> PSP games running in the browser without an emulator. The game's MIPS machine code is translated ahead of time into C++, compiled to WebAssembly, and linked against a small reimplementation of the PSP's operating system and graphics chip that draws with WebGL2.
Feels slightly pedantic to point this out, but this describes an emulation stack. A lot of emulators are already doing some kind of lift+JIT on the target's machine code (just not through WASM)
We called emulation back in the last century and it hasn't changed.
The original hardware doesn't exist on the target system.
Taking a famous example out of many others I could have reached for,
> Emulation had been around for a while as a concept, but FX!32 went one stage further. It analyzed the way programs worked and, after the program ran, used binary translation to produce dynamic-link library (DLL) files of native Alpha code that the application could execute the next time it ran. This way even in the early 1.0 release, the FX!32 achieved speeds for Win32 x86 applications that ran 40-50% as fast as native x86 code, with a 70% speed projected as likely with improved optimization. Version 1.5, released by Compaq in 1999, added support for the Alpha 21264 (EV6) CPU, including emulation of Intel's MMX instruction set.
The CPU is also in a bit of a funny place because the transpiled C++ looks to be translating instructions into manipulation of a MIPS CPU state object.
That's almost what WINE does which is, apparently, not an emulator. Small reimplementation of Windows userspace and translates DirectX to Vulkan/OpenGL. So if I do x86 -> ARM binary translation AOT and run that with WINE, is it an emulator?
you would expect wine to be translating the executable in some way if you considered it emulation, but wine loads and runs the binaries as they are. it provides a PE/COFF loader and linux-native replacements for windows apis. the machine code of the original executable is running directly on the processor.
Yeah, maybe that's the difference. I was trying to probe the semantics, not so much a "gotcha". Parts of this stack are quite bespoke for this one game.
FWIW, the two God of War games released on PSP were considered some of the most graphically impressive on the platform. Both came out late in the console's lifetime (2008 and 2010).
An IGN review also described one of them as "it looks better than a big chunk of PS2 games". [0] I've played one of them and yes, it felt like playing a resized PS2 game.
At what point does most commercial software shift exclusively to server-side rendering or streaming? Are we going to be vibe coding GTA 6 by January 2027?
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.
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
> 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.
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.
You are in a bubble or just happen to be at a place that doesn't care about architecture or quality code. I vibe lots of code, but most of it would never make it past review without significant editing and manual guidance.
You can't blame open source projects for rejecting PRs out of hand, when they have a hundred thousand lines of garbage. Not everybody is ready for their project to completely descend into slop yet. Maybe in a couple years though.
The "problem" with FOSS projects is that they're getting submissions from people who have no idea what they're doing, not that AI per se is an issue. Like the other poster, all of the actual professionals at my F100 have been doing 100% AI coding for most of the year. Having the actual coding part automated means it's easier to improve architecture, reliability, performance, testing, etc. All the things that you always want to do but previously couldn't justify spending the time on are now doable.
I work for a fortune 500, and go to lunch with friends at AWS and google. I have not met a single person that has hand written code in the last year.
I am in a bubble yes, but a bubble further down the path you are headed down. I am sorry to say it, but coding by hand is over.
Listen, I joined this profession because I loved writing code and I was good at it. My job is less interesting now, I no longer get to solve puzzles. I am not an advocate, just a realist. Hand writing code is dead.
EDIT: Its obviously not dead yet, but the path is clear, and the progress is further than people think. If you use chrome, you use vide code, if you use windows you use vibe code. If you have touched a single part of any large software companies products, I guarantee 30+% of what was merged in the last year was written with 100% pure AI and no IDE open at all.
There is no reason why gamers should be OK with use of AI to make games - AI doesn't solve any problems currently haunting the industry, it only exacerbates existing problems. If people were suddenly OK with AI in games, games won't get better - they will get even worse.
Nah man I hate what AI has done to my job. But I think people outside of major tech don't realize how far down the path we are.
I remember I was on a call with a client about a new product we put out which hosts modules of their code on our system, and we were talking about AI and they were asking how they should separate their AI made prototypes with their hand made production items, because obviously stuff that makes it to production obviously has to be remade by humans.
There was a long silence, then someone on my team said no developer had ever once opened a IDE on the entire production product we had built and they where using. Development began 2 years ago and by that time not one developer out of 2,000 at my company was using IDEs.
