these, it is often a communal activity, for the love of a shared mutual interest. Friends are made, technical expertise is gained and shared, people learn from the code and from each other, and ultimately something fun is produced. We are a social species and it feels good to help other people, and to feel supported in our efforts by others. It gives us the feeling that we matter, what we’re spending our time on matters, that our interests are not merely selfish, that we are not alone in the dark.
In any ecosystem, different specialists fill different niches, and you can’t have a vibrant ecosystem without all of them. For projects like these, the place where the reverse engineers finish is where the mod tool developers take over; where the mod toolers finish is where the artists and game designers take over; where the artists finish, the fans and beta testers take over. Some fans might even try their hand at helping with one of the other parts, and learn how to become good at it, and now you’ve got a pretty good stew going.
LLMs poison the entire ocean, kill all the coral and destroy all the ecosystems. This is true in RE, but it is also true in OSS. If you try to do something human, the moment it becomes interesting to someone with tokens for the yes-sir machine, they will steal all that momentum for themselves. Contributing to and actually using the human version, then, becomes something one would only do out of principle. That’s a very shallow pool to try to survive in compared to an entire ocean.
Is principle the only valid reason to want to do something? Why is it unacceptable that people be motivated to do things because they want the results?
The actual physical reality of the status quo of reverse engineering and recompiling is that the vast majority of stuff never gets the treatment because they aren't lucky enough to catch the attention of one of the few magical individuals with extreme skill and dedication willing to spend worth hundreds or thousands of hours of their time on them. The consequence is rot.
The status quo is thousands of pieces of software, including but not limited to video games, are lost every year, with no feasible way to recreate the systems and conditions that are needed to run them, and no way to update and repair them to be able to run again.
An estimated 88% of PS2 games are already lost forever. There are thousands of people in the world right now who have in their possession the last copies of digital media with no way to play them and nowhere near enough skill to crack and preserve them themselves.
The alternative to REA isn't hand-made free-range organic recomps, it's nothing.
> Is principle the only valid reason to want to do something? Why is it unacceptable that people be motivated to do things because they want the results?
No, not at all. I myself am not a “the means is the end” kind of person. If I just wanted to puzzle out solutions with nothing to show for it, I’d do the crossword. But, in my experience, caring only about results leads to myopic short-term solutions that create bigger long-term problems. For instance, if you’re in pain, I can “cure” that by shooting you in the head. A quick positive result for getting rid of the pain—but at what cost? For thinking work, AI seems to be shaping up to be a lot closer to a bullet than an analgesic.
All I was saying is that human motivation does not exist in a single dichotomy, and that ecosystems that develop around mutual effort create benefits beyond the mutual goal. You can’t get all those benefits without humans doing the work, but there’s no extrinsic motivation for humans to do the work, so very few will bother, and the ecosystem dies. (I hope it wasn’t ‘load-bearing’.)
Anyway, the benefit of reconstructed source code is not even about preservation, it is in enhancing the user experience beyond mere preservation. We’ve been preserving software using emulation alone just fine for quite some time. If you are actually worried about preservation, you might consider how much the Wayback Machine is getting blocked these days because of AI scrapers. Or how an AI agent might apologetically wipe out some irreplaceable archive. Or how nobody in the future will probably be able to care about preservation much as the one-two punch of climate change and AI descend on us. It’s always those damned long-term consequences from short-term thinking, you know?
>An estimated 88% of PS2 games are already lost forever.
This is certainly not true. Where did you read this?
also, emulators exist, it's not recomps or nothing.
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One thing's for sure, the people paying $220/mo subs are showing awesome demos. The people who are not paying $220/mo, they're producing: a lot of drama.
> It really depends on your perspective of what the point of the hobby is. Were decomps/recomps a hobby because people wanted to make sure their old games could run on modern hardware and be extended with mods etc., or were they a hobby because people enjoyed the actual process of using Ghidra and reverse engineering by hand, and the decompiled game was just a side effect?
I think your question would make sense if these were the only two reasons. Someone who just wants to make sure their old games can run would see these tools as a good thing. People who just enjoy reverse engineering by hand wouldn't care this exists, or maybe even, a helpful tutor.
So perhaps then, the sentiment being as negative as it is, is revealing something about the hobby: that many participants, considered the metagame of being the first to do it, to be "smart enough" to have figured it out, the "street cred" if you were, is what they are lamenting, but they just either lack the words, or aren't being honest with themselves.
