@jojobar It isn't baseless, they maintain a compatibility list using community reporting. This is a common practice among many emulator projects. https://rpcs3.net/compatibility
It looks like a best guess, but the process isn't quite robust. An evident flaw of the matching process is that the permuted outputs aren't having their colour information reduced to match the actual texture graphic, which seems to use 18 colors in what they say is the original texture, though another texture I've checked online seem to be 23 colors. Assuming the original texture was prepared in a late 90s version of Photoshop, you need to consider font rendering methods, downscaling algorithms, export options, etc. were used. They may've exported to a BMP before converting to the texture format the N64 uses, or not at all depending on the workstation.
Cases like the Snowboard Kids 1 and 2 decompilations, where AI assisted decompilation furthered actual community effort, and the resulting static recompilation port was not vibe coded, are sadly the exception.
AI can help expedite the function matching part of decompilation, but does not help much with the actual documentation of human readable code that's vital to a well crafted port.
It's not the technology so much that I loathe, but the bad actors on both sides; the big corporations vacuuming up data and real world resources for cash grabs at enormous human and environmental costs, and the cheaters that are commanding AI services to do all of their work for them to rush out slop and get a quick claim to fame.
Working with people is very important, and should never be disregarded. On the other hand, we also can't ignore advances in technology where something that once took a team of people, may need fewer people for potentially equivalent or better results (although that's not what we're seeing).
@Wezlypipz On paper, the Retroid Pocket Duo looks to have the edge as an all-purpose device, whilst the Anbernic DDS has the edge as a dedicated 3DS device since the screens are specially tailored to 3DS, but only 3DS.
Russ of Retro Game Corps has his early impressions of the Duo up already, which I'll check out later, but the initial impression seems to be it's better than the Duo Lite (which isn't hard when Time Extension gave that a poor review).
I'm still interested in both the Anbernic DS Plus and the DDS, but since getting the Retroid Pocket Nova I might be a Retroid convert.
That's pretty pricy; more than Retroid's Pocket Duo, and the price difference between the 8GB and 12GB models is much higher than what we saw with the Retroid Pocket Nova. The chipset somewhat justifies the price though, it looks to be a very capable device that'll be useful for more than just 3DS games, but I think it's definitely worth waiting for reviews on these upcoming clamshell handhelds.
I'd also be interested if Software Creations pitched this to Nintendo in any form, since they did apparently make an impression with the release of Plok?
Before anyone decries AI-assisted decompilations as "unsalvageable slop", I suggest you learn more about how decompilations, recompilations, and AI processes actually work. Reverse engineering is one of the few things were AI can work towards an objective, immutable goal (unless it decides to cheat and redefine the goal). https://youtu.be/Pl7ThC4PiVA
Whether or not a decompilation or reverse engineering project chooses to use AI assistance is a matter of preference, but either kind can achieve objective function matching. The documentation part still requires human observation and critical thought.
Rejecting AI usage in its current state with its plagiarism and massive environmental and ethical concerns? I completely understand. The end result of function matching, however? That part is an actual, undeniable result. AI in this scenario is largely just a more intelligent automated bruteforcing strategy, removing the tedium from having a human do the less creative part of reverse engineering, and one of the best use cases for computers regardless of the AI label.
@Kotonete The stereoscopic 3D effect is largely inessential anyway, and already not accessible to anyone using any device that isn't an original 3DS, so I don't mind that so much. If they do by some miracle pull it off though, same glasses-free technology and IR head tracking that the New 3DS used, that's be so cool.
As for the AI button, uhhhh, I guess just on-device gen AI or on-the-fly translations, it's all unnecessary buzz but the Snapdragon G2 Gen 2 does support it. I do want this specifically for 3DS games, I'd love to replay the likes of Smash Bros for 3DS, Kid Icarus Uprising, Metroid Samus Returns, Super Mario 3D Land, and plenty more.
At first I thought it was going to have both a right analogue stick and a C-nub, but lo! The nub is actually a dedicated AI button.
Anbernic are seriously kicking up their game right now, calling out the shortcomings of the other 3DS-centric dual screen handhelds on the market, this looks like it could be a dream device like the Nova is for 4:3 gaming.
The only caveat here is that the screens are nearly perfect for dual screen gaming. 720p screens will only integer scale 3DS games by 3x. Whilst 960p screens happen to 4x integer scale 3DS games, and 5x integer scale NDS games. The Snapdragon G2 Gen 2 is probably capable of supporting dual 960p displays too. Guess we'll see an RG DDS Plus in the future.
My experiences with importing started with the Nintendo DS and Play-Asia. Where the original DS and Lite were completely region free, I started with an American Nintendo DS and Super Mario 64 in December 2004 for $235. At the time, the exchange rates for imports from Play-Asia to the UK were amazing, and I'd paid £128 for that. I got to enjoy the DS 3 months early and at a comparable launch price. I continued to import a great many of my Nintendo DS games from Play-Asia, thanks to how spectacular the exchange rates from USD to GBP were for the early 2000s. My next two games were Chokkan Hitofude (Polarium), and Zoo Keeper.
A few years later, I even imported an entire Japanese Wii system just to play Super Smash Bros. Brawl at its Japanese launch date! I had a fantastic time, but this was also mere months before the emergence of Datel's Freeloader, or the Twilight Hack that homebrew enabled your Wii systems. Had the timing been better, I could've imported just the game alone without buying a whole 'nother console.
@tuffy VideoGameEsoterica is complicit in the waves of AI slop recompilations, by giving the attention seekers a platform from which he can profit. It's simply irresponsible to promote a project that is not complete like it's ready for public usage.
Flooding the market so to speak is how crashes happen, and why Nintendo had their seal of quality program. Public community projects can't exactly have a seal like that, but I'm hoping to see a trusted list / repository of mature decompilation-based and static recompilation ports emerge.
@Kotonete There is an alarming number of rush-job vibecoded ports that undermines the community effort, but there are some meaningful LLM assisted projects that take the time and have proper attention to detail, to produce a decent enough port. The cream of the crop remains to be the ports that were not LLM assisted, and produced by capable developers who didn't want to take shortcuts, but the public has also been too quick to completely dismiss a project because they were willing to use some AI assistance (a far cry from vibecoding).
