As someone heavily involved in the retro gaming tech space, I've seen a lot of people using AI there and it's really disappointing to me. You're right that it takes a lot of technical knowledge and deep understanding of the system, and the whole point of the endeavor is the process of getting that knowledge and becoming an expert in the system. It's a hobby, not a job; the end goal of a working emulator or whatever is just motivation to carry you along that process of learning.
So having Claude one-shot a NES emulator is almost pointless to me. You're using and looking at source code for an emulator you didn't write -- and you can learn from that, but it's not the same thing and doesn't require you to really understand a CPU the way you would by, say, observing a deviation in game behavior and staring at trace logs to figure out the exact instruction you emulated incorrectly.
It's not all bad -- AI is a great research tool and can automate some of the tedious parts (writing out an instruction decoder by hand is miserable). But using it to just...skip over the effort of doing a project defeats the whole purpose of doing those projects in the first place.
I don't want to be gatekeepy or curmudgeonly or "back in my day..." about it. But for me, my entire career path is due to skills and knowledge I learned spending several years of my life as a teenager figuring out how to write an NES emulator as a relative beginner to programming. And so I feel like using AI for this is depriving the next generation of that learning process. In addition, there are only so many retro games, and fewer popular ones. There's only so much unexplored territory to discover, and doing it with AI deprives another person of that experience and deprives that game's community of someone who might have been able to find a "home" working on projects related to that game.
> AI allows players to have decompiled and in turn ports of games to new platforms, enhanced versions of the game, etc.
We're ten years too early to do what you're suggesting. You need a really, really good understanding of the decompiled codebase and the original game and platform to port or implement new features.
You can't really ask "Claude, make Ocarina Of Time Widescreen" and expect it to work.
We're not ten years early. If you can afford the tokens, and can course-correct the agent when it gets off in the weeds, AI can do 95% of the grunt work of a decomp now.
Also, "widescreen OOT" is probably tweaking a pair of projection matrix floats in the binary so that might not be a great example :)
You could absolutely do that, because it's a narrow, targeted change. I give it 10% odds Claude could make that change to a binary ROM and 70% to a decomp.
> AI allows players to have decompiled and in turn ports of games to new platforms, enhanced versions of the game, etc.
To what end? The biggest benefit of tinkering with 40-year-old hardware is the experience of doing so. The knowledge and intuition you learn about how computers really work; the friendships you develop through collaboration with others, through asking for help with your projects and helping others with theirs; and the relaxing Saturday afternoons spent investigating and debugging and experimenting. The "benefit" of having a game that's been recompiled to a native executable for your PC or whatever is marginal compared to the benefit of the process to get to that point. That end goal is just a lighthouse to keep you on track, and when you get there maybe you'll play the recompiled game once to celebrate a job well done before moving on to another project.
If writing software is a means to an end, then there's value in anything that reduces the effort to get to that end. But as I see it, retro gaming projects are mostly an end to a means.
> Seems pretty egoistical when nobody's forcing you to use AI in any way, it provides an objective benefit to other people.
I have three fundamental claims:
- There is little to no positive benefit to using AI for hobby projects whose completion provides little to no intrinsic value.
- Choosing to do so has a negative impact on you, as it bypasses an incredibly valuable learning experience.
- Choosing to do so has a negative impact on others, as it takes away someone else's project opportunity (there are a finite amount of popular retro games, and many people prefer to work on novel projects rather than recreating something that has already been done).
I'm not sure what's "egoistical" about that, and I'd love if you could elaborate on that because I'm still wrestling with the ethics and implications of all this myself. The way I see it, it's better if I choose to forgo the use of AI on my projects, and I think others should choose the same.
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Many years back, one retro gaming community I'm a part of had a prolific contributor who was extremely knowledgeable about the game, but also incredibly abrasive. He was the most knowledgeable person in the community at the time, and held this over others; discrediting their achievements, discouraging their attempts to learn, constantly starting fights and driving many good people out of the community. Yet he was allowed to remain in the community for many years, because everyone thought we needed his expertise.
Eventually the community came to the realization that it's just a video game and we don't "need" anything at all. None of the long-term community members are really here for the game anymore; we're here for the experience and the camaraderie. So we should make decisions (like kicking out this member) that are technically suboptimal for the game (at least in the short term), but better for fostering the community.
In a similar vein, using AI within these sorts of hobby spaces may allow faster progress on such projects, but it takes away the value of completing the projects in the first place, to the detriment of both the individual and the community.
> To what end? The biggest benefit of tinkering with 40-year-old hardware is the experience of doing so.
The biggest benefit to you. Other people, most people in fact, just like the game and want to enjoy it in new ways. They don't care about the code or reverse engineering itself. That people now benefit that it's easy to decompile because otherwise outside of really big titles like sm64, probably nobody is going to take the effort to manually decompile a less popular game.
That's the egoistical part.
Nobody is forcing you to use AI. And it's not really any different to how people would build their own NES emulators to learn instead of just grabbing whatever best NES emulator already exist.
