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Claude wrote a functional NES emulator using my engine's API

carimbo.games

11–20 of 95 posts

Re: Claude wrote a functional NES emulator using my engine's API

#11
post #8

Nice, but NES emulator is one of the most written pet projects anywhere, which makes it considerably less impressive.

Heck, when Satya Nadella wanted to demonstrate Copilot coding, he had it emit an Altair emulator. I guess there's little room for creativity in 8-bit emulator design so LLMs can handle them well. https://thenewstack.io/from-basic-to-vibes-microsofts-50-yea...

Re: Claude wrote a functional NES emulator using my engine's API

#12
post #5

Git wrote a functional NES emulator for me by simply cloning one of the many publicly available ones!

This is the comment.

Give it copy paste / translate tasks and it’s a no brainer (quite literally)

But same can be said of humans.

The question here is, did it implement it because it read the available online documentation about the NES architecture OR did it just see one too many of such implementations.

Re: Claude wrote a functional NES emulator using my engine's API

#15
post #3

It’s a shame that the source code isn’t commented and documented more. At the very least, I would see it being helpful to add some documentation for every CPU op code being emulated.

Forbidding LLM to write comments and docstrings (preferrably enforced by build and commit hook) is one of the best "hacks" for using that thing. LLM cannot help itself but emit poisonous comments.

Re: Claude wrote a functional NES emulator using my engine's API

#19
post #13

I'd be curious in how well it passes 100th Coin's NES accuracy tests https://github.com/100thCoin/AccuracyCoin

Indeed, that's what I kind of hinted at in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46442195 and coincidentally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46437688 briefly after, namely that OK, one can "generate" a "solution", that's much easier than before... but until we can verify somehow that it actually does what it say it does (and we know of hallucinations and have no reason to believe this changed) then testing itself, especially of well know "problems" is more and more important.

That being said, it doesn't answer the "why" in the first place, an even more important question. At least though it does help somehow to compare with existing alternatives.

Re: Claude wrote a functional NES emulator using my engine's API

#20
post #14

Who care what it did. What did you learn? To live is to learn.

When I consider the utility of a hammer, my first priority is to ask what the hammer can teach me.

There are NES emulators aplenty, the only value in writing a new one is pedagogic, for the writer.

This endeavor had negative net value.

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