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AI-assisted recomps and decomps - where do you draw the line?

AI-assisted recomps and decomps - where do you draw the line?

You'd have to be living under a rock to have not noticed the recent boom in static recompilation and decompilation projects - it seems like every day, multiple projects are announced; from popular titles to more obscure games with niche audiences; at the rate they're appearing it feels like it's only a matter of time until every game is playable on every platform.

For example, just recently The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker has made its way to Windows and Mac natively - bringing with it high frame rates, widescreen support, improved rendering, HD texture pack support and more... AstroCore has brought Super Mario Galaxy to PC, gen1recomp has added FireRed and LeafGreen, the list goes on.

It's no surprise to anyone that this boom in projects has been almost fully in part to the rise of AI assisted development or in some cases, projects that are entirely vibe-coded.

Many of these projects disclose outright the fact they were built with help from large language models such as Claude Code. For example, The Wind Waker recomps readme says it was developed "with substantial AI assistance for code, testing, documentation and debugging".

So here's the question, beyond the ethical and environmental impacts; these recomps and decomps cost nothing. They’re made in part by people in their spare time and can provide easy access to games that are perhaps stuck on dead or hard to find hardware, run or perform badly on their original platforms; or that the original publisher may have delisted entirely. Yet as soon as an LLM shows up in the credits a big part of the reaction devolves to "AI = bad", whatever the resulting product may look like. Of course, some of that criticism is absolutely well founded: people worry about undocumented, unoptimized and spiraling codebases; about the craft and passion of hand reverse-engineering and about how these models were trained in the first place.

So who's really right? Is it the people who see AI-assisted ports as a shortcut that cheapens the scene, or the people who think a free, working, improved and accessible version of a game they love is worth having however it was made?

Where do you personally draw the line?

Back in August, Scarlet's community check-in on how we cover AI-assisted projects garnered more than 360 replies. Scarlet suggested that when a project we feature uses AI and makes it clear that it does; we will endeavor to inform you depending on of course on the information publically available and to the extent that you should expect from an independent website providing simple news coverage. Giving anyone who would rather avoid these projects a clear indicator, without anyone having to dig through repositories for hints themselves.

So let us know:
  • Where do you draw the line on using LLMs in such recomp and decomp projects?
  • Would you play a game knowing much of its port was written with AI? Or would you prefer to avoid it?
  • If an AI-assisted recomp were the only way left to play a game you cherish would you take it? Or would your principles keep you waiting for an official remaster?
As always, keep it civil please...
 
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AxlSt00pid said:
I've seen tons and tons of "Mostly AI" recomps where the main repo is basically all done by Claude or Codex, and the end result runs like complete garbage

THAT is bad usage of AI, because of quantity (of recomps done) over quality (of said recomps)
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So you think Wind Waker HD for Switch 1 runs like garbage? Care to explain?
 
AI isn't going anywhere, and although I'd love to stick to a person's passion project, I can't see someone taking the time to combine Skate 3's mechanics into MW2 as close as we have it now because of AI. It's being used as a tool to make people's wildest dreams come true which is cool for people who don't have the time to make anything.

Although I'm curious to see how this continues, I'd love for older games to be somehow improved compatibility-wise, even if it's just wishful thinking.

Or at the very least, recompiling games like The Outfit or Crimson Skies for PC would make me a happy camper.
 
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x65943 said:
how long before decompiling software and distributing this software becomes illegal?
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with these new ai models cloning software is becoming like child play, and since it's re-coding these softwares from scratch (with something like Rust for example), technically copyright holders can't do anything to stop it (legally). this is obv very bad for governments, corpos, finance, banking etc worldwide, proprietary software & sensitive data is at risk of being copied and exposed, this could lead to the true downfall of civilization as we know it. so yes, laws should be passed to gatekeep this stuff somehow.

that said I wish these devs or vibe-devs just be transparent about the use of ai, like mentioning specifically how ai was used like: "ok i don't know how to code but i really wanted to make this project so all of the programming was done by ai", or" i only used ai to generate assets or enhance them" etc etc at that point just leave it to the user to choose whether it's for them or not.
 
