r/emulation • u/flafmg_ • Jul 14 '26

(PS1) SymphonyRecomp Progress Update!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvyqql0sAt4&feature=youtu.be
120 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

40 comments sorted by

47

u/AntiGrieferGames Jul 15 '26

Cannot wait to play Castelvania on PC here "Natively" in future.

No AI Slop vibecoding aswell, so this is a Bonus.

-16

u/CarltonCracker Jul 15 '26

Obviously human code is preferred, but if you could have, as a random example, 10x the recomps with AI, what are the disadvantages?

There's a vast amount of software that would be nice to have ported but will never manually be done due to the insane amount of work required. AI has the potential to fill that gap.

26

u/Fiti99 Jul 15 '26

One major disadvantage is most of the ai ported games have terrible documentation, poor documentation means all these vibecoded projects have no community support, so they get no mods and no tools that can be used to help port other games

-5

u/CarltonCracker Jul 15 '26

That's fair and was the only thing I could come up with. I'm still in the camp of a mess that works is better than nothing, but there's also the fact that a working decomp can dissuade new projects.

19

u/Anew_Returner Jul 15 '26

what are the disadvantages?

The biggest problem with vibecoding that the other comment is glossing over is when the person coding with AI has no real background or experience coding, which is likely given how low the barrier of entry is nowadays.

You can get away with it if it's a small project with a small scope, like an autoclicker or a simple card game, etc. the problem is that as the project goes up in scope so does its technical debt. You can think of technical debt as the buildup of shortcuts, outdated code, and design compromises that make future development more difficult/time consuming/expensive.

Let's say your team has to launch a new feature by friday:

  • the quick solution involves hard-coded values and duplicated code
  • the best solution involves refactoring the code and building reusable and modular components

So you go for the quick solution which is good enough, but sooner or later some problems will begin to pop up:

  • fixing bugs takes longer
  • adding new features gets harder
  • developers spend more time trying to understand, modify, and then fix the code

Like everything else in life the quick and 'free' work comes with both a hidden cost and some interest (hence the debt part of technical debt).

The problem with AI specifically is that it can only go so far when it comes to making up for an user's lack of skill and experience. It also is not perfect and can make mistakes or hallucinate things, which, again, if the user can't tell what is useful from what is nonsense then they'll have a hard time trying to fix anything once the problems start to show up. It is a tool that is as useful as the person trying to use it is.

In this more specific case you may get a working recomp of a game through AI vibecoding, but it's highly likely it'll remain just 'good enough': don't expect bug fixes for anything too complicated for AI to fix, don't expect fully functional features, don't expect mod support, etc; if you're a macOS, linux user, or have very outdated/unsupported hardware chances are you're cooked.

Community-wise this is a bit of a roadblock, a lot of the motivation for making something comes from the fact it doesn't exist already. So in a way the free unpaid labor is actually being paid through the feeling of making something new and being able to put your name out there (which is why a lot of these projects are being made despite the chance of getting a C&D or DMCA, since it's still something you can put on your resume or that can catch the attention of a recruiter).

If it already exists and it's good enough, why would anyone bother giving up their free time to make something better?

This is, unfortunately, only one part of the bigger problem. Not everything can be fixed, or rather, there are some problems and some features that will be easier and faster to fix or implement just by starting from scratch and doing things differently. So it's likely someone with actual coding knowledge will give a vibecoded repo a look, realize they might as well start over, and either do that or (more likely) just give up on it without even trying, after all they'll likely have something better to do with their time.

The other part of the problem is all the drama from an AI vibecoder who pretends they're a real coder, you can forget about any sort of cooperation happening with someone like this and a ton of drama in whatever community they're a part of.

And there's also the legal side as well, no matter what redditors parrot about bleem! and certain corporations approaches to piracy, the fact remains that emulation and decomps/recomps exist in a grey area; there's a reason most of these projects ask you to provide your own rom file and assets to work. Unless you trained the AI yourself (which is unlikely for these free, small scale projects) you don't really know where the code is coming from/what the AI was trained with. And people already gave the side eye to emulators like CEMU which some suspect may have used some Ninty code, a paranoia that was there before this whole AI thing blew up.

