Comment by VCFundedGenYer
3 hours ago
This gives decomps/recomps a bad name.
I'm tired of these terribly made AI projects in this space. It's just noise and low quality spam. I miss when these were done legitimately.
Some script kiddie ran this through a chat bot once and probably doesn't even understand the code.
For those who don't understand, watch this segment of DF Retro Super Show - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6gJTdk_BkI&t=165s
If the decomp scene is about the art of decompiling I would agree, but looking at r/decomps it seems the audience is gamers who just want to play the games. Do they also think it's terrible? Considering how anti Kotaku is it sounds like they are actually working well.
No it doesn't.
The point of decomps/recomps was never for some altruistic reason related to skill or art.
The point was people wanting to play games. This just adds to that. Yes - the people who did it before were skilled, smart and deserve recognition. But these ports are exactly that - ports so that people can play their old games or relive them.
I've always considered these an art more than a practical tool. If I wanted to pirate a game, I can just grab an emulator.
When you automate the process, the only interesting thing about the whole operation dies. I already knew you could reverse engineer C and I already knew emscriptem exists, it's the manual work that made it worth checking out.
The Mona Lisa is an interesting piece of art people come to visit France for. MonaLisa.jpeg is a good wallpaper for about a week at best.
> But these ports are exactly that - ports so that people can play their old games or relive them.
I'm thinking of Matrix here, just with games instead of chicken. Is it actually the game itself, or is it a machine's assumption of what the game is supposed to be?
With the decomp/recomp/mod/RE in general scene, the people involved were at least highly knowledgeable of what they were doing and they knew where their limits were and what needed to be done.
The chatbot however will yield a happy "done, did the needful" and deliver a pile of garbage instead.
>I miss when these were done legitimately.
Before LLM-assistance there were barely any fully playable recomps.
How many recompilation projects have you helped with? I get annoyed with non-contributors complaining about the people that contribute.
What's low quality about a working transpile? Missing out on engine details/optimizations is a shame, but if someone cares about that they can do that themselves, it doesn't make the transpile itself low quality.
Gonna have to heavily erm-akshully this.
Decomps or decompilation is about recovering source code that can bit for bit recover the same binary asset. This gives you back the source code from just the binaries. This requires the same toolchains, sdks, etc.
Recomps or recompilations basically inline and unroll say a PPC interpreter back into HLL code. This gets you something that modern toolchains can work with, while you replace all the IO layers so you can update the graphics, controller and networking stacks.
Neither of these are transpilation, which normally refers to a source to source compiler that translate the codes laterally in the same semantic strata.
What most folks are doing are recomps and there are existing SDKs for this (pre-ai) but more and more tooling is becoming available to the point at which I think there will be an agentic harness that runs the game under and emulator for realtime delta debugging and visual diffing.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham's_Law
I had a feeling that transpilation was maybe somehow different from decomp/recomp but convinced myself they were close enough.
Thanks for the interesting "erm-akshully" on the distinction!
The thing is they are actually good, that's why they are getting so popular even when you can emulate many of them already.