Kushan

I hope blahm1d is legit trolling with that response, otherwise they come across as a complete arse (AI use or not).

I actually think these recomp projects are a good use of AI. Re-compilation is historically a very slow, repetitive and tedious process, but the benefits of having a native source port are huge.

Recompilations are never going to be accurate to the original media because they're running on entirely different devices, so lack-of-accuracy is already widely accepted. However you do get other benefits like native performance, widscreen support, input support and so on.

It's not worth the time and effort of the few talented humans out there to decomp every game out there, so why not let an AI do it.

GenAI has massively lowered the barrier to entry for a lot of tasks. I think that's a double-edged sword, because it means someone can lazily prompt their way to building something but it'll be buggy, look bad and generally be a mess. That same person would have given up trying to build it themselves because they just didn't care enough in the first place to sit down, learn to code, debug and so on.

Whereas someone who DOES care can absolutely use AI to accelerate their own work. That person that cares will be double checking everything the AI outputs, they'll be testing what they build and spending probably just as much effort going back and forth with said AI to fix the broken things as they would have debugging an annoying glitch. The difference is that the AI helps them skip past the skill and knowledge gaps they currently have and if worst comes to worst, they'll just go fix it themselves.

The problem is the former is far more prevalent.

That's insane! I'm sure some folks will bemoan how it does what it does (the "nasty" bit), but it's still a huge achievement getting this far with Dreamcast emulation on the DE10. Constraints really do breed ingenuity.

Even if this never becomes a "proper" core for the DE10 nano, it at least lays the groundwork for future FPGA devices that might be able to take it to the next level. Very cool stuff!

@NoirConceit But that's my point, if they're smart enough to know about the Saudi connection, then they must be smart enough to know that their very vocal community would take issue with it. Maybe I'm just a bit "never put down to malice what can be explained by ignorance" on this.

@NoirConceit Going by the same logic, surely they also "knew" that the community would kick up a huge fuss?

I'm not thrilled at what happened here, but at least they did the right thing eventually, even if it took a community backlash.

Maybe I am somewhat sympathetic as I had no idea SNK was now majority owned by the Saudis.

I think there's more nuance to this discussion that the Article or these comments are allowing.

I think "vibe coding" an entire FPGA core with AI is only going to give you something as good as the emulation code it's based off of, i.e. probably not super accurate.

However, maybe that's a start, maybe that gets you 80% there and a qualified person is able to refine that last 20% to get the accuracy you need. I have genuinely no idea, but I can't imagine humans are going to port the entirety of the MAME catalogue to FPGA by hand any time soon; the reality is that there's just not that many people qualified enough to do it and the catalogue is huge.

There's a world where the clever people can use AI to accelerate that goal and get us actual accurate renditions of those titles much faster than we'd otherwise be able to do.

I don't think the discussion is as binary as "AI = Good/Bad", though some people will definitely see it that way.

It's always silly to equate 1 pirate to 1 lost sale. That's how the RIAA once calculated damages against limewire to be greater than the GDP of the entire planet.

PLEASE BE AWARE:

Heritage Auctions and Wata games have been in the past accused of (And taken to court for) price fixing and market manipulation for this exact kind of thing. In fact, that $2million sale mentioned in the article was proven to have been bought by someone with ties to the auction house itself, in other words they bought it themselves to drive up the price.

Please please please take this whole thing with a pinch of salt.

@Hydra_Spectre That's what I thought it was at first!

I think a lot of people need to reset expectations on what "100% accuracy" even means. There can be discrepancies between physical consoles, especially as they age.

@Porco Maybe the PS4 IS retro 😂 But also the PS4 Pro is the same generation and could do 4k, much like the Xbox One X did do the XBONE so you could argue the toss either way.

You could argue that the generation before the previous generation is retro, so it would still apply to the Xbox 360/PS3. Then we have Current Gen, Previous Gen and anything before that is retro.

It's all subjective, but I just don't see how anyone can claim the PS3/360 are not retro. And I say this remembering buying my 360 with Halo 3!