I am not saying you need to be "OK" with the use of AI to make games. I am saying your "OK" doesn't matter, it will happen. If you fight the lost cause you can delay it, but then you will have no control over how the world looks once the fight is over. Don't get caught up in the fight to prevent it, look for a future compromise you are happy with and work on shaping that future.
This isn't the first time something like this happened, and we can see the results of hoping for it to go away. The invention of the car was full of people who wanted to ban cars, and eventually they lost and we now have tons of car dependent hell holes... What all of those people should have focused on was making sure the laws/regulations/patterns/thoughts around cars were healthy and balanced so that the car future would be healthy and balanced. Instead, they where all or nothing, and once they lost, they no longer had any say in what happened and cars broke through to very little resistance beyond no/yes.
You are not deciding for the entire gaming community. They can vote with their wallets, and the industry should better listen to them or going to end up on the wrong side of the bubble. It is not in its best shape anyways.
That's what makes this so obviously a push for brain rot and rent seeking, getting a foot into every single last door. I mean, we still have scroll lock keys on our keyboards, but oh noes, some big companies that have been doing nothing but being stains on tech are doing everything via LLM, nobody opens an IDE, "manual coding" is over, NOW, there are no alternatives? Yeah right. Just chill.
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.
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
> 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).
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.
They did not. They went to a fair bit of trouble in this regard. The tool both requires an original ROM and a psp-decryptor tool to extract the encrypted EBOOT.BIN. Neither are included, and there is no guidance on how to source either.
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.
That genie escaped the bottle a couple decades ago when The Pirate Bay went online and game studios and publishers started focusing on MMOs and other live service games that couldn't be torrented to compensate. This is a pittance in comparison and it's for a long dead console platform to boot.
It's a bit harder to reverse engineer a game from a video stream than from a binary+data dump ;) (of course an LLM can come up with a knock-off that roughly has the same theme of what it sees in the video-stream, but that would basically be "Italian Spiderman - the Game".
Sure, but the LLM can either
1. recreate the assets from the good old "view it from multiple angles" trick
2. exfil the running game from the servers :P
I can see this thing crushing the demand for video games & software, and all the supporting second order industries going down with it (Adobe, Atlassian, etc).
People have an idealistic view of the world, "democratizing" the software industry, but people are not going to get fed.
And the remaining will move onto other industries, the supply of labor will create a kind of involution you see in China, where labor chase after a smaller supply of money.
A 2 trillion dollar industry destroyed, because we want to run games on the cloud, or something
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
> Also, video game programmers are already starving artists comparatively.
So this is making it better for them?
> To many people want to make video games to exploitation is rife. Only publishers benefit from your rhetoric. At least artists get royalties
Now both the publisher and the artist (we can now include game developer) will get $0 and cannot have it both ways.
We can accept mass decompilation of games and existing ones being sold today and offered for free, and also accept significant layoffs and the collapse of an entire industry.
Have you not seen the mass layoffs from Microsoft and other major publishers? And the toxic work environment they are often associated with? AI has nothing to do with that. I hope we see a resurgence in Indie studios and studios that care about their community and customers and not pulling rug pulls like Ubisoft do. Or the union busting Rockstar did.
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
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
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.
Well, according to the repo, it contains no actual game assets. You need to supply your own PSP disc of the game. Might protect them legally, might not.
I did a similar project for an old Pentium MMX 350MHz level game and instead vibecoded an x86-32 to WASM dynarec that runs the game at 1k+ MIPS in Firefox, on my old Zen2 PC. I was shocked that this is even possible. Still feels unreal to see.
AI excels at this because it can work at the function level to brute force decomp to C with void* fiascos and keep trialing and erroring until the compiled md5sum matches the original binary’s. The resulting source will be unreadable and unmaintainable but at least compiler and platform agnostic.
Humans are still better at this given time. Check out sm64’s decomp quality
> A small PSP kernel. Whatever the game asks of the PSP's operating system is answered by high-level emulation in profile/host
So this is just an emulator with extra steps. The kind of bad emulator that requires game-specific patches instead of getting the emulation correct to begin with, and is embedding the emulator into a binary together with the game. Absolute slop.
