We've seen a flood of AI-assisted retro gaming projects lately, from translations to decompilation and recompilation efforts.

Opinion is sharply divided on the merit of such projects; AI tools help speed things up for sure, but they often come with unwelcome side effects – as the recent recomp of the 1995 Sega 32X title Knuckles' Chaotix proves.

As pretty much anyone who has tried the Claude-coded recomp has pointed out, it is suffering from multiple issues, ranging from poor audio to a widescreen mode that keeps reverting to 4:3, as well as terrible performance in special stages – and more.

"The sound is an absolute mess, worse than emulated, and the widescreen has tons of moments where it reverts back to 4:3," says @hikaru9420 (translated from Spanish). "I'm getting pretty fed up with all these "ports" made with AI that offer zero real benefit over just emulating them."

"So the recomp is kind of broken," says @WiiUOffical2012. "Some of the sound channels are broken. Widescreen is a mess. There are a lot more bugs than the OG game. For the love of God, don't use AI for your game projects. Instead, put more human effort into decomps/recomps."

Meanwhile, @danielhenribuss visually demonstrates the kind of issues this vibe-coded decomp is plagued with.

"Thanks to projects like these, more and more people's first introduction to recomps and retro dev/homebrew is 'PoS that barely works and has no attention to detail'" adds @sokzajelo.

While some will argue that, without the help of AI, these kinds of projects will either take much longer or might not happen at all, the counterpoint is that because these are coded by AI and not a human, debugging the issues is often harder, as the code isn't as easy to fix.

Have you tried out this latest vibe-coded effort, or do you tend to steer clear of them? Leave a comment below.