@Porco I would say that we are firmly in the UHD generation, thus the HD generation is retro. Sure, HD resolutions are still in use today but so are SD resolutions. Something being in use still doesn't mean it's not retro or old.

The 360 and PS3 ARE retro. They're 20 years old.

To put that into context, when the 360 released in 2005, 20 years earlier would have been 1985 - the era of the NES and Master System. They were retro in 2005.

Retro is also not an insult at all.

Ooft, this is a tough one. AI has impacted a lot of industries, but translations have definitely been hit pretty hard.

However, I think it's difficult to really quantify the impact when we're talking about fans giving their time to do a thing. Unless there was previously some crowdfunded effort for the translation work, it's hard to argue that someone lost a job over using AI (or any tool) to translate a 25 year old game.

What's more, if the resulting output isn't great, then there's still clearly a need for a "proper" translation, so that figurative job loss isn't a loss, it's just seen as less valuable because there's already some kind of translation made (albeit a poor one).

I don't quite buy the argument of it turning a translator's job into a glorified "text janitor" while also saying it doesn't save time. If it doesn't save time, then why are you bothering to sanity check the resulting output? Why not just perform the direct translation yourself? Then you're not a "Text janitor", right?

When we've had commercial titles using crappy AI translation then I'm completely on board with holding the publisher accountable and saying you took away a paid job for a worse outcome - shame on you.

But when it comes to fan stuff, translating games that are a quarter of a century old? I find it difficult to have a problem with it.

This is just proof that you can be an excellent software engineer but a poor manager of software. No shade what so ever on Stenzek, I genuinely do appreciate him and Duckstation but he does seem to be taking a lot of things personally.

Really, he should just say "I don't have time to manage the Android version, but if someone would like to help/volunteer their time to it, this is where they can start".

Projects as big as Duckstation cannot be managed entirely by a single individual, the community needs to step in to help but Stenzek needs to be able to ask for that help rather than just shunning the problematic areas.

@GodlessPreservation The day Nintendo decided to use pirated ROMs in their own re-releases was the day I realised that Video Game preservation is something we have to take on ourselves because it's clear the IP owners can't be trusted with it.

It's definitely one of those "Seems simple on the surface but is actually quite a difficult problem to solve" situations.

You don't want 40 different ammo types, especially if you have to manage inventory for those different ammo types. You also don't just want one type, for the reasons stated in the article.

But what is a good balance? 10 types? 5? 3? Do you have them as separate from inventory and if so, how do you balance carrying capacity across the 3? (It's an immersive sim, maybe I want to load up on heavy ammo! That's my choice!).

It's a shame there hasn't been more in the prototype series, they were always fun games.

@ChromaticDracula I'm a huge fan of Godot. I've tinkenered with a few game engines over the years (Unreal, Unity, etc.) and several years ago I went down a similar path to yourself, writing up engines while learning C++ learning a bit of OpenGL, SDL and a few other bits. However, Godot felt like where it really "clicked" for me.

It does have its own scripting/programming language which is quite easy to use, so you'll definitely do some coding. There's also a version of it that supports C# as a language, which I found as a C-based language was quite easy to transition to if you have existing C++ knowledge (Though In fairness I transitioned to C# as part of my day job years ago).

Either way, good luck!

@ChromaticDracula If you really want to try making a game, I would recommend something like Godot. The barrier to entry is remarkably low, it's also a small download with no additional dependencies but a very full featured engine and development platform. It will let you focus on actually making a game, rather than making a game engine which I think is just a vertical difficulty curve. There's plenty of documentation, youtube tutorials, example projects etc. out there for you to learn from as well.

Do not take this as any kind of criticism of Pyrite (Which looks absolutely stunning), but I can't imagine such a brand new project will be a good place for absolute beginners to start from.

I think we're long past the point of speculating IF it's a bubble and now we're at the point of fully acknowledging that it IS a bubble and it WILL pop. The question is more around what the aftermath of that is.