> The kind of bad emulator that requires game-specific patches instead of getting the emulation correct to begin with, and is embedding the emulator into a binary together with the game. Absolute slop.
There's kind of a bitter lesson variant with AI coding where the work to make a simple, consistent, flexible, DRY platform or library isn't really worth it when anyone can press a button and get a variant customized to their needs in minutes.
People playing the game don't care about the elegance of the emulator, and if there is a bug in the slop, they can just have their AI fix it immediately and keep playing.
Or they can just save their time/money, use a human-crafted emulator, and not deal with their game crashing constantly and all manner of stupid bugs. It is genuinely insane that you believe your average joe video game player would rather spend $100~200 on a subscription, prompt for an emulator, then prompt it over and over to fix showstopping bugs rather than playing something that works for free, and yet that is what you are supposing when you suggest they "don't care" about the "elegance" of the emulator.
You would at least have a point if people were slopping out emulators for things that didn't exist but, surprise surprise, we still don't have a Switch 2 emulator. Almost like this entire notion is a complete fraud and all it can do is regurgitate existing code poorly.
At first, the handmade emulators were just as buggy and crashed all the time. That’s just normal during development. With AI tools, however, you now have the advantage of being able to theoretically create a comprehensive testing environment where, eventually, an LLM will play the games on its own and fix any bugs it finds, so that the user ends up with a nearly perfect emulator.
The Switch 2 is a completely different story than other consoles. To create an emulator for it, you'd have to be able to reverse-engineer the Switch 2, and that won't be possible until there's a jailbreak.
Good news here, someone claims to have found a userland exploit in at least one game and dumped the game via HDMI capture of visual encoded data. They might be full of it, or we might have a path for Switch2 ROMs.
I say that as a Switch 2 owner with a pretty extensive Nintendo library. I dont actually have any interest in using Switch 2 ROMs this decade, but maybe next.
I certainly do. I'm paying 300, 400% more for my PC/server parts and HN has been ruined because of fraudsters selling a con, among many other undesirable side effects. People like yourself selling incoherent hype like "people will just prompt an emulator for themselves" are part of the problem. It would be weird if I didn't have an axe to grind with hucksters doing their best to ruin things for everyone else.
There have been A LOT of buggy game ports released and immediately abandoned. It's all well and good until you want to actually experience the game as intended. Running into a huge issue that will never be fixed several hours in radicalizes folks pretty quickly.
Unfortunately, all of these slop-ports will wow and amaze people that have zero intent of actually playing the game. They're the software equivalent of clickbait.
> PSP games running in the browser without an emulator. The game's MIPS machine code is translated ahead of time into C++, compiled to WebAssembly, and linked against a small reimplementation of the PSP's operating system and graphics chip that draws with WebGL2.
Feels slightly pedantic to point this out, but this describes an emulation stack. A lot of emulators are already doing some kind of lift+JIT on the target's machine code (just not through WASM)
Most people would say that Ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation or static recompilation is not considered traditional emulation.
We called emulation back in the last century and it hasn't changed.
The original hardware doesn't exist on the target system.
Taking a famous example out of many others I could have reached for,
> Emulation had been around for a while as a concept, but FX!32 went one stage further. It analyzed the way programs worked and, after the program ran, used binary translation to produce dynamic-link library (DLL) files of native Alpha code that the application could execute the next time it ran. This way even in the early 1.0 release, the FX!32 achieved speeds for Win32 x86 applications that ran 40-50% as fast as native x86 code, with a 70% speed projected as likely with improved optimization. Version 1.5, released by Compaq in 1999, added support for the Alpha 21264 (EV6) CPU, including emulation of Intel's MMX instruction set.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32
You are no longer emulating the CPU but the rest of the system you are absolutely emulating. So I think it's very close to traditional emulation.
The CPU is also in a bit of a funny place because the transpiled C++ looks to be translating instructions into manipulation of a MIPS CPU state object.
https://github.com/jessicanataliagta/PSPRecomp/blob/main/src...
That's almost what WINE does which is, apparently, not an emulator. Small reimplementation of Windows userspace and translates DirectX to Vulkan/OpenGL. So if I do x86 -> ARM binary translation AOT and run that with WINE, is it an emulator?
https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/blob/master/loader/main....
According to WINE itself, WINE is an emulator.
