> PSP games running in the browser without an emulator. The game's MIPS machine code is translated ahead of time into C++, compiled to WebAssembly, and linked against a small reimplementation of the PSP's operating system and graphics chip that draws with WebGL2.
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 CPU is also in a bit of a funny place because the transpiled C++ looks to be translating instructions into manipulation of a MIPS CPU state object.
Yeah, maybe that's the difference. I was trying to probe the semantics, not so much a "gotcha". Parts of this stack are quite bespoke for this one game.
AI is completely cracking up the emulation bubble. We're not even emulating things anymore, we're just reverse engineering things and directly porting games. This is an awesome timeline for old game preservation. These fuckers aren't profiting from the games anymore, yet they won't release their IP, or update their old games to newer, more accessible platforms. So I really appreciate the work these kinds of developers have been doing.
> This is an awesome timeline for old game preservation.
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.
Tbh, I think it's not an awesome timeline. AI is kinda motivating everyone to do everything on their own instead of gathering up and contributing to one (or two) projects, which is something I'm worried about in Open Source software as a whole. If we were using AI to contribute to a single decomp, making it as good as it could possibly be and gathering knowledge about the game, it would probably be much, much better. Instead, we are getting a mountain of shoddy, vibe-coded ports
> AI is kinda motivating everyone to do everything on their own instead of gathering up and contributing to one (or two) projects, which is something I'm worried about in Open Source software as a whole.
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.
> AI is kinda motivating everyone to do everything on their own instead of gathering up and contributing to one (or two) projects, which is something I'm worried about in Open Source software as a whole.
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.
In theory it would be great if we had a bunch of experts reverse engineering these things and making better decomps but in reality most people find the work miserably boring, no one's gonna pay you for it, and it almost never happens.
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.
Isn't this technically illegal to reverse engineer and share? It's awesome but I feel like it'll hasten big companies to lobby and make some harsh laws around this type of thing. I'm surprised Claude/Fable allows this? Or do we trick them to do it?
It’s legal to have a ROM of a game you actually owned and ripped. This is simply allowing the ROM that you actually own to be played on a different console, the web.
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.
I understand where you are coming from, but look at what else copyright protection has brought: studios and publishers are so insecure that they want to lock consumers out of 10+ year old games so that they don't have to compete with (their own) past games.
Maybe putting some pressure on making games that are actually new and different isn't a bad thing.
That genie escaped the bottle a couple decades ago when The Pirate Bay went online and game studios and publishers started focusing on MMOs and other live service games that couldn't be torrented to compensate. This is a pittance in comparison and it's for a long dead console platform to boot.
It's a bit harder to reverse engineer a game from a video stream than from a binary+data dump ;) (of course an LLM can come up with a knock-off that roughly has the same theme of what it sees in the video-stream, but that would basically be "Italian Spiderman - the Game".
I don't think reverse engineering or open source is creating the starving artists.
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
> Also, video game programmers are already starving artists comparatively.
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.
Have you not seen the mass layoffs from Microsoft and other major publishers? And the toxic work environment they are often associated with? AI has nothing to do with that. I hope we see a resurgence in Indie studios and studios that care about their community and customers and not pulling rug pulls like Ubisoft do. Or the union busting Rockstar did.
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.
> A small PSP kernel. Whatever the game asks of the PSP's operating system is answered by high-level emulation in profile/host
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.
> 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.
Or they can just save their time/money, use a human-crafted emulator, and not deal with their game crashing constantly and all manner of stupid bugs. It is genuinely insane that you believe your average joe video game player would rather spend $100~200 on a subscription, prompt for an emulator, then prompt it over and over to fix showstopping bugs rather than playing something that works for free, and yet that is what you are supposing when you suggest they "don't care" about the "elegance" of the emulator.
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.
At first, the handmade emulators were just as buggy and crashed all the time. That’s just normal during development. With AI tools, however, you now have the advantage of being able to theoretically create a comprehensive testing environment where, eventually, an LLM will play the games on its own and fix any bugs it finds, so that the user ends up with a nearly perfect emulator.
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 certainly do. I'm paying 300, 400% more for my PC/server parts and HN has been ruined because of fraudsters selling a con, among many other undesirable side effects. People like yourself selling incoherent hype like "people will just prompt an emulator for themselves" are part of the problem. It would be weird if I didn't have an axe to grind with hucksters doing their best to ruin things for everyone else.
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)
https://github.com/jessicanataliagta/PSPRecomp/blob/main/src...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.