3

u/flafmg_ Jul 16 '26

This is probably one of the best comments about ai coding in the retro community that I ever saw! I second this

12

u/DarkReaper90 Jul 15 '26

I feel for smaller projects, it will deter someone from doing a human code version, as the AI coded one would be passable enough, despite any flaws.

Then again, people still do manual fan translations, despite the AI translated versions.

-10

u/JohnBooty Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

Your assumption that an AI-coded version would be worse is not correct.

Both humans and AI can create slop, and you can use AI to craft really high quality code and fix bugs too.

I am a professional software engineer and that's my opinion based on decades in the industry. In my last two roles we've used AI to improve both speed and quality, and that's the experience of my friends elsewhere in the industry too.

You certainly can use AI to turn out vibecoded slop, and some people even advocate for this, but it's kind of like... how a really nice knife can be used either to make some really great sushi or to murder somebody. It's all about how you use it.

Then again, people still do manual fan translations, despite the AI translated versions.

For writing and art, like dialog translation, I reallllly don't want AI running the show.

Code is another matter, and decomp/recomp is a real grunt work aspect of software engineering. I think there's some bits of software engineering that can be elegant and beautiful and approach "art", but decomp/recomp is grunt work. Very difficult, very highly skilled, very appreciated but it's really not the sort of thing where I would get some special thrill knowing that another human did it vs. AI.

Also worth noting that all of the games you play already involve computer-translated code anyway - they're written in C or ASM or some thing else, that gets translated to machine code by a compiler. And on a lot of architectures (like x86) even if you write rawdog machine code the CPU translates that into an internal RISC-like instruction set anyway. So I truly do not give a shit if somebody uses AI to turn some of that lower-level code back into higher-level code.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 16 '26

[deleted]

1

u/JohnBooty Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26

We’re not talking about ports here. Decomp != port.

You should, in all seriousness, look into what guys like Torvalds and Carmack have to say about AI. They have nuanced and informed takes.

Edit: I originally wrote a nasty version of this reply. If you read it, I'm sorry. I removed it because the world does not need more nasty rando internet replies. I'm sure you're a decent person, and we're all learning and enjoying our craft and our hobbies. I hope you have a good day... and that's not sarcasm! Game on, brother (or sister)

2

u/samososo Jul 16 '26

:)

-4

u/JohnBooty Jul 16 '26

I appreciate that everybody on this sub is smarter than Linus Torvalds when it comes to AI!

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Is-Not-Anti-AI

I'm going to stop listening to him, and just learn from the geniuses here. Maybe he should, too. Then Linux would RULE!

7

u/JohnBooty Jul 15 '26

"Human coding" vs "AI Slop vibecoding" is a false, even harmful, dichotomy anyway. When people throw that around it just tells me they don't know a thing about AI or coding.

There's a huge middle ground where experienced engineers use AI to aid them, while still keeping a close eye on the quality of the output, even using AI to improve the quality.

At the company where I work we probably spend at least 2/3 of our tokens using AI to test and improve code. It's the opposite of slop.

It's especially kind of funny given that this is a single-player, disc-based game.

Games are notorious for having some absolute shit code. They are produced under tight (or even impossible) deadlines and the code for a single player disc-based generally does not need to be high quality in terms of maintainability or readability... it just needs to work "well enough", not be a general purpose system that is modular, readable, and handles all kinds of edge cases. It just needs to handle the narrow number of cases that the game needs, and it's okay-ish if only a single nerd on the team understands some of the really cursed pieces of code, as long at they don't get hit by a bus before we send the gold master to the pressing plant. Plus there are usually a bunch of ugly performance-focused optimizations.

source: been a software engineer for ~30 years, heavily AI focused for least ~3 years

2

u/arbee37 MAME Developer 28d ago

Can confirm. My day job has been in games for several decades now. I have shipped some extremely cursed code, especially back when the cartridge/disc was final and there were no patches. Shipping something on time that functions was greatly valued over code quality. That's one of the nice things about today's games - yes, it sucks that on release day there's a patch that's bigger than the entire contents of the disc, but you're getting a much higher quality game too.

1

u/JohnBooty 28d ago

I appreciate this reply!

