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I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

joshfonseca.com

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Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#81

Post by stavros »

smt88 wrote: post #49
wincy wrote: post #5

That's hilarious that you give the villagers thought and the first thing they want to do is overthrow Tom Nook. If this works in Gamecube on an emulator, surely it'd be possible to make it work on the Switch emulators as well?

LLMs are heavily trained on reddit, and "Tom Nook is a capitalist dictator if you think about it" is a reddit meme. Like many LLM reactions, it's less "thought" and more "regurgitating reddit jokes/opinions".

How can you tell? Either you're saying that LLMs have no "thoughts", and just regurgitate everything, which doesn't explain how they can reason in novel problems, or you're saying you can tell what's original thought and what's regurgitation, in which case I'll ask "how do we know your comment isn't you regurgitating an HN opinion"?

Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#82

Post by vidarh »

Arisaka1 wrote: post #57
malfist wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to care about repeat scripted dialogue like you, until I took an arrow to the knee

Yep. I can see how relying on non-repetitive dialogue generated by LLM's will inevitably make us lose common ground scenarios that end up being memorable moments, like the arrow to the knee from Skyrim or "such devastation! this was not my intention" from Final Fantasy 14. A way to bypass this problem is to keep the important dialogue fixed, but this only one of the problems. Another issue would be emphasizing the me…

It doesn't need to be random tidbits. You can add "life events" for the character to the prompt, and steer the responses heavily toward the character wanting to talk about those. With an LLM in the picture, you can even have the character remember past interactions with you, and expand on it different ways depending on how you interacted with them.

Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#83

Post by mrheosuper »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #51
b3lvedere wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is mentioned in the article: "What About the GameCube Broadband Adapter? Yes, the GameCube had an official Broadband Adapter (BBA). But Animal Crossing shipped without networking primitives, sockets, or any game-layer protocol to use it. Using the BBA here would have required building a tiny networking stack and patching the game to call it. That means: hooking engine callsites, scheduling async I/O, and handlin…

I wonder if you can bitbang an ethernet interface to abuse it into being a serial port.

At that point why not bit bang any spare GPIO ? like GPIO for 2nd player controller ?

Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#84

Post by stavros »

jraph wrote: post #50
bigyabai wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just covering my ass. Life is good right now and I don't want to meet any Nintendo ninjas, even for insinuated infractions. It's not so much a condemnation of HN, but the way IP is in the US. The only website I want hosting my comments on Nintendo modding is my own.

I doubt a star will make Nintendo lawyers go "ow nose, they didn't spell out emulator in full, we can't attack them! Damn those star armors!". I don't think it changes anything technically. The only thing this kind of censoring does is countering basic censor bots I think, and somehow making swear words publishable in the US.

The asterisk would make it so they can't just search for "Nintendo emulator" online and find their comment.

Until I typed this, I guess...

Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#85

Post by arkh »

dolebirchwood wrote: post #15

This is awesome. LLM-powered NPCs is one thing I'm most excited about in the future of gaming. Characters repeating the same scripted dialog over and over again is one of the biggest immersion breakers.

> Characters repeating the same scripted dialog over and over again is one of the biggest immersion breakers.

The real immersion breaker and the holy grail of RPG is the fact NPC have no life or goal outside of what the player does. Imagine a game where NPCs have wants and goals and do things to get those done. Where you could leave it running for 10 years and things would have happened without you.

Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#86

Post by [deleted] »

stavros wrote: post #81
smt88 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are heavily trained on reddit, and "Tom Nook is a capitalist dictator if you think about it" is a reddit meme. Like many LLM reactions, it's less "thought" and more "regurgitating reddit jokes/opinions".

How can you tell? Either you're saying that LLMs have no "thoughts", and just regurgitate everything, which doesn't explain how they can reason in novel problems, or you're saying you can tell what's original thought and what's regurgitation, in which case I'll ask "how do we know your comment isn't you regurgitating an HN opinion"?

[deleted]

Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#90

Post by simonw »

Here's the code: https://github.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod

I was intrigued as to how it would intercept a conversation and then pause the game for long enough for the LLM to return a response, so I used https://gitingest.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod to dump the 40,000 tokens into Claude Opus 4.1 and asked it: https://claude.ai/share/66c52dc8-9ebd-4db7-8159-8f694e06b381

The trick is the watch_dialogue() function which polls every 0.1 seconds and then answers with placeholder text: https://github.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod/blob/cc9b6b...

  loading_text = "..."
  write_dialogue_to_address(loading_text, addr)
So the user gets a "press A to continue" button and hopefully the LLM has finished by the time they press that button.
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