Thread

Resident Evil 4 (GameCube) – complete byte-identical decompilation to C/C++

140 points · 99 comments · metrofun

LaurensBER · 1789929455 · focus · HN ↗
Despite all "hate" against AI in the (retro)-gaming scene I'm genuinely excited to see these kind of projects (not sure if this one involved any kind of AI) and emulation.
From a technical perspective emulation is absolutely amazing, it requires deep technical knowledge, an excellent understanding of the source system and the optimisations are on another level.
1. NobodyNada · 1789934979 · focus · HN ↗
  As someone heavily involved in the retro gaming tech space, I've seen a lot of people using AI there and it's really disappointing to me. You're right that it takes a lot of technical knowledge and deep understanding of the system, and the whole point of the endeavor is the process of getting that knowledge and becoming an expert in the system. It's a hobby, not a job; the end goal of a working emulator or whatever is just motivation to carry you along that process of learning.
  So having Claude one-shot a NES emulator is almost pointless to me. You're using and looking at source code for an emulator you didn't write -- and you can learn from that, but it's not the same thing and doesn't require you to really understand a CPU the way you would by, say, observing a deviation in game behavior and staring at trace logs to figure out the exact instruction you emulated incorrectly.
  It's not all bad -- AI is a great research tool and can automate some of the tedious parts (writing out an instruction decoder by hand is miserable). But using it to just...skip over the effort of doing a project defeats the whole purpose of doing those projects in the first place.
  I don't want to be gatekeepy or curmudgeonly or "back in my day..." about it. But for me, my entire career path is due to skills and knowledge I learned spending several years of my life as a teenager figuring out how to write an NES emulator as a relative beginner to programming. And so I feel like using AI for this is depriving the next generation of that learning process. In addition, there are only so many retro games, and fewer popular ones. There's only so much unexplored territory to discover, and doing it with AI deprives another person of that experience and deprives that game's community of someone who might have been able to find a "home" working on projects related to that game.
  1. mw888 · 1789954745 · focus · HN ↗
    Those most-intelligent of humans who carefully memorized verbally the most important civilizational facts known had the same reaction to the invention of writing.
    You are clearly a wizard of a prior era. But it is a new era.
    breezybottom · 1789957832 · focus · HN ↗
    No they didn't.
    cassonmars · 1789973020 · focus · HN ↗
    They really did. And through great irony, such objections are preserved.
    <a href="https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439" rel="nofollow">https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439
    "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
    shakna · 1789987938 · focus · HN ↗
    Be wonderful if you approached a translated piece, by first considering the time and culture that produced it. Understanding the intent, rather than quoting it out of place.
    This is a political critique, on the rule of law (writing) over attempting to treat things on a case by case basis (philosophy).
    Quoting it, without understanding it, is part of that author's complaint.

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