Comment by csnover
6 hours ago
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.
It is true. The PS2 is the worst example, with so many games lost to disk rot and never digitally available, leading to a particularly poor archival rate.
https://insider-gaming.com/study-classic-games-unavailable/
Probably a misinterpretation of “not offered for sale today”.
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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.