> So perhaps then, the sentiment being as negative as it is, is revealing something about the hobby: that many participants, considered the metagame of being the first to do it, to be "smart enough" to have figured it out, the "street cred"
This is a very ingenerous interpretation.
I am a hobby hiker. My mountain hikes are so easy that basically anybody could do them: no street cred involved, it’s not even worth to speak about them. But it is important to me that most goals are only reachable by walking and putting in the effort: if a company offered a 20$/mo service that brings subscribers to the endpoint, carried in a luxury litter by robotized carriers, I would feel that my hobby has been devoided of sense.
> if a company offered a 20$/mo service that brings subscribers to the endpoint, carried in a luxury litter by robotized carriers, I would feel that my hobby has been devoided of sense.
As someone else who hikes: why? I do not understand. Do you not enjoy the hobby of hiking for the sake of hiking?
The views will be just as beautiful, the air just as fresh, and the feeling of moving my legs just as energizing, regardless of how others may decide to get to the destination themselves. Why would the experience of others have any impact on my own experience of a trail?
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Thanks for framing this in a way that I've struggled to phrase.
At every turn it seems like a lot of intellectual pursuits are just being voided by this technology.
I've heard the "one level up" argument in software with the supposition being that the work's still there, it's just becoming more abstract... but even in software, this doesn't really track.
The injection of this technology into not just intellectual but artistic pursuits (since there are now commercial AI image and music generators) should be a red alert.
What is there to live for once everything you once loved to do has been optimized for maximum revenue? Where every time you do something for fun, someone will come out of the woodwork when you show it off to either tell you AI could've done it quicker, or that they made an AI version with a flashier UI or something?
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This is a good illustration of the crux; that mindset makes absolutely no sense to me. Is hiking the Appalachian Trail meaningless because you can just drive from Georgia to Maine? Is camping in tents ruined for everyone because fancy Winnebagos exist?
But you still can do it without LLMs/AI. And even better you can be proud that you did something "by hand" without AI help. Do you know that you can still cooking, singing, programming and so on? You do not need to buy ready meals, generate music by prompts or let model to figure out solution.
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It is a lot of gatekeeping involved for sure. As a lifelong musician, who probably spent a few thousand hours to learn piano, guitar, drums and music production, I was shocked when people could produce reasonable sounding music with a mouse click and a budget of cents instead of endless dedication and a lot of money. I felt totally devalued and stripped of my „street cred“ to stay with your terms.
That's not (just) gatekeeping. People try to internalize a positive self image, from positive internal and external validation. Skills can also be a source of status or meaning (usefulness to others).
Taking that away compounds with the crisis of meaning we already have to make people feel more alienated than ever.
Oh, yes.
I must think of all the people who poured countless years of their lives learning all the C++ bullshit..
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> Were decomps/recomps a hobby because people wanted to make sure their old games could run on modern hardware and be extended with mods etc., or were they a hobby because people enjoyed the actual process of using Ghidra and reverse engineering by hand, and the decompiled game was just a side effect?
This is a very weird false dichotomy. It almost certainly was both of those for everyone who made any meaningful progress. You have to care about the end result to stick with a project to the end after you've finished the fun parts, and you have to enjoy most of the process of getting there for it to be a hobby. The journey and the destination matter, not one or the other.
A little nitpick on the sound quality of piano VSTs: I don't know about drum VSTs but I don't think your piano VST is actually a good example, because piano synthesis is actually pretty darn hard.
I haven't followed this closely the past few years, but it used to be pretty obvious you were listening to a VST compared to a real instrument in actual playing. When you compare recordings, sample based ones sound awesome as long as you just try a single note, but they were obviously missing something in the sympathetic resonances (sounding worse than my upright piano which is perhaps a 20th percentile piano), and the more physics based ones had not so great tones.
I've actually been hoping that someone would try to apply deep learning to piano VSTs, even emailed a few researchers, but no reply. If something new has come up I'm not aware of, I apologize.
Have you checked out Pianoteq? It is physical modeling and sounds incredible. It even runs on a RaspberryPi of you want.
When it comes to real instruments, Roland ships physical modeling in some of their instruments. They are a mainstream company.
