One of the most exciting developments in the retro gaming scene over the last few years is the rise of recompilation projects, offering players a new way to experience some of their favourite games on modern PC platforms.

However, as the number of AI recompilations of classic games grows daily, many in the gaming community have been pushing back against this controversial technology and the promotion of projects that rely heavily on GenAI code, arguing that it is "hurting the scene". Dariosamo, for instance, one of the developers of Banjo Kazooie Recompiled (an unofficial PC port of Banjo Kazooie), recently took to social media to criticise the YouTuber VideoGameEsoterica for featuring news about an AI recomp of Banjo Tooie on his YouTube channel.

In the video, VideoGameEsoterica failed to disclose that the project has nothing to do with the original Banjo Kazooie Recompiled team that developed the human-made tooling these GenAI projects used, and that the original team is making its own GenAI-free recomp of the game. This prompted Dariosamo to label the video "irresponsible" and write a thread urging players to support non-AI-assisted developers that take their time to get things right.

He isn't the only dev rallying against this sudden onslaught of AI recomps over the last few weeks either, with video game historian, musician, and game developer Synamax also voicing his opposition after his team's work was taken without his knowledge. To give you some backstory, back in February of this year, Synamax started work on a decompilation (and recompilation) of Paradigm Entertainment and EA Canada's Beetle Adventure Racing, which was a game released for the N64 in 1999.

These are projects he is working on alongside a group of other volunteers, but that were recently taken and "finished" without their consent in order to produce a "low-quality vibe-coded" recomp.

For Synamax, the reason he wanted to do a Beetle Adventure Racing decompilation (and recomp) came from a deep personal love for the game. Growing up, his parents were anti-video games, so his only exposure to gaming was typically through whatever he could play on his PC and any old video games his game dev cousin gifted him for the NES. Because of this, he didn't have an N64 growing up, but managed to experience Beetle Adventure Racing while on vacation at the Nickelodeon Hotel in Orlando, Florida, which is where he gradually fell in love with it.

"I really resonated with the music, and there was just something about the aesthetic of it. Eventually, I grew to really appreciate the game, and I started to recognise its connections with Need for Speed 3, which was a racing game I had on PC. That's when I realised, 'Wait, there's actually a lot of similarities and a lot of the same staff that worked on it.' Inevitably, when emulation came about, I wanted to play it, but it turns out it's actually a really difficult game to emulate [because of timing issues and other problems]. So it was always in the back of my mind, like, 'Wouldn't it be great to play this on PC? Wouldn't it be great to mod it?'"

Having no experience with reverse-engineering at the time, he put a pin in the idea, but found himself getting more and more involved as the years went on in other preservation efforts. He not only conducted extensive research into the music and sound effects of Metroid Prime, but also contributed to the Symphony of the Night decompilation project and produced a source code rewrite of Williams Electronics' 1983 arcade game Sinistar (a game he also created a roughly 3-hour documentary about based on his findings). It was during this time that he gained the necessary skills and confidence to attempt a decompilation of Beetle Adventure Racing.

In what Synamax describes as a huge stroke of luck, the very same day he launched the Discord for the Beetle Adventure Racing decompilation and recompilation projects, a similar project was also started for Paradigm Entertainment's earlier game Pilotwings 64 (a title produced in collaboration with Nintendo). This was a game that rather handily used an earlier version of the Beetle Adventure Racing engine and created an opportunity for some cross-collaboration and knowledge sharing between the two teams (Synamax is even among the list of contributors on the Pilotwings 64 project).

Over the past year, with this arrangement in place, the decompilation project has been making steady progress and is now 30% complete, but recent events have inevitably had a pretty large impact on morale.

"It's insulting and hurtful," says Synamax. "Any ethical hacker would recognise, 'Oh, this is some guy's project that they're still working on; I better not touch it.' A couple of weeks after I started doing the BAR decomp, I lost my job of seven years because of AI, and I'm still unemployed. I was kind of hoping that the exposure from this could help me find some employment. But I really don't know if that's going to be the case now."

As Synamax notes, it's not just these AI developers that he's disappointed in, but those who are making money from featuring these kinds of projects, accusing them of "creating harm" in the community. Below VideoGameEsoterica's video on the Beetle Adventure Racing AI decomp, for instance, Synamax called out the YouTuber for spotlighting this port, writing the following:

"This LLM-assisted recomp is based off of the manual human-led decompilation work that me and my team have been working on since February. Supporting this spits in the face of all the labour and passion we have put into this project."

In response, VideoGameEsoterica stood by his coverage, noting that Synamax made the project available for use under license (specifically AGPL 3.0), meaning the LLM-assisted decomp and "vibe-coded" recomp technically aren't in violation of any license. He also claimed that, as a news channel, he's only telling people "what's new" and that the matter is between Synamax and the developer of the AI decomp.

However, as Synamax explains, his objections have nothing to do with any potential license violations, but with what he calls a lack of "common decency" in someone taking and then claiming to "finish" the team's work in a way that could undermine the original decompilation (and recompilation) efforts.

Right now, as Synamax notes, no open-source licenses truly protect projects like this from generative AI, stating, "the only way to stop AI reuse is to not post your code online." He explains this would be "impossible" to do for a crowdsourced project like Beetle Adventure Racing's decomp (which relies heavily on community contributions). As a result, he says it is up to players to be more critical of what they consume. In the case of Beetle Adventure Racing, for example, the AI project exhibits a lot of issues with accuracy due to the game being altered to run at 60fps, from cars smashing into walls in the intro to enemy racers being much less of a challenge due to higher frame rate "f***ing up" the game's difficulty, as Synamax explains.

"The game is running way too fast (probably to accommodate 60fps)," says Synamax. "The reason the cars drive off-road and crash into walls in the intro is that the game has reached the end of the car's 'replay' data for that cutscene. Since they're out of replay commands to process, they just stop 'thinking', which makes the cars act like mindless zombies.

"In fact, I think the AI added further insult to injury by making it look like they fixed this issue by making the blue car not splash into the water (as seen on original hardware). But then the AI gave up, and the rest of the cars are behaving as they would with inaccurate emulation. It's way worse than what you see in emulation with PJ64 or Ares. I estimate the cutscene delay has increased by around 4 seconds. This has also affected the difficulty tuning. How fast the cars should go is based on some internal clock, which has been altered. It's obvious that the game software was specifically tuned to the N64's hardware limitations, and trying to push or overclock those finely tuned settings has caused these issues."

Fortunately, as Synamax tells Time Extension, despite everything, he and his team aren't giving up on their goal of creating a decomp, adding they may not be the first, but they will be "the first human-made effort." Synamax even plans to produce a documentary after all is said and done, similar to his Sinistar doc, and is already in touch with several members of the original dev team.

"All the decomp and recomp guys, we're all talking about 'Good software is going to last,'" he says. "And it's going to make a difference, and people are going to recognise it, and go, 'Oh, this is way better.' I'm tired of AI taking stuff away from me: my livelihood, my income, and everything like this. I've had it. This has gotten too big. I'm tired of standing on the sidelines. We can't just let this go."