Ultimately there's a spectrum between emulation and native code and where you draw the line is an arbitrary and subjective choice.
If WINE is not an emulator then YAML ain't a markup language
you would expect wine to be translating the executable in some way if you considered it emulation, but wine loads and runs the binaries as they are. it provides a PE/COFF loader and linux-native replacements for windows apis. the machine code of the original executable is running directly on the processor.
Yelling At My Laptop
It appears to me like an emulator where the binary is just compiled in based on the huge amount of code like this:
https://github.com/jessicanataliagta/PSPRecomp/blob/main/pro...
That made me chuckle
I was going to argue but:
> That code runs against a register file and a model of the PSP's memory.
From the project README. That to me, is an emulator.
I think of an emulator as a separate project/product typically. Perhaps that's what they are saying?
Yeah, maybe that's the difference. I was trying to probe the semantics, not so much a "gotcha". Parts of this stack are quite bespoke for this one game.
FWIW, the two God of War games released on PSP were considered some of the most graphically impressive on the platform. Both came out late in the console's lifetime (2008 and 2010).
An IGN review also described one of them as "it looks better than a big chunk of PS2 games". [0] I've played one of them and yes, it felt like playing a resized PS2 game.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20121020044819/http://www.ign.co...
Yup, this game was playable on 32MB ram pocket size console with graphic so good and detailed!
That 32MB ram is impressive.
At what point does most commercial software shift exclusively to server-side rendering or streaming? Are we going to be vibe coding GTA 6 by January 2027?
They’re gonna turn Stadia back on. Who can afford personal graphics cards and memory these days?
Who can afford to service game streaming when those GPUs could be used for LLM inference / training?
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.
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
> 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.
At this point, the anti-AI fight is over, and all of the communities trying to keep it going are just causing weird misshapen progress horizons.
Feel how you want about it, but as a in industry programmer, I have watched phrasing shift from
Coding: Writing code by hand
Vibe coding: writing code by prompt
to
Manual Coding: Writing code by hand
Coding: writing code by prompt
I have not seen a single person at work open an IDE. Nor have I talked to anyone that has in a year. Its over, coding via ai IS coding now.
You are in a bubble or just happen to be at a place that doesn't care about architecture or quality code. I vibe lots of code, but most of it would never make it past review without significant editing and manual guidance.
You can't blame open source projects for rejecting PRs out of hand, when they have a hundred thousand lines of garbage. Not everybody is ready for their project to completely descend into slop yet. Maybe in a couple years though.
The "problem" with FOSS projects is that they're getting submissions from people who have no idea what they're doing, not that AI per se is an issue. Like the other poster, all of the actual professionals at my F100 have been doing 100% AI coding for most of the year. Having the actual coding part automated means it's easier to improve architecture, reliability, performance, testing, etc. All the things that you always want to do but previously couldn't justify spending the time on are now doable.
I work for a fortune 500, and go to lunch with friends at AWS and google. I have not met a single person that has hand written code in the last year.
I am in a bubble yes, but a bubble further down the path you are headed down. I am sorry to say it, but coding by hand is over.
Listen, I joined this profession because I loved writing code and I was good at it. My job is less interesting now, I no longer get to solve puzzles. I am not an advocate, just a realist. Hand writing code is dead.
EDIT: Its obviously not dead yet, but the path is clear, and the progress is further than people think. If you use chrome, you use vide code, if you use windows you use vibe code. If you have touched a single part of any large software companies products, I guarantee 30+% of what was merged in the last year was written with 100% pure AI and no IDE open at all.
I think you forgot the #sponsored tag.
There is no reason why gamers should be OK with use of AI to make games - AI doesn't solve any problems currently haunting the industry, it only exacerbates existing problems. If people were suddenly OK with AI in games, games won't get better - they will get even worse.
Nah man I hate what AI has done to my job. But I think people outside of major tech don't realize how far down the path we are.
I remember I was on a call with a client about a new product we put out which hosts modules of their code on our system, and we were talking about AI and they were asking how they should separate their AI made prototypes with their hand made production items, because obviously stuff that makes it to production obviously has to be remade by humans.
There was a long silence, then someone on my team said no developer had ever once opened a IDE on the entire production product we had built and they where using. Development began 2 years ago and by that time not one developer out of 2,000 at my company was using IDEs.
