What's more interesting is the new ability to easily create ports of old games that let you play old games legally: Bringing your copy of the original's data files and playing on a modernised engine with high-resolution, unlocked FPS, bugfixes, etc. In the past couple of months, I've seen a bunch of vibe-coded ports of DOS games for which the source code was lost.
If you've noticed the obscene amount of ports, remakes, and remasters (most of which are done terribly) in recent years, it's obvious why certain people are pushing this as IP infringement. Companies were loving the fact that they could pull from a back-catalog of their PS2 games, get it compiling again, do some minor fixes to support modern widescreen/controllers/etc, maybe do some minor graphical enhancements, then resell a 20-year-old game for $60. Far less work than a new title, and far less risk since it has a built-in fanbase.
It's exploitative and shitty, to be clear, but it's understandable why some people are very upset about this.
The people who are looking to lay off all their developers and lazily vibe code ports are furious that other randos are able to lazily vibe code ports just as easily.
/world's tiniest violin plays sad song/
Looks like software is having its Napster moment now. Except, instead of one entity dictating the rules of engagement and deciding to sue Napster and its clones out of existence, we have 100s of entities with competing interests.
IP has been a good source of revenue generation, that social contract is now broken. I've got my popcorn bowl ready though, the industry that just fought Google and Apple for better revenue sharing is about to take all that legal infrastructure they acquired and make a big mess of everything. Here's to the next decade hah.
Regardless, IP holders should have the rights to distribution and while you may disagree with that it's still a legal protection they get to enjoy under our legal system.
I don't know where my quake cds are. Even if I found them I'd have to figure out what mods to run to have it feel good. Then I'd have to find communities to play with.
This is super cool to me.
If they wait too long, perhaps the community will produce a better port before them.
One turn involved ChatGPT explicitly fixing C++ source code to fix beat detection for the available audio sources after I complained that it was broken.
Hands down, sure, the most respectable work, apart from the original AVS code, was done by the Emscripten contributors. Anyway, it readjusted my expectations, even after my day job switched to agentic coding as the primary development tool.
I have a few of my own stuff and it has been amazing.
For example I had a VR setup of GTA5 with adaptive triggers during covid but it eventually degraded due to updates and compatibility issues. Quite literally today I opened codex and had it up and running with custom patches for some bugs I used to deal with in a few hours.
I would start by asking it how to start and then digging away.
"X license disallows this current use without express permission"
"Z gave me permission , here's the pdf, they gave us permission regardless of what licensing says going forward."
<insert pdf generated from a text file that says "I'm Z and I gave permission.">
"Okay, we will continue forward while noting that Z gave us permission regardless of what licensing says going forward."
So that probably helps contribute to why they still run smoothly even in WebAssembly/WebGPU. Even if the overhead was like 5x worse (pretty sure its nowhere near that, closer to maybe 1.5-2x in certain cases), it'd probably still run pretty smooth.
Performance is excellent, most of these games aren't all that hard to run. I expect most recent mid-range computers are able to play all of these in a playable fashion, even the ones running on integrated graphics.
Now the games industry will try it again for real and find a way to rebrand cloud gaming and trick everyone to believe its better than running games on your own machine, only for them to stream the game back to you without you ever owning it.
All of this power and still there's nothing new I want to play.
The whole world is about to get wild.
Compiler output is highly predictable, but it doesn't make the inverse true. LLMs are not themselves compilers.
It’s an archaic law framework designed by corporations to guarantee a monopoly to extract as much value from "their idea."
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
Probably will consume gazillion compute but now seems like sky is the limit, on a good compute day at least
By the time we get there, AI can probably be able to recreate the game based on the video alone. I think we are already there, the fidelity of it might vary.
What will probably happen is that frontier models will lobotomize models to refuse reverse engineering. That will buy some time, however with open weight models, some will find the way to fine tune the models to support RE if magically everybody agrees on the consensus that RE should be blocked.
Will? It's already happening:
* Amazon Luna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Luna
* Nvidia GeForce Now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_Now
* Xbox Cloud Gaming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Cloud_Gaming
We keep having to learn this same lesson.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would it have gotten traction in the future? Don't know, but with Google it was certainly never happening.
Thanks for the interesting "erm-akshully" on the distinction!
If you own the game legally, ripping it and playing it on a web emulator is not illegal.
I'd love to make a soccer game with all the famous players in it with AI and dump it on the internet for free out of pure spite because of companies like EA. I don't even like sports games.