As for AI decompilations, the actual reverse-engineering process, I don't have many qualms with that as the process of function-matching is a quantifiable and immutable goal. The documentation on the other hand, is another matter requiring human effort. The Snowboard Kids 2 decompilation project was AI assisted; or managed rather, and the project manager wrote up articles explaining the process and how the decompilation could be completed much faster than otherwise. https://github.com/cdlewis/snowboardkids2-decomp#articles Notably, the same author's static recompilation built from the decompilation effort as far as I can see is entirely human made.
@Kotonete It's largely a matter of supply chains, these retro handhelds commonly exist on the back of affordable components used for automobile dashboards, from the unusual display sizes to the SoC chips.
Nintendo had a specialist purpose for having resistive 256x192, and later 320x240 resolution touch screens developed, whilst the phone market had completely moved away from resistive in favour of the capacitive screens that were more natural to use with your hands and allowed for multi-touch. I remember having an early resistive touch screen phone called the LG Viewty, and this thing was actually very difficult to use. You really had to press the screen surprisingly hard to type out a message! It was bad enough that my next phone was a Blackberry with its tiny physical keyboard, that was preferable to that stiff touch screen.
@Kotonete It's only a piracy device if you decide to make it one. By all means, if you have an original DS or 3DS, there are ways to dump the ROMs and save data from your own DS cartridges and play them on anything else!
Something similar happened with a "Sonic the Fighters Recompiled" release recently. A trailer went up on YouTube, featured gameplay footage that may've not actually been the recompiled port running, but did feature footage of the menus, didn't disclose AI usage. That trailer was made private after about an hour when people actually tried out the port and found it performed extremely poorly, with bad performance and many disruptive bugs.
For some reason there's an inclination to put up a YouTube trailer for your project before actually finishing it, or even getting it to a presentable state.
The portraits there might be an inclusion for the sake of the animation, since those characters don't have 2D games with sprite artwork representations (outside of the Vampire Survivors expansion).
However, it certainly does feel like a Collection tease!
Regardless of whether the Oliver Twins are directly responsible for this output, or someone approached them about it, this unmistakably just looks like generic AI trash output you see on socials or small businesses that don't know better.
Yes the graphics may be high detail and high fidelity, but they're not good because of that, whilst I can point to many reasons why they're pretty bad. The unnerving uniformity and predictable placement of many details, the super-generic style that AI output produces from a prompt devoid of direction, and if we end up getting a closer look we'll probably identify a sleuth of inconsistencies and errors, with unnerving details and uncanny expressions.
Can I also just point out that the big box artwork depicts the group walking away from the Emerald City?
It's such a bizarre choice for a VR experience. The Ace Attorney games are visual novels, like spending hours reading a good book. It just seems like such a bad fit for the games when there's importance in reading the dialogue and understanding the facts of the cases, and yet there's no voice work to carry the dialogue that would immerse the player in the narrative.
Pleased to see here the the James Pond collection is not using any of that awful AI generated artwork, but is entirely based on the original artworks. If they're the "16-bit versions", that probably means the SEGA Mega Drive / Genesis versions rather than SNES, and not the Amiga versions, but we'll see.
Whoa! That "Gaia edition" collector's edition is an eye-watering £168. I guess because of the mechanical music box and figurine?
I'll be content getting just the physical game, maybe the SteelBook version.
Also, Limited Run Games have just put up their listings for the ESRB US physical releases. Pre-orders open September 25th. https://limitedrungames.com/search?q=Terranigma
As usual, LRG are doing a distribution release for Clear River Games as they've done many times before.
On Switch 2 it's £29.99 for a digital game, £39.99 for a game-key version, and £69.99 for a collector's edition; 6000 copies of the game on a cartridge with "additional trading cards, a poster, and other collectible items". They will be very hard pressed to find anyone to wants to buy any of this at these prices. I loathe the idea of merchandise printed with this awful AI artwork.
The statement from Antstream tells me that they're doing rough constructive drafts using any materials they can source (quite possibly crudely painting over sprite artwork), throwing that into a generative AI image process like Stable Diffusion's img2img, and then tweaking the output iteratively.
Which is to say, they're using gen AI to do heavy lifting on "rendering" artwork and then just fixing any errors they catch.
Statements have already changed from "3D render process" for the robot cow example, to "producing pseudo-3D drafts", they're just covering themselves as they get caught.
Seriously, making edits to an AI output in no way makes the end result "fully human-authored"...
System3 is also at fault here for not having the due diligence to check the work that Antstream were doing, blindly trusting the results whilst not having the eye for the heavily scrutinised AI-slop aesthetic.
It's not necessarily low effort per se, they do seem to have put an effort into building the interface and conceiving it, but the production value is awful and inconsistent where they've mish-mashed in a lot of generated assets that do not belong, and have no basis in the original games. Just bad ideas with terrible execution, that fail to convey the original games. It wouldn't surprise me if the program code and written materials are also LLM junk, but that would need a deeper dive.
The ROM containing leftover graphical data from Ken Griffey Jr's Winning Run, is either that they modified program code for prototyping purposes, or that the development cartridge was overwritten and there were remnants of a previous development project. The other possibility, is that for plausibility someone heavily modified said game using the GPT-Astra tooling mentioned above, with reconstructed assets based on documented footage, to make a convincing leak. Said tooling hasn't been available especially long though.
Now in this instance I DON'T think that's what happened and that this Dream leak is the real deal, but with recent developments we need to remain more critical of any purported leaks.
The pre-order prices, especially for the Duo Lite, are far better than I expected. The pair of 1920x1080 and 1280x960 screens should be very good for 3DS and DS gaming too, although the top screen doesn't have perfect integer scaling for either of them (but the bottom does).
These devices are powerful enough to do more than just 3DS gaming though, GameNative being a way to play your Steam and GOG libraries should be very nice on these.
RGDS Plus looking like it will cement itself as a dedicated DS option, and Duo Lite as a great 3DS option.
