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)
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://github.com/jessicanataliagta/PSPRecomp/blob/main/src...
https://github.com/jessicanataliagta/PSPRecomp/blob/main/pro...
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Ah, yes. Thank goodness the FOSS community never generated many different tools for the one purpose before, right? \s
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.
(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).
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.
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.
Maybe putting some pressure on making games that are actually new and different isn't a bad thing.
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.
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
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.
The industry needs a shake up.
How? The ISOs/ROMs were already preserved and playable on emulators on newer platforms
It's like not this represents something like a cycle accurate Cave CV1K board, which are very expensive and imperfectly emulated.
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.
Port is about 80% done, but completely mechanical with AI and an oracle (the Dolphin emulator)
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.
Humans are still better at this given time. Check out sm64’s decomp quality
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.