AI isn't going to just disappear as soon as the bubble pops; lots of people are using AI today for all kinds of applications but most likely we'll see the "real" use cases stick around and the forced use-cases fade away. All the marketing that stops at "It's got AI in it!" will have to justify exactly what that AI is doing, rather than it alone being the selling point (We're already starting to see this at the investor level, whereby just saying you're an AI company isn't good enough any more).

And companies will go bankrupt/get acquired. That much is certain. You can place your bets on who the winners and losers will be.

For my money, I think Google are one of the few that will come out the other side relatively unscathed. They're not reliant on anyone external to themselves aside from fabricators for their own chips. They're not even dependant on nvidia. Even Nvidia, the company that has arguably done the best with the AI hype, is dependant on people buying their GPU's but Google is quite happy to design their own TPU's.

@MontyMole I think it depends on what you mean by "Natively", you'd need to employ some amount of emulation as only the very first launch PS3's had a full PS2 inside them.

Imagine entering a backgammon competition cosplaying as Ubuntu.

Absolutely loved this game, I'd definitely want to play a remastered version of it.

As I've gotten older and my time more precious, I find myself leaning more and more on various cheats to be able to get through and complete some games. Usually it's the "busy work" that bothers me - the resource farming, the endless cookie-cutter sidequests, that kind of deal. I don't have time to sit through the repetitive garbage so I'll skip past that and go back to the parts I actually enjoy.

It's quite impressive how much this doesn't change the look of the game at all. I don't mean that in a negative way, I mean they've done a great job sticking to the original art style and very much falls into the "This is exactly how I remember it" rose-tinted view.

I had no idea about Palmer Lucky! What a real shame. Oh well, none of his companies will be getting a penny from me (I'm sure they'll be devastated), there's too much hatred in the world right now and it's all I can do to stand up against it.

Ah glad to see my home town on the internet like this!

I remember not really getting on well with Time to Kill, one of those games I wanted to like but just couldn't get into. Then land of the babes came along and it weirdly "clicked"? I enjoyed it thoroughly from start to finish.

Turns out the latter is well known as a terrible game and the former received quite positive reviews. Clearly younger me didn't know ***** about good games.

@gingerbeardman I think what confuses matters here is that sometimes people use "100% accuracy" when they really mean "100% compatibility with all known titles".

Unless someone's going to test every single title against real hardware and compare timings across the board, it's going to be difficult to prove the "100% accuracy" thing.

To make matters worse, particularly on older hardware, two physical devices can be slightly differently specced - SNES's get faster with age as an example. How the hell do you compare that, when two of the same devices has subtle differences?

Oh and an even more fun one - different FPGA devices have been shown to exhibit differences even with the same cores! The Mister Pi runs slightly differently to the DE10 nano, enough that it did actually cause one core that I knew of (N64) to require additional work to fix a game crash that didn't happen on the DE10. I'm sure I've seen comparisons of different DE10 nano's going out of sync with each other as well.

@NoirConceit As is your right to choose whom you do and don't pay attention to, but if you're willingly choosing to be ignorant about a subject (And I don't mean that as an insult, just a fact), you probably shouldn't be commenting on it.

@NoirConceit If you bothered to watch the video, you'd see that he specifically mentioned that this new space is actually cheaper than what he was paying for storage of all the stuff in the space.

Nevermind the other corrections about the barcadia fiasco.

@retrophilion the Commodore trademark saga is far from over. Other companies have claims to be able to use the name and/or logo in various capacities. Amiga is also separate from Commodore and notice that Retro Games don't brand their A1200 with "Amiga" at all.

Just so we're all clear, this policy will affect certified Android devices (i.e. anything that officially has the Play Store installed). The vast majority of those handhelds being discussed are not certified and thus don't have to adopt this policy. It'll be interesting to see how this works for something like F-Droid, whereby that store's entire deal is that they build the apps (and thus sign them) themselves. That would be a good way to distribute things like emulators without the authors having to give up any personal information.