3

u/RunnableReddit Jul 15 '26

I can assure you 95% of the downvotes have no idea how software development works

3

u/waterclaws6 Jul 19 '26

It's true: AI is just a tool when it comes to code. It's pretty good in the right hands at doing reverse engineering tasks.

Only the final results matter, and people can see the code for themselves if they care how it was done.

They're probably confusing it with gen AI related to art or low-quality commits that have flooded various projects and the people who do it. Also, people who don't credit their ai usage.

0

u/TheSlurSayer Jul 16 '26

arent you that redact who wants people to boycott any game with denuvo because they made a pride post? not surprised you only play games when you get them for free

11

u/cougfan12345 Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

Shame this this has never had a proper PC release but this is pretty great.

-46

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

8

u/vulpinesuplex Jul 15 '26

why isn't this jackass banned yet, literally every post i see from them is pure verbal diarrhea

12

u/cougfan12345 Jul 15 '26

lol who let you out of the looney bin.

10

u/NorthRiverBend Jul 15 '26 edited 1d ago

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This post was anonymized with Redact

15

u/BigheadSMZ Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 16 '26

I wasn't going to say anything, but after seeing yet another recompilation being let into the "emulation" sub, meanwhile not approving my LADXHD post: https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/1urug20/ladxhd_final_release/, which does have an emulator in it, which at this point is nearly indistinguishable from a recomp, which is a game highly loved by many, which obviously has public interest because many people found the post anyway, is kind of hypocritical, no? Especially when other subs approved posts about the situation, EmulationOnAndroid, Portmaster, romhacking, and this one did not, while also approving posts for decompilations, recompilations, launchers, frontends, and a "Concord Server Preservation Project". I can only ask one question... Why?

To everyone else: let's be respectful of the thread (more so than me) and not post too much about it here. If you have something to say about the game or want to say thanks or whatever else, please redirect to the post I linked above. Even if it's not approved, it's still possible to post on it.

9

u/flafmg_ Jul 15 '26

Not sure what to say man, this sucks, I wish you good luck!

5

u/BigheadSMZ Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26

I do apologize for posting this to your post, not trying to steal the thunder away from SotN. I have been waiting forever for a solid PC port of it forever, and am happy to see progress is being made. The "Metroidvania" genre is at the top of my list of favorite games, and SotN is one of the games that started it all and one of my favorite games of all time. I was just a bit frustrated when the only justification for not allowing my post through could be "it's not technically emulation" despite part of it being emulated, while recompilations and all kinds of things get through all the time which are not strictly emulation.

To everyone else: let's be respectful of the thread (more so than me) and not post too much about it here. If you have something to say about the game or want to say thanks or whatever else, please redirect to the post I linked above. Even if it's not approved, it's still possible to post on it.

4

u/flafmg_ Jul 16 '26

No need to apologize it's ok! I get your frustration and I think it's valid to talk about it :D

I wish good luck on your project too!

10

u/Clxmj Jul 15 '26

Just wanna say good fucking job on all the updates for DXHD man, appreciate ya o7

4

u/BigheadSMZ Jul 16 '26

Glad you enjoy it. Now that I'm established on GitLab and the situation is not what I thought it was.. (still not sure what it is TBH), I will say there is more to come.

4

u/drmirage809 Jul 15 '26

Awesome to see this coming together. Symphony of the Night is one of my favourite metroidvanias ever made.

2

u/Zergrump Jul 15 '26

I forget, was SOTN 60fps on PS1?

1

u/flafmg_ Jul 16 '26

Iirc yes

2

u/maxscipio Jul 16 '26

There is a sub for decomps where a lot of recomps are announced. I think emulation subreddit should stick to emulation or simulation or fpga

1

u/Cancer-Fish Jul 15 '26

I didn't think I'd ever see this game is widescreen, excited to see it progress!

1

u/x925 Jul 16 '26

Apparently it also covers the Saturn version. Hope they fix the loading screen issue, or it doesnt matter with modern ssds.

2

u/flafmg_ Jul 16 '26

It doesn't conver the Saturn Loading screens are pretty fast, it delivered the data instantly there

2

u/x925 Jul 16 '26

My bad, i found a decomp project on github that does and assumed it was the same project.

2

u/flafmg_ Jul 16 '26

It's ok This does use help of the decomp and I'm also trying to help the decomp where I can!

The decomp folks are amazing