Thread

1. 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. ronnier · 1789931713 · focus · HN ↗

      I really think the hate is just masked jealousy, now project managers, tpms and line managers can submit rather substantial code. That wasn’t possible before and it took away some value from devs (I say this as a dev of more than 25 years). I watch PM fix issues now instead of waiting for a dev. I understand the anger but these tools are not going away

      1. bigyabai · 1789937282 · focus · HN ↗

         In the early days of emulation, there were tons of low-quality and imprecise emulator backends. If you wanted to play a dozen SNES games, you usually needed a half-dozen emulators to get them all to boot to the main menu. They were disparate efforts usually led by 1 or 2 people that wanted to get a Super Famicom game to run, and then gave up on implementing or fixing support for other games.

         We live in a golden age of emulation because that attitude died out. With more powerful computers (and less hack-oriented development) it became possible to properly emulate a complete console with a high level of accuracy. For preservationist purposes, accurate emulation is much more important than being the first to emulate a game, or even being able to decompile it. The only reason that we can point and laugh at low-quality efforts like Nintendo Switch Online is because the community cares even more than Nintendo did. The reason Wine/DXVK/Proton works so well is because it didn't fracture itself into a thousand downstream forks to fix one specific game. It's a holistic effort.

         A lot of the hand-wringing comes from a justified place that doesn't want to see emulation backslide into a bazaar-like community. You're free to disagree with their logic and vibe-code a thousand game decomps, but in all likelihood emulation will be a more popular choice for the foreseeable future. Lots of people emulate stuff on their iPhone or Steam Deck, almost nobody is playing a game decomp on it though. I can't imagine AI tipping the scales on decomp popularity, especially among average Joes.

         1. StilesCrisis · 1790000225 · focus · HN ↗

            I don't think that's right. I helped work on SNES9X in the early 2000s and it ran nearly everything perfectly.

            Sure there were smaller emulators which didn't work well, that's understandable. But gamers didn't need more than one or two emulators to play every game that existed; you just needed to pick the right ones.

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