The arrival of GenAI coding tools has sparked an explosion of AI-assisted projects in the retro gaming space, including decomps, recomps, translations, and more.

While the tools can drastically speed up development, there are questions surrounding the accuracy of such projects when compared to hand-made alternatives – and Michael Pavone, the dev behind the Sega-focused BlastEm emulator, has made it very clear where he stands on this topic (thanks, Read Only Memo).

The emulator – which has been in active development for 13 years and supports Sega CD, 32X, CD+32X, Sega Pico, Yamaha Copera, Game Gear, SG-1000 and SC-3000 – has just reached version 1.0, and Pavone has taken this milestone as the perfect moment to spell out his future plans:

"BlastEm today is made up of 100% artisanal AI-free code and I intend to keep it that way. That said, I've found the proliferation of vibe-coded projects in the retro space to be fairly discouraging. When it comes to commercial development for modern platforms, I get that ROI concerns make AI hard to ignore. I may have some concerns about over-reliance on these tools in the commercial space, but I can't deny they can be helpful for accelerating software development. For most software, people primarily care whether it works and does what they want, not whether it was artisanally crafted by a real human being.

Retro software developmpent is a different though. Much of this software is not particularly useful for any real work. People develop it for the challenge and the sense of personal achievement. If a computer does all the hard work, what's the point? Will developing this stuff by hand still be valued in a world in which anyone with money to burn on tokens can quickly turn out an AI-slop version? I don't think I know the answer to those questions, but they are weighing on me."

Pavone adds that he still has a lot to do with his emulator.

"I'd like to emulate the Teradrive and at least the Sega-PAC in the LaserActive," he adds. "I expect these goals will keep me motivated for now. Hopefully with this huge stable release out of the way, I will also be a bit more on top of stable releases for a while. That said, don't sleep on the nightly builds. They'll always be the first to get new features and bugfixes."