I am not saying you need to be "OK" with the use of AI to make games. I am saying your "OK" doesn't matter, it will happen. If you fight the lost cause you can delay it, but then you will have no control over how the world looks once the fight is over. Don't get caught up in the fight to prevent it, look for a future compromise you are happy with and work on shaping that future.
This isn't the first time something like this happened, and we can see the results of hoping for it to go away. The invention of the car was full of people who wanted to ban cars, and eventually they lost and we now have tons of car dependent hell holes... What all of those people should have focused on was making sure the laws/regulations/patterns/thoughts around cars were healthy and balanced so that the car future would be healthy and balanced. Instead, they where all or nothing, and once they lost, they no longer had any say in what happened and cars broke through to very little resistance beyond no/yes.
You are not deciding for the entire gaming community. They can vote with their wallets, and the industry should better listen to them or going to end up on the wrong side of the bubble. It is not in its best shape anyways.
Voting with your wallet only works when there are alternatives—there are none.
That's what makes this so obviously a push for brain rot and rent seeking, getting a foot into every single last door. I mean, we still have scroll lock keys on our keyboards, but oh noes, some big companies that have been doing nothing but being stains on tech are doing everything via LLM, nobody opens an IDE, "manual coding" is over, NOW, there are no alternatives? Yeah right. Just chill.
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.
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
> 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).
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
That’s fair, I saw a screenshot of God of War running in the browser in the ReadMe so assumed the person put it online.
They did not. They went to a fair bit of trouble in this regard. The tool both requires an original ROM and a psp-decryptor tool to extract the encrypted EBOOT.BIN. Neither are included, and there is no guidance on how to source either.
Yes once I was on desktop and checked it out, they are not distributing the ROM.
This seems to be a trend. A person decompiled Halo and put it online[0]. It also requires you to bring the ROM. Exciting times.
0. https://hcemobile.com/
Also pedantic but: it’s jurisdiction dependent
> 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.
> I understand where you are coming from...
I don't think you do. But please continue.
> Maybe putting some pressure on making games that are actually new and different isn't a bad thing.
That's not the point. It is what comes afterwards and software engineers cannot have it both ways.
This will make game studios move to world models with the real game being never released, but only simulated and streamed to you.
So let's see what happens.
That genie escaped the bottle a couple decades ago when The Pirate Bay went online and game studios and publishers started focusing on MMOs and other live service games that couldn't be torrented to compensate. This is a pittance in comparison and it's for a long dead console platform to boot.
And why do you think people won't be able to rip the streamed games too?
It's a bit harder to reverse engineer a game from a video stream than from a binary+data dump ;) (of course an LLM can come up with a knock-off that roughly has the same theme of what it sees in the video-stream, but that would basically be "Italian Spiderman - the Game".
Sure, but the LLM can either 1. recreate the assets from the good old "view it from multiple angles" trick 2. exfil the running game from the servers :P
I can see this thing crushing the demand for video games & software, and all the supporting second order industries going down with it (Adobe, Atlassian, etc).
People have an idealistic view of the world, "democratizing" the software industry, but people are not going to get fed. And the remaining will move onto other industries, the supply of labor will create a kind of involution you see in China, where labor chase after a smaller supply of money.
A 2 trillion dollar industry destroyed, because we want to run games on the cloud, or something
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
> Also, video game programmers are already starving artists comparatively.
So this is making it better for them?
> To many people want to make video games to exploitation is rife. Only publishers benefit from your rhetoric. At least artists get royalties
Now both the publisher and the artist (we can now include game developer) will get $0 and cannot have it both ways.
We can accept mass decompilation of games and existing ones being sold today and offered for free, and also accept significant layoffs and the collapse of an entire industry.
Have you not seen the mass layoffs from Microsoft and other major publishers? And the toxic work environment they are often associated with? AI has nothing to do with that. I hope we see a resurgence in Indie studios and studios that care about their community and customers and not pulling rug pulls like Ubisoft do. Or the union busting Rockstar did.
The industry needs a shake up.
