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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't know what is so difficult for you to understand in "just because you enjoy selling trash, doesn't mean I or others enjoy selling trash too"?
If your company managed to find an executive to pay for your trash - fine, this literally happens all the time, every day and happened before AI too - B2B software is widely known to be lowest quality software available. Your and your colleagues' job is to produce as much code as possible, in the shortest timeframe possible for the lowest possible price. In that context it's no wonder you all happily use AI, you work on slop, so a machine allowing you to produce even more slop even faster is a godsend.
It's much more difficult to get people to use your software if they don't have an idiot manager above them forcing them to use it or when there's real market competition.
The market forces will be such that everyone will sell "trash" in the future, otherwise they can't compete. And I will say "trash" charitably even though much of the code written by AI is already better than most human programmers.
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.
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 agree for the most part, although I think there is also an issue of laziness. There are people who should know better that are submitting unreviewed garbage.
But from the sound of it, you are not agreeing with the sibling comment, because you still have to review the code to make sure it's not slopping up the codebase or taking the architecture in an insane direction.
Large companies tend to be under a regulatory regime where code reviews are mandatory already. But no, my experience is what the sibling said. 100% agent driven, no IDE open at all. The difference is professionals will naturally just prompt better because they better know what they want.
You don't know what I do, and fortune 500 doesn't scream "excellent software engineering practices".
I also know some people at Google, and they are generally in the same boat as me - mostly using agents to generate code, but not blindly merging slop (yet).
30% of code merged without even glancing at it seems unlikely to me, but I can't disprove the number you pulled out of thin air. For side projects I bet it's far higher. For serious projects I have my doubts. It will get there, but it hasn't yet.
Google's own public number is 75% of new code AI-generated (April 2026), but that's engineer-approved, not merged without a look. Sources for that and other companies: https://xpoze.ai/ai-code-percentage
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.
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.
> 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 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 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
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
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
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.
Reminds me of my own manifesto, which I've written since getting sick of dealing with the hype and gatekeeping machine that surrounds AI based development right now.
With the widespread increase in speed/commit cadence/content added to repos, I wonder if there's an angle here for companies with a lot of CI/CD needs to simply start self-hosting their CI/CD machines on premises.
In my experience, self hosting your CI/CD runners had the biggest impact in cost savings throughout, while also allowing for more powerful machines, which directly means quicker CI/CD runs
Related to this discussion, I have written a manifesto against the excessive usage of MCP and other "tools" when using coding agents. I believe sticking to the basics yields the better quality overall in output
A manifesto against the hype that has grown around AI-assisted development. We're not against the tools, we're against the hype and the gatekeeping. We're programmers who use AI every day but are tired of being told we need a harness, a workflow and forty skills just to ask for what we want.
The author's complaint is that omarchy is basically a set of ricing on top of arch. I can grok that
Problem is, some people are really impressed by ricing and that is what has been catching users for that ""distro""
I'm pretty sure the fans of minimalism/t distros or just plain bare setups aren't really hyping that much. The author is right in that it's just an opinionated layer on top of Arch
I am also (second post) working on an "idle clicker" like TUI game called "cuqueclicker", where you click an ass instead of a cookie (yeah, it's inspired by Cookie Clicker)
I'm working on a full blown terminal emulator called "terminal-use", or "tu" in short, for coding agents. It allows agents to operate fully fledged TUI applications including multiple windows, mouse control, etc. It can even self drive a NetHack session via Claude, if you want lol.
It's basically tmux for your coding agent, great for developing and debugging TUI applications as well, because now your agent has a closed feedback loop of applying changes and trying them out itself via tu.
