21–30 of 190 posts
It's pretty amazing what you can do when you embrace LLMs, figure out how to build one high-quality rigorous project with them, and then start working on more projects. You become a machine with your workflow, once again limited only by your time/energy, tokens, and your discretion on how to spend it.
Mildly related, but I have been waiting for goldeneye to be decompiled for a while but before that process has finished there is has been a spiritual successor(?) made that has scratched the single-player itch for me: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1574480/Agent_64_Spies_Ne... Worth a look if you want a bit of nostalgia.
Historically there was a notion of "clean room" reimplementation.
These days it seems people translate the actual game code into a different representation of that same code and that makes it open source? Github is full of these.
It's especially annoying that LLMs/agents are a logical starting point for decompiling old games but there is a significant backlash against it as the gaming community is very anti-AI and consumers of the benefits decompiling offers tend to be noncoders who don't believe that AI can do more than slop. I've seen takes such as "they're too lazy to learn C++" and accepting a PR from someone using Claude taints the proje…
on the flip side retro games are almost completely and entirely an aesthetic experience. like if something totally subjective and personal like nostalgia is not just a valid reason, but the #1 reason, to be engaged with retro gaming, why isn't some random condition about the process of resurrecting the games also valid? i think you agree that there is. but it should change your language about this idea of "consumers"…
Not to mention, there's a lot of stuff beyond an "aesthetic experience". Videogames have historical value, and they have relevancy at the very least as a testament of the state of the industry at any given point.
Legend of Dragoon, for example, integrated QTE-like controls in its attacks, even as a turn-based game. FFVIII, released the same year, implemented interaction in a somewhat similar way. These two are very early predecessors to mechanics Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 much more recently used. That has value.
If anyone wants to establish random conditions as to why they consider a work to be worthy or not, they may have those. But then they should keep them to themselves, rather than pretending people shouldn't care about something because of the way it was done. It's like the classic situation of someone complaining about how some open source project doesn't do something exactly in the way they like. I have nothing but contempt and despise for that sort of people, and it's a whole order of magnitude worse here, where the "problem" stems from their political stance, which nobody with a pulse should give a crap about.
Its really great how we can breathe new life into older games like this. I'm currently working solo on a Tales of Symphonia gamecube decomp. My aim is to let AI do everything of substance. currently about 3400 functions are exact out of about 4800. So still a way to go. But I haven't written a single line yet.
It's especially annoying that LLMs/agents are a logical starting point for decompiling old games but there is a significant backlash against it as the gaming community is very anti-AI and consumers of the benefits decompiling offers tend to be noncoders who don't believe that AI can do more than slop. I've seen takes such as "they're too lazy to learn C++" and accepting a PR from someone using Claude taints the proje…
to be fair much of the fun in decompiling/RE is the puzzle solving, it's like a giant crossword puzzle that you fill in bit by bit, slowly figuring out how things work. Having an LLM do large parts of that for you is probably kinda boring for many.
Which does kind of suck. Yeah, it's not nearly as cool to say "I prompted a probabilistic pile of tensors and it did the hard work for me", and I think it majorly adjusts how "impressive" projects are. There's no point pretending like decompiling a game by hand and using GPT-6.7 to do it are remotely comparable.
The suck-y part is that if you do the decomp with GPT-6.7 and produce, say, a PC port of an early 2000s console game, a large number of people will refuse to touch it and treat it as if you have committed a cardinal sin. Maybe that's justified? I dunno. It definitely goes beyond people just saying it isn't as fun.
I’m surprised the game companies themselves aren’t interested in these projects. Seems like easy money to just decompile a retro game, add some quality of life improvements and stick it on steam. Are their hands tied by legal or what other factors are preventing this?
Yes many games are caught up in IP hell. Including the one my username is inspired by. It's why you see a lot of fan remakes. Another sad side effect of corporate owned IP is also a lot of times the individuals who did the bulk of the work on something can't be the ones to do a remake. They don't own their own work. A company owns it. That's what most of us sign up for to get a paycheck. But when it's something like…
1) Rights can't be held by corporations, only individuals. So the rights to a piece of art or IP would always trace down to a list of names.
2) Everything enters the public domain after 20 years or the death of the entire list of ownership.
Its really great how we can breathe new life into older games like this. I'm currently working solo on a Tales of Symphonia gamecube decomp. My aim is to let AI do everything of substance. currently about 3400 functions are exact out of about 4800. So still a way to go. But I haven't written a single line yet.
How did you get started? I have a project in mind and would love to try, but getting a foothold on it feels really hard when you are starting with an ISO image and an empty folder.
But in essence it's not so complex. You only need the original compiler that was used to compile the game and tools like ghidra. Binutils for the architecture can help. From there you ask the agent to start building the project. Prepare to spend a ton of tokens though if you go the full AI route.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
on the flip side retro games are almost completely and entirely an aesthetic experience. like if something totally subjective and personal like nostalgia is not just a valid reason, but the #1 reason, to be engaged with retro gaming, why isn't some random condition about the process of resurrecting the games also valid? i think you agree that there is. but it should change your language about this idea of "consumers"…
If the process is the product, then anyone who is not involved with the process has no right to say anything about the product. Not to mention, there's a lot of stuff beyond an "aesthetic experience". Videogames have historical value, and they have relevancy at the very least as a testament of the state of the industry at any given point. Legend of Dragoon, for example, integrated QTE-like controls in its attacks, ev…
[right hand emoji] "their political stance"... "they should keep them to themselves"