I'm hoping Google will allow unsigned APK's to be side-loaded with a developer tools toggle so people still get a choice but I've yet to see anything about that.

That's fantastic! I loved Exhumed as a kid and the remaster from a couple of years ago was brilliant!

Not buying that thing about the intrusive R at all, I don't think I've ever heard anyone say "Ameeger".

I visited Piece Hall for an Orbital gig back in 2023 and had no idea that venue was there. When I first read the article, I was a bit annoyed with myself because I'd have definitely visited but then reading that it seems that Piece Hall requires its venues to shut when there's a gig on? That doesn't make any sense to me, surely that's a self-own?

It's a shame because I really enjoyed the gig and would gladly see more bands there again.

@AllieKitsune There's definitely a little bit of hate in these comments, but yeah I was mostly referring to the various tweets and such on it. Seems that for every person here claiming that it's obvious NN didn't know how to run a successful hospitality business (which I agree with as a sentiment), there's also comments from people asking questions like "Where did the £25k go?!".

I don't hate the guy for giving it a go though, even if I think he could have done things differently/better. Then again I wouldn't have tried something like that at all because in spite of my armchair analysis, I don't think I could run a successful one either.

Don't understand the hatred here. It's easy to point fingers from the sidelines and say it was doomed from the beginning, but clearly those who backed it thought otherwise.

I did think the decision to only serve Vegan food was a weird one but then again I didn't back it.

Admittedly it has been a long time since I played Xenon 2 but I don't remember transforming from spaceship to tank mode? Was that something in the first Xenon game or am I just not remembering correctly?

Well I guess this shouldn't be surprising really, it's the same kind of thing that has happened to the Commodore brand over and over.

I do find it interesting that Commodore Industries seems to have released a big press statement but doesn't look like they're actively pursuing a lawsuit (Just the mild threat of one), so I wonder where the legalities really do stand.

Love this game, excited for the documentary! Just need to carve out 3 hours now.

Ah man, I was curious what else Michael Edwards had done with his career, so went and looked him up on Wikipedia.

Wish I hadn't. Probably should have left him out of the game, really.

It's a worryingly common story that Google just doesn't respond to these things, which is a terrifying prospect when it's your livlihood. If you're an LTT or someone you've got enough klout to know someone directly at Google, but the majority of creators out there aren't so fortunate.

Google really needs to take this seriously, if they're going to start deleting channels then you should have a human contact you can speak to.

@truth_will_set_u_3 Wow, can't believe you wrote all of that when you didn't read past the first sentence of the person you responded to.

I know it's a bit of a cliché word to use at this point, but you were definitely triggered lol

@JJtheTexan It's also worth knowing that "Deep Blue" isn't considered a particularly good Chess AI by today's standards. I'm sure I remember testing out one called Fritz or something many years ago that's claim to fame was it could beat Deep Blue while running on commodity hardware.

I thought this was an April fools, but it seem legit. Damn.

Interesting, my understanding is the Agelix 5 is about 2.5x as powerful as the Cyclone V, but it's hard to put into perspective what that means for an FPGA. Is it a linear uplift, or is it more complex?

If the PS1/N64 is about the limits of the Cyclone V, could the Agelix 5 ever hope to emulate the PS2, given that's something like 15x more powerful than a PS1? (I mean it uses the PS1 CPU for the sound alone!).

@KingMike you're about half right. The PS3 had an "OtherOS' mode that let you install Linux, which Sony removed in a later update (and the PS3Slim). That bright extra scrutiny to the system.

Fail0verflow then discovered the critical flaw in Sony's private key generation (there's a fantastic ccc presentation you can watch on this if you're interested) that meant you could figure out the private signing key. Geohot used their work to derive and publish that root key.

The PSN shutdown was not a DDOS, but rather due to how far reaching this was - with those private keys you essentially had full access to the network. Sony has to take it down while they worked on a way to fix all the damage.