So I think physical modeling is there but harder to get right than recording samples of piano keys being pressed. The results can be been convincing and it's nice that it requires little memory compared to sample based techniques.
I recall seeing a audio technician test some of the modern VSTs and it seemed extremely impressive to me as an amateur.
It's to the point where you virtually put microphones around the virtual instrument and it behaves (according to the person who does it for a living) creates an intuitively correct sound.
Edit: and to be clear this was a demo from before the LLM times so it's something built the traditional way.
I get where you're coming from, but IMO, for the 99.99% of modern music where either the piano is sitting in a busy mix with other instruments and/or the piano is getting routed through a ton of compression, saturation, delay, reverb, etc to make it sound like a modern track, you really won't be able to tell whether it's a VSTi or live recording. True for both pop music and soundtracks. The only case anyone can tell a difference is going to be solo piano pieces that are intentionally made to sound as raw as possible, which is fairly niche.
You can bring this distinction back to recomps, too -- one area you can't use a vibed recomp over an emulator is things like TAS's[0], since the TAS community has strict rules about staying compatible with the original hardware, including doing things like sending the TAS inputs into an actual console to verify it works properly. A recomp is likely going to have minor (or major) compatibility issues that would prevent this from working. But it won't matter for 99.99% of players.
[0] https://tasvideos.org/
> Were decomps/recomps a hobby because people wanted to make sure their old games could run on modern hardware and be extended with mods etc., or were they a hobby because people enjoyed the actual process of using Ghidra and reverse engineering by hand, and the decompiled game was just a side effect?
It’s interesting to dwell on what ‘we’ appreciated before versus what we appreciate now. Since LLMs lowered the bar, it feels like raw human effort has come to be held in higher esteem.
Are we going to re-evaluate what we were impressed with in the past based on that new metric? For example, will accomplishments by experienced engineers be devalued in comparison to accomplishments by outsiders? Will the software engineering equivalent of ‘folk’ or ‘outsider’ art become more valued? There will be a natural instinct to distrust outsider contributions because, well, how did they get so good?
Are some metrics of human effort going to be de rigueur going forward?
Study former examples of 'AI' doing this : the Luddites and various artisans displaced by 'AI' looms and 'AI' factories in the 19th century.
I think you misunderstand the OP, the issue isn't the work if AI can do it we should still pool together and not waste tokens on the same problem 10-100x times because 100 people are doing the same thing in parallel.
Since it's not educational as it used to be, if you built your own version of n64 emulator number 10143 you got something out of it you learnt some interesting stuff, learnt software development, hardware etc.
Now we are literally all just taking a magic machine pouring money on one end getting half baked output the other but no progress is being made on money is being wasted. Since even if 1 person had built it everyone would have had access already.
This is the same wave of slop coding/vibemaxxing we had a few months ago where everyone was building product X for the 1 million-th time without any actual progress being made.
Math has a similar problem now, before if 1000 people tried to solve a problem they all grew from that experience, the LLM is not growing/learning anything from this effort.
All we are doing is burning resources for our pleasure, I say that as someone who has now written his own compiler, vcs and browser stack, with vibe coding, though largely I would claim I have used and tried to read the code, clean it up, to learn from it where different things break.
But even this feels absurd waste of resource imagine all of us collectively burning 200$ per month plans which assuming a at cost pricing we are all burning 200$ of electricity each month to do what exactly? Some folks are on their 10th subscription that means most people are burning 1000-2000$ of ultra cheap energy generally sourced from a mix of gas/oil turbines burning away at big data centers these days.
We could all solve it by making a site.. cough github.. and not duplicating work.. cough..
But somehow because it's easy no one seems to care.
I am hardly against software progress, and if AI gets better we will have better software (because most people write horrible software most of the time) so I am happy about it, to an extent that I can be, with my profession feeling somewhat challenged.
But given I have always worked as a fixer of broken stuff it's very much also feels fine to me. Either way I am very much against these 200-500 dollar plans that allow you to burn hundreds of dollars of energy for little productive gain duplicating the same work 100th time.
I am sure software developer using 100-200$ plans just for work can get more out of it. And it's probably making up for the effort they would have put in their work otherwise.
What's a VST?
Virtual Studio Technology. Often referred to as a virtual instrument or a (virtual) synthesizer, and works as a plugin in digital audio workstations.