@GordonBennet I doubt it'll ever feel as responsive as an original resistive DS or 3DS touch screen, and there'll probably be a bit of delay or latency on emulation. So games like Rhythm Heaven / Paradise on DS will probably not feel great, but the RGDS Plus gameplay video does showcase that one.
@Scollurio My Nova is arriving today, and there's a strong chance I wouldn't have bought a Nova if a dual-screen version were available at the same time. This is my first Retroid device though, and I'll see how I get on. I've much more of an itch for small form factor handheld GameCube games than I do emulating 3DS games anyway.
I can believe that they used gen AI to quickly produce a trailer for a rushed deadline, but the claim that they haven't used gen AI for the game's artwork and assets is an outright lie. It's plainly obvious looking at the background graphics like the crane machine masts and hand rails. No human artist makes that kind of melty fuzz in any kind of visual medium representing mechanical structures.
@Wezlypipz The specs haven't been officially announced yet, but I am seeing that it uses the same chipset but with reduced RAM and no internal storage. If it's a purpose built device with fine tuned firmware and its NNDDSS software emulator, it might work just fine.
I said I'd wait on reviews for a reason, since that the RGDS GammaOS update reignited interest in the device.
Looks very promising, I had my eyes on the RGDS after an update to the GammaOS custom firmware, but this looks like it could be what the hardware should've been in the first place. Will wait for reviews on this one, this might be going on my Christmas wishlist.
@Deway I'm honestly surprised if you didn't, the cheat codes were a big part of the culture of playing the Mega Drive Sonic games. The debug mode codes were among the most famous, because it turned the games into sand boxes where you could play around with spawning objects and enemies! Although, some of the official re-releases disabled using some of the original cheat codes for one reason or another.
@Zeebor15 I wasn't aware of that, nor this previous reboot of Microids (a Joe & Mac reboot?).
Still, yes running a Kickstarter campaign is definitely a risk management here, but there's been increasingly the issue with Switch releases this year. Red Art Games initially skipped over doing a Switch physical release for Monster Crown Sin Eater, but were convinced to do one after the Kickstarter campaign backers voiced their demand for one after they announced a PS5 physical. More and more boutique releases are failing to get off the ground, not securing enough pre-order funds to realise the limited number print they promised. Even Limited Run's releases seem to have slowed down lately.
Aside from risk management, we probably don't know which company was approached about making a Joe & Mac retro collection happen, if it was the license holder (G-Mode) or the publisher (Red Art Games), or maybe if it was an auction where G-Mode offered publishers a chance to do a release.
@MG4M3R It sounds like he might be running local stable diffusion or something in that case. Though as I understand it, you can't just train a modal on your own images, the base model itself must have tens of thousands of images which are highly unlikely to be sourced properly. It's conceivably possible, but not likely to be what's happening.
I don't particularly care for the use of generative AI for visual or audio asset production, it's a means of cutting out talented artists that can do a much better job of cohesive and appealing visuals. However, I can see there's an actual merit to the visual direction here in spite of that. They've leaned into the absurd mish-mashing of elements that generative AI is admittedly quite capable of (albeit in the vain of "Italian Brainrot"), where there's a faux-photo realism and a consistent theming of large single eyes and mechanical bodies with gears.
I would be more forgiving if this were only a homebrew throwback game and an exploration of the technology, but I can't really support this as a commercial product knowing how the technology is derivative of actual artists that could've accomplished the same vision and better, whilst also being economically and ecologically damaging.
It's worth discussing the kinds of ROM chips that were used for retail SNES cartridge releases. My understanding is that they use Mask ROM, which uses photolithography to imprint the program data into silicon and doesn't rely on an electrical charge that can gradually leak. That means the chip's data integrity is incredibly reliable, and that this particular cartridge's failure point is more likely to the elsewhere on the PCB or on the ROM chip's connections, which should be an entirely serviceable repair job.
This is as compared to aftermarket retro console physical releases that use EEPROM, an often rewritable flash storage medium that will leak its electrical charge over time, and risks failure if it doesn't receive any power for many years (a problem that we're discovering with more recent 3DS and Switch physical games).
Taking a closer look at System3's site after this debacle, I noticed their shop, and their various physical or code in a box releases for Switch games. There's even more slop, one game is straight up copying Breath of the Wild's cover art, others have weird humans with melting faces, whilst Strike Force Kitty appeared to be using actual game assets layered atop an AI slop background.
That trailer video is an insult to all of the artists that brought the original games to fruition, it's nothing but lazily generated AI renditions of character artwork from the James Pond games, accompanied by what's very likely AI generated music from Suno or a similar service.
The only effort that's gone into that trailer is the basic motions and recreation of a James Bond style title sequence.
I'm eagerly awaiting my Nova's arrival, I ended up being pretty disappointed with my Ayaneo Pocket Air Mini, as the buttons just didn't feel right to me, and the performance wasn't adequate for my GameCube emulation ambitions.
@gojiguy You'll be pleased to hear then that the input latency is actually very low, about 15ms in Russ' estimation from his Retro Game Corps review. https://youtu.be/QntymbB9a2Q?t=1005
@Deway There's a chance it exists in their archives somewhere, though Square Soft were known to be poor at preserving their own code or production materials around the time.
It sounds like Ivan is abandoning the GB Bridge vision for quick AI processed results on a game-by-game basis (somewhat similar to how Infidelity and some others manually perform NES to SNES ports via Mesen debugging).
That's what I find disappointing, as the proposed GB Bridge layer would've been a far more exciting development than working on games on a case-by-case basis.
That isn't to say I wouldn't appreciate the end results on a game-by-game basis though, since I can tell Ivan still cares very much about producing a quality piece of work from whatever foundation he's working from.
Whenever it comes to replicating displays, my concern is always that the effort is replicating an aged display we have access to now, rather than a factory fresh display as we would've experienced decades ago.
The ghosting, transitional fade, and LCD pixel decay in this emulated display are superb, but they're likely also calibrated on a degraded display. There's also that the contrast of the DMG LCD display had a dedicated adjustment dial.
Is 64DD support a first for N64 flash carts? I was aware of carts like the Summercart having support for the Aleck64 arcade games, I even got to try it out.
This is like running Mega-CD / SEGA CD games from a Mega Drive / SEGA Genesis flash cart, which is quite a feat.