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
> 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)
if you liked this topic, you might be interested in https://thegamingemporium.com/recent/
I wonder how long it'll take until Sony takes this down
Well, according to the repo, it contains no actual game assets. You need to supply your own PSP disc of the game. Might protect them legally, might not.
and Yuzu didn't include any switch assets
I remember trying to emulate this game on my i7 laptop a decade ago. It was running like 15 FPS.So for me this look like magic.
maybe i will finally able to play MGSolid saga on a browser on my mac :)
I saw one yesterday for GTA 6 it was taken down. Somebody can probably dig up the X link.
You mean GTA 5?
Yup, I think it's playgta5.com but you will probably have to look for mirrors or on wayback
Insane that we can now decompile PSP games to WebGL. Emulation has come far from 2006 where ePSXe the PS1 emulator would only run on a beefy Pentium.
No need to decompile even.
I did a similar project for an old Pentium MMX 350MHz level game and instead vibecoded an x86-32 to WASM dynarec that runs the game at 1k+ MIPS in Firefox, on my old Zen2 PC. I was shocked that this is even possible. Still feels unreal to see.
AI excels at this because it can work at the function level to brute force decomp to C with void* fiascos and keep trialing and erroring until the compiled md5sum matches the original binary’s. The resulting source will be unreadable and unmaintainable but at least compiler and platform agnostic.
Humans are still better at this given time. Check out sm64’s decomp quality
> A small PSP kernel. Whatever the game asks of the PSP's operating system is answered by high-level emulation in profile/host
So this is just an emulator with extra steps. The kind of bad emulator that requires game-specific patches instead of getting the emulation correct to begin with, and is embedding the emulator into a binary together with the game. Absolute slop.
> The kind of bad emulator that requires game-specific patches instead of getting the emulation correct to begin with, and is embedding the emulator into a binary together with the game. Absolute slop.
There's kind of a bitter lesson variant with AI coding where the work to make a simple, consistent, flexible, DRY platform or library isn't really worth it when anyone can press a button and get a variant customized to their needs in minutes.
People playing the game don't care about the elegance of the emulator, and if there is a bug in the slop, they can just have their AI fix it immediately and keep playing.
Or they can just save their time/money, use a human-crafted emulator, and not deal with their game crashing constantly and all manner of stupid bugs. It is genuinely insane that you believe your average joe video game player would rather spend $100~200 on a subscription, prompt for an emulator, then prompt it over and over to fix showstopping bugs rather than playing something that works for free, and yet that is what you are supposing when you suggest they "don't care" about the "elegance" of the emulator.
You would at least have a point if people were slopping out emulators for things that didn't exist but, surprise surprise, we still don't have a Switch 2 emulator. Almost like this entire notion is a complete fraud and all it can do is regurgitate existing code poorly.
At first, the handmade emulators were just as buggy and crashed all the time. That’s just normal during development. With AI tools, however, you now have the advantage of being able to theoretically create a comprehensive testing environment where, eventually, an LLM will play the games on its own and fix any bugs it finds, so that the user ends up with a nearly perfect emulator.
The Switch 2 is a completely different story than other consoles. To create an emulator for it, you'd have to be able to reverse-engineer the Switch 2, and that won't be possible until there's a jailbreak.
Good news here, someone claims to have found a userland exploit in at least one game and dumped the game via HDMI capture of visual encoded data. They might be full of it, or we might have a path for Switch2 ROMs.
I say that as a Switch 2 owner with a pretty extensive Nintendo library. I dont actually have any interest in using Switch 2 ROMs this decade, but maybe next.
Source: https://x.com/gezine_dev/status/2100262587263037470
Sounds like you've got an axe to grind
I certainly do. I'm paying 300, 400% more for my PC/server parts and HN has been ruined because of fraudsters selling a con, among many other undesirable side effects. People like yourself selling incoherent hype like "people will just prompt an emulator for themselves" are part of the problem. It would be weird if I didn't have an axe to grind with hucksters doing their best to ruin things for everyone else.
> There's kind of a bitter lesson variant with AI coding
Yeah, it feels like we've entered the era of disposable software.
Also I do like how everyone in this thread seemed to immediately and unanimously clock this project as slop.
There have been A LOT of buggy game ports released and immediately abandoned. It's all well and good until you want to actually experience the game as intended. Running into a huge issue that will never be fixed several hours in radicalizes folks pretty quickly.
Unfortunately, all of these slop-ports will wow and amaze people that have zero intent of actually playing the game. They're the software equivalent of clickbait.