The whole thing (all banks) is more than 10,000 lines of assembly code. When I wrote assembly code for a university computer science course, it was hard to manage even 200 lines. I cannot imagine writing and managing 10,000 lines!
Impressive work, indeed. vermiceli the GOAT.
You said in another comment:
> Then, i spent some time in building a harness and collect telemetry data in Mesen. Once, i had that: i just played the game in the emulator and asked Claude Opus 5.5 to use this as verification.
Can you comment on how this verification process worked?
You'll have to forgive me for not trying to answer these questions myself by investigating the code/git history, but... I hope you understand.
Actually, I am peeking around the code a bit and it's a bit disappointing, but it's what I should have expected having tried a project like this myself with a Game Boy game. I would like to see what an AI-produced semantic (?) rewrite of a retro game would look like. That is, what a port/rewrite that wasn't so faithful/wedded to the original ROM layout or platform architecture. For example, the agent (and you, presumably) was satisfied with writing a sort of RP2C02 emulator facade instead of doing the hard work of translating the bytes into platform-agnostic graphics rendering code. So now any customization/extensions you write to the game are fundamentally constrained to the abstractions of a specific chip from the 80s.
But I agree, that using an "AI" tool may be a serious temptation and thus way less new porting projects will be done with such care.
When someone commissions a painting, or a sculpture, they might cut the ribbon that holds the curtain on the opening day, that is all.
I mean, if you insist on doing everything by hand, go right ahead.
Afterthoughts: I really just don't get why people are so weird about this AI coding thing. What difference does it make to you if someone thinks they have more to learn from high-level planning work than from low-level coding work? A lot of the time, I get the vibe from people who talk this way that they are still early on in their career and think they have to prove their coding chops. I think that's why people like Linus Torvalds couldn't give a shit if people use AI or not, as long as it's not slop and suits its purpose. If you've already spent over a decade writing code and savoring the process, maybe you're just getting a little tired of it. And maybe agonizing over code perfection even drives you slightly insane sometimes. Who the f*** knows? In any case, it's none of your business. I don't know why I'm even writing all this. Because I know you'll just come back with the same old tired gatekeeping non-arguments.
I hadn’t heard about that - any details?
I used it to get games written in Lua running on SNES and in my own language/engine running on Dreamcast, Wii, Web and more.
Are there any emulators out there that let you swap in higher resolution assets so a game can be freshened without a complete port?
The NES supports PCM audio. It was notably implemented wrong in the title screen of Double Dribble and fixed with a patch that produces clearer audio after bit reversal into the correct encoding for the hardware:
Edit: For SNES, not NES, my bad.
For AI usage: It was all done by Claude/Codex, but it wasn't that straight forward. First: i started in April and the models weren't good enough and would make errors. You could see those immediately in glitches. Then, i spent some time in building a harness and collect telemetry data in Mesen. Once, i had that: i just played the game in the emulator and asked Claude Opus 5.5 to use this as verification. The rest was smooth.
You sure you're a gamer? I've been at it since about 1986.
I do think you're objectively correct in your post, but I think what the grandparent meant was that "The author isn't actually interested in playing Contra on his website" which is why QoL stuff like that wasn't added and it "smells" like it should be there if you cared about playing on the thing you actually shared to HN. I know the first thing I would do would be to add wasd + mouse support to Contra, since the control scheme is the reason I don't try to play it. But at the same time I have never been interested in games that deliberately limit your controls as a form of difficulty (feels like a Japanese gamedev thing, from Resident Evil to Dark Souls)
edit: figured out why that nostalgia happened. I was revisiting an old flash game I liked [0] and people were complaining to the dev about this exact key ghosting issue to him when it wasn't his fault but a fault of their keyboards, and in the Newgrounds description he links to a forum post [1] elaborating on the issue
[0] https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/547881
[1] https://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?789015-wont-...