This is a pretty neat project, AI or not. I'm not against assistive technologies, my concerns are reliance on these technologies doing the work for you, and the current reckless development of AI that the big corporations are doing. Said recklessness being the utter disregard for ecological and economical wellbeing, and for ethical or legal sourcing of training data.
@selfdeztruction Seeing as this is a hobby project it's more forgivable, but if this were actual business like commercial game production, I would want roles being filled by actual people. That said, I can still understand very small teams that have absolutely no access to people who can perform roles, and have no other choice than the AI service can do the parts of work that they can't; often audio or graphical work as software programmers are concerned. That usually results in a pretty damn crap looking game though.
These are genuine production rarities which is where the value comes from, and it's cool to see this kind of discovery. The ROM is almost certainly identical, but it would be nice to get confirmation on that detail. Circumstances however indicate they're going to keep these as pristine as possible.
RTA's take on open source is completely wrong, and why AI output has been a plague on open source repositories. Open source projects are still subject to licensing and headed up by project managers who will approve or reject any contributions based on their alignment with project goals. AI pull requests are a nuisance that waste project managers time with often poor quality, detrimental changes.
The MiSTer project here has a pretty unambiguous goal of recreating the functionality of the original hardware based on the actual hardware, so any cores developed on the processes and output of software emulators is detrimental to that goal.
If you want to hijack an open source project to do something that doesn't follow the community's goals, well you can fork it and go your own direction, but like Mike Channell said this really serves no purpose when dedicated software emulator devices are plentiful and affordable.
Just cramming more and more content into the device without regard for quality is how Atari crashed the video game market in the first place, are we forgetting that?
Comments 320
Re: 80% of All PS3 Games Now 'Playable' on PC, Thanks to the Talented Team Behind RPCS3
@jojobar
It isn't baseless, they maintain a compatibility list using community reporting. This is a common practice among many emulator projects.
https://rpcs3.net/compatibility
Re: Following 'Millions' of Computations, a Coder Is Convinced They've Deciphered the Mysterious Plaque in Super Mario 64
It looks like a best guess, but the process isn't quite robust.
An evident flaw of the matching process is that the permuted outputs aren't having their colour information reduced to match the actual texture graphic, which seems to use 18 colors in what they say is the original texture, though another texture I've checked online seem to be 23 colors.
Assuming the original texture was prepared in a late 90s version of Photoshop, you need to consider font rendering methods, downscaling algorithms, export options, etc. were used. They may've exported to a BMP before converting to the texture format the N64 uses, or not at all depending on the workstation.
Re: 'The Community Aspect of Decompilation Has Been Broken' - decomp.dev Closes in the Wake of AI-Based 'Bad Actors'
Cases like the Snowboard Kids 1 and 2 decompilations, where AI assisted decompilation furthered actual community effort, and the resulting static recompilation port was not vibe coded, are sadly the exception.
AI can help expedite the function matching part of decompilation, but does not help much with the actual documentation of human readable code that's vital to a well crafted port.
It's not the technology so much that I loathe, but the bad actors on both sides; the big corporations vacuuming up data and real world resources for cash grabs at enormous human and environmental costs, and the cheaters that are commanding AI services to do all of their work for them to rush out slop and get a quick claim to fame.
Working with people is very important, and should never be disregarded. On the other hand, we also can't ignore advances in technology where something that once took a team of people, may need fewer people for potentially equivalent or better results (although that's not what we're seeing).
Re: AliExpress Leaks Price and Shipping Information for Anbernic RG DDS Handheld
@Wezlypipz
On paper, the Retroid Pocket Duo looks to have the edge as an all-purpose device, whilst the Anbernic DDS has the edge as a dedicated 3DS device since the screens are specially tailored to 3DS, but only 3DS.
Russ of Retro Game Corps has his early impressions of the Duo up already, which I'll check out later, but the initial impression seems to be it's better than the Duo Lite (which isn't hard when Time Extension gave that a poor review).
I'm still interested in both the Anbernic DS Plus and the DDS, but since getting the Retroid Pocket Nova I might be a Retroid convert.
Re: AliExpress Leaks Price and Shipping Information for Anbernic RG DDS Handheld
That's pretty pricy; more than Retroid's Pocket Duo, and the price difference between the 8GB and 12GB models is much higher than what we saw with the Retroid Pocket Nova.
The chipset somewhat justifies the price though, it looks to be a very capable device that'll be useful for more than just 3DS games, but I think it's definitely worth waiting for reviews on these upcoming clamshell handhelds.
Re: Decades After Being Canned, This Excitebike-Like SNES Racer From The Developer Of Plok! Is Finally Getting A Digital Release
@Guru_Larry
That would be "Excitebike: Bun Bun Mario Battle", which yeah was released on the Satellaview service.
Incidentally, LuigiBlood is currently working on a standalone conversion of that title, after releasing a fan dubbed MSU ROM conversion of the Satellaview version of Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA).
I'd also be interested if Software Creations pitched this to Nintendo in any form, since they did apparently make an impression with the release of Plok?
Re: Super Smash Bros. For N64 Is Getting A Non-"AI Slop" Recomp, With 'Smash Remix' Support
Before anyone decries AI-assisted decompilations as "unsalvageable slop", I suggest you learn more about how decompilations, recompilations, and AI processes actually work.
Reverse engineering is one of the few things were AI can work towards an objective, immutable goal (unless it decides to cheat and redefine the goal).
https://youtu.be/Pl7ThC4PiVA
Whether or not a decompilation or reverse engineering project chooses to use AI assistance is a matter of preference, but either kind can achieve objective function matching.
The documentation part still requires human observation and critical thought.
Rejecting AI usage in its current state with its plagiarism and massive environmental and ethical concerns? I completely understand.
The end result of function matching, however? That part is an actual, undeniable result. AI in this scenario is largely just a more intelligent automated bruteforcing strategy, removing the tedium from having a human do the less creative part of reverse engineering, and one of the best use cases for computers regardless of the AI label.
Re: Anbernic Is Cloning the Nintendo 3DS Next, Minus the 3D
@Kotonete
The stereoscopic 3D effect is largely inessential anyway, and already not accessible to anyone using any device that isn't an original 3DS, so I don't mind that so much.