Last edited by CoolMe,
Unregulated AI is a scourge on society and the planet. The circular funding where Nvidia gets stock in AI companies in exchange for giving them products and both sets of companies record it as profit is likely illegal, and if not, should be. OpenAI should not be allowed to buy up nearly the entire world's capacity of memory every year leaving the other AI companies scrambling for the leftovers and consumers and traditional businesses with nothing. We are rapidly regressing to the stone age of computing where, even now, the computer I built in 2018 (which can't even technically run Windows 11), will outperform any computer under $1500 available today, and my phone from 2021 has better specs than today's flagships. This is quite possibly the last generation of console gaming as the PS6 will cost too much to bother making or buying, and even Sony has realized that there is more money using their optical disk factories for making vision sensors for AI robots than gaming products for consumers.

AI datacenters consume massive amounts of water and electricity. The companies building and using these data centers do not foot the bill for these costs. They don't even comply with existing regulations on pollution. Governments are using eminent domain to seize family businesses, farms, and homes to build them, while making the drinking water toxic for whole towns and communities. AI companies can freely commit crimes using their agents and then claim the agents "went rogue" instead of facing any penalties for those crimes even when the agents were following direct instructions.

The US economy is in shambles, aside from the stock market which is a rigged casino owned by the rich propped up by the AI circular funding bubble. IT was the last career path that allowed for a middle class lifestyle, and now AI is rapidly replacing developers and support staff, while high hardware costs are forcing companies into the cloud to temporarily cut costs, leading them to lay off their on-prem staff.

You can't avoid discussing politics about this. The Trump administration will not enforce any restrictions on AI at all, and they will not even enforce existing laws against AI companies that are committing crimes. If you are upset about anything I said above, do your research on which politicians are willing to regulate AI and vote for them in November. Hint: Trump and all his Republican allies are 100% on board with unregulated AI, but at least some democrats aren't. Donate to the campaigns of anti-AI candidates, make calls, knock on doors. Write and call your congressmen and mayor and tell them to heavily regulate AI. Figure out if they are building a datacenter in your community and organize your neighbors into attending town halls, protests, start class action lawsuits, etc. Hold the data centers accountable for the pollution they cause. Do the hard work instead of just bitching on the internet.


With all of that said, stop attacking the little people using AI. They are spending their free time making something nice for you, for free, and you just want to complain about something. Because everything sucks, and you don't want to put in the real effort to do anything about it. Maybe you even voted for this, plan to vote for it again, and want to feel better about yourself by putting some random person on the internet down for something they made. For you. For free. You personally playing a recomp or using a fan game/mod built with AI is causing almost no harm. The resources the devs used to build those projects has already been used, and is insignificant compared to even just minutes of your local and state governments using Flock cameras to track your travel to use against you later. Use your energy to complain to the companies and politicians destroying the planet, not some random guy who made you a nicer version of Zelda. I personally am using local open source AI models to make up-scaled texture packs for some of my favorite games, and I'm very happy with the results. I could share them on here, but the hatred and vitriol I would face for sharing them isn't worth the effort. The anti-AI people won't care that I already own the hardware and that the AI I used to make them consumed less electricity than playing a AAA game on the same hardware.

Because AI=bad, nuance is too complicated for the modern internet, and anger is reserved for everyone besides the ones actually causing the problems.
 
Last edited by Kraken_X,
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Clearly ai has its uses for many things but personally I think this is where it should remain... As a tool. And with that we have seen loads of things happen recently that just were not happening for a number reasons before, but the tool has made it happen.

I don't see how it cheapens the scene though as 99 percent of gamers are just that... Gamers. End users, not interested in the creative process or code involved. And most modders are the same, they want plug and play with a full step by step tutorial to do so.

Unfortunately the moral implications of ai outweigh the practical uses as yet. Yeah Wind Waker HD on my switch is fucking awesome but I'd rather that energy went into something useful for the planet but gamers and modders won't be the ones to do that!
 
