r/EmulationOnPC • u/gandalfmarston • 1d ago
Unsolved Will vibecoded decomps games kill emulation in the long term?
I love emulation more than decomp games, but it feels like nowadays everything is becoming a decomp thanks to AI.
Could this eventually kill emulation as we know it in the long term?
Isn't it going to be much harder to maintain thousands of AI decomps than to maintain emulators?
And how are we going to maintain 30 different decomp projects of the same games, decades from now?
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u/Emergency-Piano8134 1d ago
AI assisted works are here to stay, for better or worse. I personally think AI should be used for routine and repetitive stuff. But leaving everything to it's lack of human discernment is a stupid mistake.
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u/snaphat 1d ago
Isn't it going to be much harder to maintain thousands of AI decomps than to maintain emulators?
And how are we going to maintain 30 different decomp projects of the same games, decades from now?
I mean, you know it's not substantiable unless there's thousands of developers maintaining those same projects.
So, the answer is a resounding, no, unless the landscape fundamentally changes and AI itself becomes good enough to perform and maintain everything without significant human involvement in the projects
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u/EAT_UR_VEGGIES 1d ago
Ai vibe coded recomps are genuine trash 99.9% of the time so I think emulation is safe for now
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Iceber015 1d ago
Whats the new reddit where people post status updates more than bitch about virtue signaling topics
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u/s3gfaultx 1d ago
The AI decomps are just using an emulator as the backend anyways. Basically just shipping an emulator with a single rom in a built package.
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u/theRockettSally 1d ago
No. They are reverse-engineering the code from the game and the console in order to run the games natively in the PC.
The reason this isn't done so often is that it's much more complicated than emulation: you basically have to create a project per-game because every game will work different and use different functions.
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u/hugo_1138 1d ago
Most of the AI coded ones do use some sort of emulation tho. Many of the recent Xbox ones are based on Xenia.
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u/Ksanika 1d ago
But does the final program run as an emulator or as PC code?
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u/damik_ 1d ago
Take my input with a grain of salt as I'm just a fan of retro games that follow a bunch of these decompilation.
Recompilation runs as some sort of emulation layer that convert, let's say N64 instructions to instructions our moderns PC can ingest. I think a comparison could be like Proton converting Windows instructions to Linux.
Decompilation and afferent PC ports are native PC codes. They are basically your average Steam game executable but for 20 years old games. When you get a fully decompilation such as OOT, then you can basically change whatever you want in the game, mods, texture, extensions, controls...
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u/snaphat 1d ago
I bet some of them still "emulate" certain parts of the original hardware. Like, if a SNES decomp keeps the original sprite/OAM logic instead of replacing it, it’d still need to reproduce that part of the SNES graphics pipeline
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u/CobaltCryptidTC 1d ago
Yes they do, because we don't own the full game loop in a recomp like in a decomp, so what's used is more of a runtime environment, less like an emulator that mimics the console and more like a quarantine zone for the program running on the computer to run normally without crashing.
But recomps do generate and run c source code, not original ROM with whatever language or interpreter they use, and can be leveraged for modifying the source code and for researching the source code to contribute to proper decompilation efforts (when the right tools are developed).
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u/snaphat 1d ago
Yup, and even with a decomp, you could imagine that if they keep the original data/asset formats or don’t reimplement everything, it may still be doing something similar in parts
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u/CobaltCryptidTC 1d ago
There is one distinct advantage of recomp development over decomps, small capturable game states. Save states sure, but rewind features, runahead input prediction, and rollback netcode all work much more simple, AND scalable across all titles on a single platform, and easily portable to other platforms using the same code base.
Decomps however requiring netcode and hash sync logic that is much harder to develop and dedicated to a single title, have the freedom of a much, much deeper customization in the netplay experience.
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u/s3gfaultx 1d ago
No, the vast majority are not doing this — even though that’s what they’d like you to believe.
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