If they do by some miracle pull it off though, same glasses-free technology and IR head tracking that the New 3DS used, that's be so cool.
As for the AI button, uhhhh, I guess just on-device gen AI or on-the-fly translations, it's all unnecessary buzz but the Snapdragon G2 Gen 2 does support it.
I do want this specifically for 3DS games, I'd love to replay the likes of Smash Bros for 3DS, Kid Icarus Uprising, Metroid Samus Returns, Super Mario 3D Land, and plenty more.
Re: Anbernic Is Cloning the Nintendo 3DS Next, Minus the 3D
At first I thought it was going to have both a right analogue stick and a C-nub, but lo! The nub is actually a dedicated AI button.
Anbernic are seriously kicking up their game right now, calling out the shortcomings of the other 3DS-centric dual screen handhelds on the market, this looks like it could be a dream device like the Nova is for 4:3 gaming.
The only caveat here is that the screens are nearly perfect for dual screen gaming.
720p screens will only integer scale 3DS games by 3x.
Whilst 960p screens happen to 4x integer scale 3DS games, and 5x integer scale NDS games.
The Snapdragon G2 Gen 2 is probably capable of supporting dual 960p displays too.
Guess we'll see an RG DDS Plus in the future.
Re: Poll: Have You Ever Imported A Video Game?
My experiences with importing started with the Nintendo DS and Play-Asia. Where the original DS and Lite were completely region free, I started with an American Nintendo DS and Super Mario 64 in December 2004 for $235.
At the time, the exchange rates for imports from Play-Asia to the UK were amazing, and I'd paid £128 for that. I got to enjoy the DS 3 months early and at a comparable launch price.
I continued to import a great many of my Nintendo DS games from Play-Asia, thanks to how spectacular the exchange rates from USD to GBP were for the early 2000s. My next two games were Chokkan Hitofude (Polarium), and Zoo Keeper.
A few years later, I even imported an entire Japanese Wii system just to play Super Smash Bros. Brawl at its Japanese launch date! I had a fantastic time, but this was also mere months before the emergence of Datel's Freeloader, or the Twilight Hack that homebrew enabled your Wii systems. Had the timing been better, I could've imported just the game alone without buying a whole 'nother console.
Prior to that, I had inadvertently bought an imported game at a local gaming and records store; Pokémon Ruby version!
I'd visited the shop together with my cousin, and discovered they had a pair of import Ruby and Sapphire versions in store, and we each left with one.
I forget the exact date, but the games hadn't launched in the UK yet; another example of how importing used to afford earlier access to games.
This shop didn't deal in imported goods like that too often, but they did occasionally sell bootleg multi-carts for the Game Boy / Color.
Re: Feature: "It's Insulting & Hurtful" - Beetle Adventure Racing Decomp Dev Kicks Back Against The Rise Of AI Recomps
@tuffy
VideoGameEsoterica is complicit in the waves of AI slop recompilations, by giving the attention seekers a platform from which he can profit.
It's simply irresponsible to promote a project that is not complete like it's ready for public usage.
Flooding the market so to speak is how crashes happen, and why Nintendo had their seal of quality program. Public community projects can't exactly have a seal like that, but I'm hoping to see a trusted list / repository of mature decompilation-based and static recompilation ports emerge.
@Kotonete
There is an alarming number of rush-job vibecoded ports that undermines the community effort, but there are some meaningful LLM assisted projects that take the time and have proper attention to detail, to produce a decent enough port.
The cream of the crop remains to be the ports that were not LLM assisted, and produced by capable developers who didn't want to take shortcuts, but the public has also been too quick to completely dismiss a project because they were willing to use some AI assistance (a far cry from vibecoding).
As for AI decompilations, the actual reverse-engineering process, I don't have many qualms with that as the process of function-matching is a quantifiable and immutable goal. The documentation on the other hand, is another matter requiring human effort.
The Snowboard Kids 2 decompilation project was AI assisted; or managed rather, and the project manager wrote up articles explaining the process and how the decompilation could be completed much faster than otherwise.
https://github.com/cdlewis/snowboardkids2-decomp#articles
Notably, the same author's static recompilation built from the decompilation effort as far as I can see is entirely human made.
Re: Review: Anbernic RG DS Plus - My New Favourite Way To Play Nintendo DS Games
@Kotonete
It's largely a matter of supply chains, these retro handhelds commonly exist on the back of affordable components used for automobile dashboards, from the unusual display sizes to the SoC chips.
Nintendo had a specialist purpose for having resistive 256x192, and later 320x240 resolution touch screens developed, whilst the phone market had completely moved away from resistive in favour of the capacitive screens that were more natural to use with your hands and allowed for multi-touch.
I remember having an early resistive touch screen phone called the LG Viewty, and this thing was actually very difficult to use. You really had to press the screen surprisingly hard to type out a message!
It was bad enough that my next phone was a Blackberry with its tiny physical keyboard, that was preferable to that stiff touch screen.
Re: Review: Anbernic RG DS Plus - My New Favourite Way To Play Nintendo DS Games
@Kotonete
It's only a piracy device if you decide to make it one.
By all means, if you have an original DS or 3DS, there are ways to dump the ROMs and save data from your own DS cartridges and play them on anything else!
Re: Bubble Bobble 4 Friends: The Baron Is Back! Is Getting A Physical Edition On Nintendo Switch 2
Hah, they've adopted Nintendo's own approach to Switch 2 editions, right down to the extra content and the naming scheme.
Re: "This Is What Happens When You Rely On AI Slop" - Fans Aren't Impressed With Vibe-Coded Knuckles' Chaotix Recomp
Something similar happened with a "Sonic the Fighters Recompiled" release recently.
A trailer went up on YouTube, featured gameplay footage that may've not actually been the recompiled port running, but did feature footage of the menus, didn't disclose AI usage.
That trailer was made private after about an hour when people actually tried out the port and found it performed extremely poorly, with bad performance and many disruptive bugs.
For some reason there's an inclination to put up a YouTube trailer for your project before actually finishing it, or even getting it to a presentable state.