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Kraken_X said:
Unregulated AI is a scourge on society and the planet. The circular funding where Nvidia gets stock in AI companies in exchange for giving them products and both sets of companies record it as profit is likely illegal, and if not, should be. OpenAI should not be allowed to buy up nearly the entire world's capacity of memory every year leaving the other AI companies scrambling for the leftovers and consumers and traditional businesses with nothing. We are rapidly regressing to the stone age of computing where, even now, the computer I built in 2018 (which can't even technically run Windows 11), will outperform any computer under $1500 available today, and my phone from 2021 has better specs than today's flagships. This is quite possibly the last generation of console gaming as the PS6 will cost too much to bother making or buying, and even Sony has realized that there is more money using their optical disk factories for making vision sensors for AI robots than gaming products for consumers.

AI datacenters consume massive amounts of water and electricity. The companies building and using these data centers do not foot the bill for these costs. They don't even comply with existing regulations on pollution. Governments are using eminent domain to seize family businesses, farms, and homes to build them, while making the drinking water toxic for whole towns and communities. AI companies can freely commit crimes using their agents and then claim the agents "went rogue" instead of facing any penalties for those crimes even when the agents were following direct instructions.

The US economy is in shambles, aside from the stock market which is a rigged casino owned by the rich propped up by the AI circular funding bubble. IT was the last career path that allowed for a middle class lifestyle, and now AI is rapidly replacing developers and support staff, while high hardware costs are forcing companies into the cloud to temporarily cut costs, leading them to lay off their on-prem staff.

You can't avoid discussing politics about this. The Trump administration will not enforce any restrictions on AI at all, and they will not even enforce existing laws against AI companies that are committing crimes. If you are upset about anything I said above, do your research on which politicians are willing to regulate AI and vote for them in November. Hint: Trump and all his Republican allies are 100% on board with unregulated AI, but at least some democrats aren't. Donate to the campaigns of anti-AI candidates, make calls, knock on doors. Write and call your congressmen and mayor and tell them to heavily regulate AI. Figure out if they are building a datacenter in your community and organize your neighbors into attending town halls, protests, start class action lawsuits, etc. Hold the data centers accountable for the pollution they cause. Do the hard work instead of just bitching on the internet.


With all of that said, stop attacking the little people using AI. They are spending their free time making something nice for you, for free, and you just want to complain about something. Because everything sucks, and you don't want to put in the real effort to do anything about it. Maybe you even voted for this, plan to vote for it again, and want to feel better about yourself by putting some random person on the internet down for something they made. For you. For free. You personally playing a recomp or using a fan game/mod built with AI is causing almost no harm. The resources the devs used to build those projects has already been used, and is insignificant compared to even just minutes of your local and state governments using Flock cameras to track your travel to use against you later. Use your energy to complain to the companies and politicians destroying the planet, not some random guy who made you a nicer version of Zelda. I personally am using local open source AI models to make up-scaled texture packs for some of my favorite games, and I'm very happy with the results. I could share them on here, but the hatred and vitriol I would face for sharing them isn't worth the effort. The anti-AI people won't care that I already own the hardware and that the AI I used to make them consumed less electricity than playing a AAA game on the same hardware.

Because AI=bad, nuance is too complicated for the modern internet, and anger is reserved for everyone besides the ones actually causing the problems.
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Pretty much sums it up for me. The wider implications and consequences that come from that means I can't in any good conscious support it. The negatives are *so* malignant that any positives don't even break even.

If you're generating art then as someone who's done art for roughly 20 years; don't like that even if you're generating locally. For Code if you're running *local* setups then there's at least more of a shot you know what your doing already, vibe coders never do that.
 
For me if an AI itself decided to decomp a game and released it ,i'm in.The line being that the decomp works.In 5 years, i will not use human decomp because they will be inferior to AI.
 
Reploid said:
5 percent of ppl are Luddites, according to statistics. Next 40 years will be hard for them
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Did ChatGPT hallucinate that percentage for ya? Because a half-century of experience tells me it is far higher, and not just in this forum.
 
isoboy said:
You know.... it's not like all new games run perfect out of the box, is it? A lot of them ship BROKEN.
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The problem is that people think that just because AI was used then everything will be as good as it ever going to be by the first release or something.
 
