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

carimbo.games

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

#91
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> access to a testing system that allows it to inject mouse events into a running instance of our application FWIW that's precisely what https://pptr.dev is all about. To your broader point though designing a good harness itself remains very challenging and requires to actually understand what value for user, software architecture (to e.g. bypass user interaction and test the API first), etc.

You suggest a web testing framework as a response to someone working on a real desktop app?

No I was sharing an example of a framework that does include "a testing system that allows it to inject mouse events".

That being said mouse events and similar isn't hard to do, e.g. start with a fixed resolution (using xrandr) then xdotool or similar. Ideally if the application has accessibility feature it won't be as finicky.

My point though was just to show that testing with GUI is not infeasible.

Apparently there is even a "UI Testing for devs & agents" https://www.chromatic.com which I found via Visual TDD https://www.chromatic.com/blog/visual-test-driven-developmen... I can't recommend this but it does show even though the person I was replying with can't use Puppeteer in their context the tooling does exist and the principles would still apply.

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

#92

WASM and the performance seems catastrophically bad (45ms to render a frame on an M4 laptop)? It would be much more impressive if Claude could optimize it into something that someone would actually want to play? Compare this to a random hit from Google, https://jsnes.org/ which has sound, much smaller payload, and runs really fast ( The cost of slop is >40X drop in performance? Pick any metric that you care about for…

For me on Firefox/macOS it's terribly slow, fails to initialise/resume sound, no keyboard input.

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

#93
post #84
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is easily fixable by some human guidance

Sorta, I went into this not really knowing how to implement an emulator: https://github.com/RAMJAC-digital/RAMBO With the NES there are all sorts of weird edge cases, one of which are NMI flags and resets; the PPU in general is kinda tricky to get right. Claude has had *massive** issues with this, and I've had to take control and completely throw out code it's generated. I'm restarting it with a clean slate though, a…

This sounds exhausting, once the thrill of seeing code rapidly generated wears off, I wonder if it's even worth it. If someone was going to use code they didn't write, why not just pull down some open source implementation from somewhere and build on top of it? It's basically gets you the same thing but without the LLM hassles, and you can start building on a more sane foundation.

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

#94
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You suggest a web testing framework as a response to someone working on a real desktop app?

No I was sharing an example of a framework that does include "a testing system that allows it to inject mouse events". That being said mouse events and similar isn't hard to do, e.g. start with a fixed resolution (using xrandr) then xdotool or similar. Ideally if the application has accessibility feature it won't be as finicky. My point though was just to show that testing with GUI is not infeasible. Apparently there…

> My point though was just to show that testing with GUI is not infeasible.

Indeed, which is why I mentioned the ProTools test harness and the fact that it took 6 people a year to write and takes a week to run (or took a week, at some point in the past; it might be more or less now).

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