Re: A New Castlevania 40th Anniversary Video Has Released, & Fans Think They Have Spotted A Tease For A 3D Collection
The portraits there might be an inclusion for the sake of the animation, since those characters don't have 2D games with sprite artwork representations (outside of the Vampire Survivors expansion).
However, it certainly does feel like a Collection tease!
Re: "Of All The GenAI Slops You've Ever Seen, This Is The Sloppiest Of Them All" - The Oliver Twins Tarnish Their Legacy Further With 'Wizard Of Oz' Board Game
Regardless of whether the Oliver Twins are directly responsible for this output, or someone approached them about it, this unmistakably just looks like generic AI trash output you see on socials or small businesses that don't know better.
Yes the graphics may be high detail and high fidelity, but they're not good because of that, whilst I can point to many reasons why they're pretty bad.
The unnerving uniformity and predictable placement of many details, the super-generic style that AI output produces from a prompt devoid of direction, and if we end up getting a closer look we'll probably identify a sleuth of inconsistencies and errors, with unnerving details and uncanny expressions.
Can I also just point out that the big box artwork depicts the group walking away from the Emerald City?
Re: The Long Wait For Ace Attorney 7 Continues, As 'Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies VR' Announced
It's such a bizarre choice for a VR experience.
The Ace Attorney games are visual novels, like spending hours reading a good book. It just seems like such a bad fit for the games when there's importance in reading the dialogue and understanding the facts of the cases, and yet there's no voice work to carry the dialogue that would immerse the player in the narrative.
Re: Evercade December Releases Are Reportedly The Last Ninja and James Pond Collections
Pleased to see here the the James Pond collection is not using any of that awful AI generated artwork, but is entirely based on the original artworks.
If they're the "16-bit versions", that probably means the SEGA Mega Drive / Genesis versions rather than SNES, and not the Amiga versions, but we'll see.
Re: The PS2 Tough Nut Security Chip 'MechaCon' Has Finally Been Cracked Open
@gameboycolor
Well, be even more surprised because the shell design is actually an Atari design for an unreleased 1993 personal computer called the Falcon microbox.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/3f0dsf/til_that_sony_based_the_design_of_the_ps2_on_an/
Re: Terranigma Returns January 14 2027, Physical "Gaia Edition" Now Available To Pre-Order
Whoa! That "Gaia edition" collector's edition is an eye-watering £168. I guess because of the mechanical music box and figurine?
I'll be content getting just the physical game, maybe the SteelBook version.
Also, Limited Run Games have just put up their listings for the ESRB US physical releases. Pre-orders open September 25th.
https://limitedrungames.com/search?q=Terranigma
As usual, LRG are doing a distribution release for Clear River Games as they've done many times before.
Re: System 3 CEO Says Antstream Misled Him Over Use Of GenAI In James Pond Legacy
I also just want to take a moment to call out the outrageous pricing and purchase options for the game, as I just found on their site.
https://system3.com/news/watch-the-first-gameplay-trailer-for-the-james-pond-legacy-the-pond-is-not-enough/
On Switch 2 it's £29.99 for a digital game, £39.99 for a game-key version, and £69.99 for a collector's edition; 6000 copies of the game on a cartridge with "additional trading cards, a poster, and other collectible items".
They will be very hard pressed to find anyone to wants to buy any of this at these prices. I loathe the idea of merchandise printed with this awful AI artwork.
Re: System 3 CEO Says Antstream Misled Him Over Use Of GenAI In James Pond Legacy
The statement from Antstream tells me that they're doing rough constructive drafts using any materials they can source (quite possibly crudely painting over sprite artwork), throwing that into a generative AI image process like Stable Diffusion's img2img, and then tweaking the output iteratively.
Which is to say, they're using gen AI to do heavy lifting on "rendering" artwork and then just fixing any errors they catch.
Statements have already changed from "3D render process" for the robot cow example, to "producing pseudo-3D drafts", they're just covering themselves as they get caught.
Seriously, making edits to an AI output in no way makes the end result "fully human-authored"...
System3 is also at fault here for not having the due diligence to check the work that Antstream were doing, blindly trusting the results whilst not having the eye for the heavily scrutinised AI-slop aesthetic.
Re: The Controversial 'James Pond Legacy' Gets A New Gameplay Trailer
It's not necessarily low effort per se, they do seem to have put an effort into building the interface and conceiving it, but the production value is awful and inconsistent where they've mish-mashed in a lot of generated assets that do not belong, and have no basis in the original games.
Just bad ideas with terrible execution, that fail to convey the original games.
It wouldn't surprise me if the program code and written materials are also LLM junk, but that would need a deeper dive.
Re: "Let's Get The Last Beautiful Things Hiding On Our Hard Drives Out There" - Project Dream, Rare's Unreleased Banjo-Kazooie Predecessor, Leaks Online
It looks pretty genuine to me, something this elaborate would be incredibly hard to fake, particularly all of the pre-rendered visuals.
That said, I don't find it inconceivable that someone would be able to fabricate a convincing SNES ROM using shared footage, as there's been some recent big advancements in AI tooling after GPT-6 Astra's release.
Someone developed a tool called "SuperAstra" that appears to be able to modify SNES games in realtime via prompting.
https://x.com/scottastevenson/status/2096972908828426747
And the AI tool demonstrated the capacity of reverse engineering SNES ROMs into source code to recompile as a native program for another system.
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1waulnx/who_needs_emulation_with_astra_you_can_decompile/
The ROM containing leftover graphical data from Ken Griffey Jr's Winning Run, is either that they modified program code for prototyping purposes, or that the development cartridge was overwritten and there were remnants of a previous development project.
The other possibility, is that for plausibility someone heavily modified said game using the GPT-Astra tooling mentioned above, with reconstructed assets based on documented footage, to make a convincing leak. Said tooling hasn't been available especially long though.
Now in this instance I DON'T think that's what happened and that this Dream leak is the real deal, but with recent developments we need to remain more critical of any purported leaks.
Re: Retroid Reveals Pricing For Dual-Screen 'Pocket Duo' Hardware Alongside New Gameplay Video
The pre-order prices, especially for the Duo Lite, are far better than I expected.