I think my biggest issue with that is that people who just want to replay a game in a fresh way once or twice aren't the kind of people who are going to stick around and form a community; and those communities are what foster the creativity which brings freshness and depth to the games. I see it as quite similar to AI music creation, which, sure, allows people access to music that didn't exist before without putting in the effort, but in doing so it replaces what has historically been a community endeavor with a highly individualist, consumerist one.
My perspective is biased by the fact that such communities are an important part of my life. I don't want to see my years-long collaborations and friendships made obsolete by someone looking for an afternoon of nostalgia. And maybe everything will be fine, and the AI-users and the community-builders will go their separate ways and leave each other alone. But communities which exist today are having to ask how we should relate to AI, and my conclusion is that it's best kept out of hobbyist spaces if we want those spaces to continue to exist.
To be able to play retro games on current hardware/OS?
Why does it always need to be so complicated - I have zero interest in learning about these legacy platforms but I definitely want to play some nostalgic games.
Mindboggling that you see this as a negative and even want to kick out people to “protect” the community
Also to fix bugs. Someone recently ran Shadowrun (Genesis) disassembly through chatgpt and discovered that weapon upgrades were completely broken (using the wrong value as an index and ending up reading character stats as upgrade flags), defensive spells actually buffed your enemies, not you, etc. and released a romhack to fix things.
Lately I've seen this statement that I agree with: for some people, a hobby is a means to an end (which means using AI to achieve the goal is a heresy), for others, it is the end in itself (which it isn't).
Sorry, what? The benefit is that we have these games to play. That is the intrinsic benefit. Most of us don't care about the other things you listed when all we want to do is play old games. You're free to value those things in this context and that's fine, but it's weird to impose those values on others when they're providing what people want.
Much like you, anyone who wants to get deep into emulation and reverse engineering will. They will do so because AI cant quite do what they want, and probably because they are curious. The upside is that when they are that deep they will have a bot to ask questions of along the way, and they will recognise where it comes up short eventually.
Yes people will lazy their way out of it. Many of us program, but few of us ever bothered to learn, with fluency, assembly. Those who wanted to did, and those who didnt stuck to higher level languages.
I don't see why the goal of a decomp needs to be "learning how to decomp"--although I guarantee you that working on one, even AI-assisted, will teach you those skills.
Personally, I think it's fascinating to see how the industry greats actually made the magic happen. Everyone talks about the endless fine-tuning of controls that Miyamoto asked for in SM64: now we get to see what that actually looks like! Or maybe the game had a hidden secret debug menu that no one's ever seen in 20 years, or an unfinished character is hiding in the code.
Maybe my perspective is different because I've worked on games for most of my career, so seeing how _other_ teams solved the hard challenges is exciting for me.
I don't get it. Your purpose is to learn, why should someone else doing whatever they want be an impediment? You aren't racing to the market, you aren't pursuing the same objective. If your motivation is the learning process, an existing AI assisted, AI vibed or human created emulator doesn't stop you from writing your own and learning exactly the same way
It's sad that the community isn't exactly doing their best to separate developers using AI to debug poorly understood quirks and bugs of their emulation projects from those screaming "computah! Decompile me a Super Smash Bros".
MAME is doing some amazing reverse engineering work on some more recent arcade boards by using AI[1] that would've taken decades to do so by hand, and it's being conflated with some rando committing to github the result of 5 hours of Claude stirring over the Golden Eye N64 rom and then publishing on twitter "Done, here's my Patreon link, please and thank you".
Those most-intelligent of humans who carefully memorized verbally the most important civilizational facts known had the same reaction to the invention of writing.
You are clearly a wizard of a prior era. But it is a new era.
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
That is a fictional objection raised by the Egyptian god Amun to the Egyptian god Thoth, who was supposed by the Egyptians to have invented music and writing, and was supposed by the Greeks to have invented absolutely everything else too, including botany, surveying, and government.
It's also a critique of writing, written by Plato, to impress on us that Socrates was great orator (or arguer) and was better that way. But it's not somebody's reaction to the invention of writing. It's an imagined reaction to the invention of writing.
Be wonderful if you approached a translated piece, by first considering the time and culture that produced it. Understanding the intent, rather than quoting it out of place.
This is a political critique, on the rule of law (writing) over attempting to treat things on a case by case basis (philosophy).
Quoting it, without understanding it, is part of that author's complaint.
So having Claude one-shot a NES emulator is almost pointless to me. You're using and looking at source code for an emulator you didn't write -- and you can learn from that, but it's not the same thing and doesn't require you to really understand a CPU the way you would by, say, observing a deviation in game behavior and staring at trace logs to figure out the exact instruction you emulated incorrectly.
It's not all bad -- AI is a great research tool and can automate some of the tedious parts (writing out an instruction decoder by hand is miserable). But using it to just...skip over the effort of doing a project defeats the whole purpose of doing those projects in the first place.
I don't want to be gatekeepy or curmudgeonly or "back in my day..." about it. But for me, my entire career path is due to skills and knowledge I learned spending several years of my life as a teenager figuring out how to write an NES emulator as a relative beginner to programming. And so I feel like using AI for this is depriving the next generation of that learning process. In addition, there are only so many retro games, and fewer popular ones. There's only so much unexplored territory to discover, and doing it with AI deprives another person of that experience and deprives that game's community of someone who might have been able to find a "home" working on projects related to that game.