Annoying people must really be crushed now that it's revealed that the Harbour Master's have admitted that Ship of Harkinian and 2Ship2Harkinian were in fact the some the first AI assisted game ports and just went undisclosed for a while. As models get bigger and frontier models get more capabilities you are starting to see people who have less of an idea of what they're doing taking a crack at complex projects and finding some measure of "success"(not necessarily readable decompilations but recomps that run). That's mainly where all the "slop" lies.
 
I'm probably one of the few people with the strongest stances against the technology. I value the ability to learn, to perform, etc.. A lot of people treat this technology like it's equivalent to using a user interface frontend for a command line / terminal solution. You can use a calculator to solve math problems for your homework, but you are still thinking about the problem, and likely know how to manually solve the equation by hand already, you still put in the effort to write down your answers and the work leading up to said answers. In the end, you still at least understand why the answer is what it is. Throw an a.i. at it, and more than likely it's going to do the whole worksheet for you, and the only thing you have to do is play janitor to make sure it didn't mess it up. You didn't have to do much thinking, you didn't have to draw your own conclusions, you just got the answers, and you more than likely have no idea why the answer is what it's supposed to be. Sure, you could say "well, in order to play clean up, you have to know where it went wrong." Except I've also witnessed people point out things that look problematic, but have no idea why it's problematic, and yet again, tells the a.i. to fix the issue(s). A tool to me is something meant to assist, not remove most of the labor, just so one can sit there and take credit later.

The upsides and downsides both are part of the job description of a hobby, and or a career. You can't truly appropriate the upsides if you never have any downsides, you'll take them for granted. You remove half the experiences to learn from. I think where everyone is failing has to do with them only focusing on the end result. Congratulations, you optimized the labor, experiences, etc. out of the craft, and you demonstrate why you probably aren't fit for the field.

In the context of decompilations. It can be a daunting task, and it can take months, if not years to get something worked out. To people who actually love the craft, they won't see it the same way someone who only cares about the end result would. Sometimes the challenge and labor are the fun parts. You have to actually care and pursue to understand what that means though.
 
Last edited by DeadSkullzJr,
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ChibiMofo said:
The fact that you have to write that makes me prefer AI's to the humans. At least they don't troll or get emotional about things that don't really matter, like the overthrow and destruction of society by AI.
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And somehow you're not a troll? I'm surprised everyone still puts up with your bullshit, to be honest
 
The official companies largely refuse to ever re-release most of these games and when they do they're usually and typically shoddy and half assed with poor emulation or broken graphics and lots of input lag

So it's great to be able to play these games on alternate modern platforms. I'm ALL for them basically so long as they provide enhancements or features that improve them beyond the original. Otherwise what's the point when you can just emulate. But 95+% of them all offer resolution and FPS improvements so it's all good.
 
Givemesteak said:
So you think Wind Waker HD for Switch 1 runs like garbage? Care to explain?
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My brother in fucking christ, when did I ever mention Wind Waker HD for Switch 1

My experience is playing 3 recomps where 99% of things were done by AI and they were a stuttering mess: A Tekken 3 one where the latest release halved the framerate, a MK Super Circuit one where it had quite some frametime and visual issues, and a Tony Hawk Project 8 recomp where the shader compilation stutters made the game completely unplayable
 
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shaunj66 said:
So let us know:
  • Where do you draw the line on using LLMs in such recomp and decomp projects?
  • Would you play a game knowing much of its port was written with AI? Or would you prefer to avoid it?
  • If an AI-assisted recomp were the only way left to play a game you cherish would you take it? Or would your principles keep you waiting for an official remaster?
As always, keep it civil please...
Click to expand...

I don't really care. I think AI is great for these kinds of projects. sure they lose the soul they had but who the heck cares about how much soul was put into a decomp, because that's not the point of a decomp.

Will the code it produce might be bad? Maybe?
Can it be fixed and cleaned up? Yes!
 
NitroShell said:
I don't really care. I think AI is great for these kinds of projects. sure they lose the soul they had but who the heck cares about how much soul was put into a decomp, because that's not the point of a decomp.

Will the code it produce might be bad? Maybe?
Can it be fixed and cleaned up? Yes!
Click to expand...
What the hell is the point of a decomp then? Churning one out as quickly as possible to beat others who wanted to make one for the same game?
 
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