The pair of 1920x1080 and 1280x960 screens should be very good for 3DS and DS gaming too, although the top screen doesn't have perfect integer scaling for either of them (but the bottom does).
These devices are powerful enough to do more than just 3DS gaming though, GameNative being a way to play your Steam and GOG libraries should be very nice on these.
RGDS Plus looking like it will cement itself as a dedicated DS option, and Duo Lite as a great 3DS option.
Re: Anbernic Shows The Upcoming RG DS Plus Running Nintendo DS, N64, PS1, Dreamcast And Saturn Titles
@GordonBennet
I doubt it'll ever feel as responsive as an original resistive DS or 3DS touch screen, and there'll probably be a bit of delay or latency on emulation.
So games like Rhythm Heaven / Paradise on DS will probably not feel great, but the RGDS Plus gameplay video does showcase that one.
Re: Retroid's Upcoming Dual-Screen 'Pocket Duo' Handheld Has 120Hz OLED Displays
@Scollurio
My Nova is arriving today, and there's a strong chance I wouldn't have bought a Nova if a dual-screen version were available at the same time.
This is my first Retroid device though, and I'll see how I get on. I've much more of an itch for small form factor handheld GameCube games than I do emulating 3DS games anyway.
Re: Retroid's Upcoming Dual-Screen 'Pocket Duo' Handheld Has 120Hz OLED Displays
Looking like a mighty fine device, pretty much a dual screen version of the Nova?
I see this being a fair bit pricier to reflect that.
Re: "We Understand The Concerns The Community Has" - BBG Entertainment Admits It Used GenAI In Manic Miner Trailer
I can believe that they used gen AI to quickly produce a trailer for a rushed deadline, but the claim that they haven't used gen AI for the game's artwork and assets is an outright lie.
It's plainly obvious looking at the background graphics like the crane machine masts and hand rails. No human artist makes that kind of melty fuzz in any kind of visual medium representing mechanical structures.
Re: Anbernic's RG DS Plus Comes With Its Own Capacitive Stylus And Has Higher-Resolution Screens
@Wezlypipz
The specs haven't been officially announced yet, but I am seeing that it uses the same chipset but with reduced RAM and no internal storage.
If it's a purpose built device with fine tuned firmware and its NNDDSS software emulator, it might work just fine.
I said I'd wait on reviews for a reason, since that the RGDS GammaOS update reignited interest in the device.
Re: Anbernic's RG DS Plus Comes With Its Own Capacitive Stylus And Has Higher-Resolution Screens
Looks very promising, I had my eyes on the RGDS after an update to the GammaOS custom firmware, but this looks like it could be what the hardware should've been in the first place.
Will wait for reviews on this one, this might be going on my Christmas wishlist.
Re: This Fan-Made Sonic The Hedgehog Demo Brings Green Hill Zone To The Amiga
@Deway
I'm honestly surprised if you didn't, the cheat codes were a big part of the culture of playing the Mega Drive Sonic games. The debug mode codes were among the most famous, because it turned the games into sand boxes where you could play around with spawning objects and enemies!
Although, some of the official re-releases disabled using some of the original cheat codes for one reason or another.
Re: Joe & Mac Retro Collection Brings Three "Stone Age" SNES Games To Modern Consoles This October
@Zeebor15
I wasn't aware of that, nor this previous reboot of Microids (a Joe & Mac reboot?).
Still, yes running a Kickstarter campaign is definitely a risk management here, but there's been increasingly the issue with Switch releases this year.
Red Art Games initially skipped over doing a Switch physical release for Monster Crown Sin Eater, but were convinced to do one after the Kickstarter campaign backers voiced their demand for one after they announced a PS5 physical.
More and more boutique releases are failing to get off the ground, not securing enough pre-order funds to realise the limited number print they promised.
Even Limited Run's releases seem to have slowed down lately.
Aside from risk management, we probably don't know which company was approached about making a Joe & Mac retro collection happen, if it was the license holder (G-Mode) or the publisher (Red Art Games), or maybe if it was an auction where G-Mode offered publishers a chance to do a release.
Re: Joe & Mac Retro Collection Brings Three "Stone Age" SNES Games To Modern Consoles This October
@Zeebor15
Marvelous? What do they have to do with this??
I wouldn't dismiss this as "requiring a Kickstarter for a ROM collection", Red Art games wanted community engagement and treated this as a proper project, sourcing the materials for the gallery mode, creating all new art for the packaging and manuals, making new merch, etc.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redartgames/joe-and-mac-retro-collection-16-bit-classics-with-a-new-twist/posts/4618874
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redartgames/joe-and-mac-retro-collection-16-bit-classics-with-a-new-twist/posts/4752334
This is the exact opposite of that James Pond collection that everyone's taken exception towards.
Re: "I've Never Been One To Play It Safe" - Segagaga Director Goes All-In On GenAI On His Latest Project
@MG4M3R
It sounds like he might be running local stable diffusion or something in that case.
Though as I understand it, you can't just train a modal on your own images, the base model itself must have tens of thousands of images which are highly unlikely to be sourced properly.
It's conceivably possible, but not likely to be what's happening.
Re: "I've Never Been One To Play It Safe" - Segagaga Director Goes All-In On GenAI On His Latest Project
I don't particularly care for the use of generative AI for visual or audio asset production, it's a means of cutting out talented artists that can do a much better job of cohesive and appealing visuals.
However, I can see there's an actual merit to the visual direction here in spite of that. They've leaned into the absurd mish-mashing of elements that generative AI is admittedly quite capable of (albeit in the vain of "Italian Brainrot"), where there's a faux-photo realism and a consistent theming of large single eyes and mechanical bodies with gears.
I would be more forgiving if this were only a homebrew throwback game and an exploration of the technology, but I can't really support this as a commercial product knowing how the technology is derivative of actual artists that could've accomplished the same vision and better, whilst also being economically and ecologically damaging.
Re: This Dying Street Fighter II Cart Is A Sobering Reminder That Physical Doesn't Mean Forever
It's worth discussing the kinds of ROM chips that were used for retail SNES cartridge releases.
My understanding is that they use Mask ROM, which uses photolithography to imprint the program data into silicon and doesn't rely on an electrical charge that can gradually leak.
That means the chip's data integrity is incredibly reliable, and that this particular cartridge's failure point is more likely to the elsewhere on the PCB or on the ROM chip's connections, which should be an entirely serviceable repair job.
This is as compared to aftermarket retro console physical releases that use EEPROM, an often rewritable flash storage medium that will leak its electrical charge over time, and risks failure if it doesn't receive any power for many years (a problem that we're discovering with more recent 3DS and Switch physical games).
Re: "Who Are They Kidding?" - System 3 Insists No GenAI Was Used In James Pond Legacy, But Fans Aren't Convinced
@slider1983
I'd chalk that one up to a typo or autocorrect, James Pond II was Codename: RoboCod after all
Re: "Who Are They Kidding?" - System 3 Insists No GenAI Was Used In James Pond Legacy, But Fans Aren't Convinced
Taking a closer look at System3's site after this debacle, I noticed their shop, and their various physical or code in a box releases for Switch games.
There's even more slop, one game is straight up copying Breath of the Wild's cover art, others have weird humans with melting faces, whilst Strike Force Kitty appeared to be using actual game assets layered atop an AI slop background.
Re: The James Pond Legacy: The Pond Is Not Enough Goes Physical On Switch 2 This October
That trailer video is an insult to all of the artists that brought the original games to fruition, it's nothing but lazily generated AI renditions of character artwork from the James Pond games, accompanied by what's very likely AI generated music from Suno or a similar service.
The only effort that's gone into that trailer is the basic motions and recreation of a James Bond style title sequence.
Re: Review: Retroid Pocket Nova - The New Retro Emulation Handheld To Beat
I'm eagerly awaiting my Nova's arrival, I ended up being pretty disappointed with my Ayaneo Pocket Air Mini, as the buttons just didn't feel right to me, and the performance wasn't adequate for my GameCube emulation ambitions.
@gojiguy
You'll be pleased to hear then that the input latency is actually very low, about 15ms in Russ' estimation from his Retro Game Corps review.
https://youtu.be/QntymbB9a2Q?t=1005
Re: "The Fact It's Playable At All Is Honestly Insane" - Zelda: BotW Gets 'Demade' For 3DS By An Unknown Developer
I'm surprised that this much was even possible, as the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team's BotW decompilation effort is only at 17% as of today.
Re: "This Endeavour To Save One Game Cost Me Well Over $900 dollars" - A Missing Final Fantasy VII Mobile Game Has Just Been Preserved
@Deway
There's a chance it exists in their archives somewhere, though Square Soft were known to be poor at preserving their own code or production materials around the time.
Re: "I'd Rather Disappoint Some People" - Dev Behind Tool That "Ports" Game Boy Games To GBA Pivots To AI
It sounds like Ivan is abandoning the GB Bridge vision for quick AI processed results on a game-by-game basis (somewhat similar to how Infidelity and some others manually perform NES to SNES ports via Mesen debugging).
That's what I find disappointing, as the proposed GB Bridge layer would've been a far more exciting development than working on games on a case-by-case basis.
That isn't to say I wouldn't appreciate the end results on a game-by-game basis though, since I can tell Ivan still cares very much about producing a quality piece of work from whatever foundation he's working from.
Re: "The Most Gorgeous Game Boy Emulation I've Ever Seen" - Brick Boy Goes The Extra Mile To Copy The Console's Nostalgic Display
Whenever it comes to replicating displays, my concern is always that the effort is replicating an aged display we have access to now, rather than a factory fresh display as we would've experienced decades ago.
The ghosting, transitional fade, and LCD pixel decay in this emulated display are superb, but they're likely also calibrated on a degraded display.
There's also that the contrast of the DMG LCD display had a dedicated adjustment dial.
Re: A New N64 EverDrive Flash Cart Has Been Released With A Dedicated 64DD Core
Is 64DD support a first for N64 flash carts?
I was aware of carts like the Summercart having support for the Aleck64 arcade games, I even got to try it out.
This is like running Mega-CD / SEGA CD games from a Mega Drive / SEGA Genesis flash cart, which is quite a feat.
Re: Zelda: Link To The Past Gets A Dual-Screen Port On 3DS, With Help From AI
This is a pretty neat project, AI or not.
I'm not against assistive technologies, my concerns are reliance on these technologies doing the work for you, and the current reckless development of AI that the big corporations are doing.
Said recklessness being the utter disregard for ecological and economical wellbeing, and for ethical or legal sourcing of training data.
@selfdeztruction
Seeing as this is a hobby project it's more forgivable, but if this were actual business like commercial game production, I would want roles being filled by actual people.
That said, I can still understand very small teams that have absolutely no access to people who can perform roles, and have no other choice than the AI service can do the parts of work that they can't; often audio or graphical work as software programmers are concerned.
That usually results in a pretty damn crap looking game though.
Re: "The Blood Drained From My Face" - 97 Copies Of Never-Before-Seen Super Mario Bros. Variant Found In Wisconsin Retro Store
These are genuine production rarities which is where the value comes from, and it's cool to see this kind of discovery.
The ROM is almost certainly identical, but it would be nice to get confirmation on that detail. Circumstances however indicate they're going to keep these as pristine as possible.
Re: "You Might As Well Play On A Raspberry Pi" - The World Of MiSTer FPGA Remains Divided Over "AI Slop" Cores
RTA's take on open source is completely wrong, and why AI output has been a plague on open source repositories.
Open source projects are still subject to licensing and headed up by project managers who will approve or reject any contributions based on their alignment with project goals.
AI pull requests are a nuisance that waste project managers time with often poor quality, detrimental changes.
The MiSTer project here has a pretty unambiguous goal of recreating the functionality of the original hardware based on the actual hardware, so any cores developed on the processes and output of software emulators is detrimental to that goal.
If you want to hijack an open source project to do something that doesn't follow the community's goals, well you can fork it and go your own direction, but like Mike Channell said this really serves no purpose when dedicated software emulator devices are plentiful and affordable.
Just cramming more and more content into the device without regard for quality is how Atari crashed the video game market in the first place, are we forgetting that?