Retro Gaming Has a Port-Slop Problem
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29 replies
I read "port slop" and said "yeah, it's called UDP, but that's not new, why is there an article about it? click...oh."
/facepalm
I need to stop browsing before I've had caffeine.
I hope you still enjoyed the read, even if it ended up being completely different to what your pre-caffeine brain saw!!!
I saw a video about a vibecoded ratchet and clank port. It BARELY managed to get over 100 fps and dropped to 60 when near water on a 3070.
A game from 2001 should not run that badly on modern hardware, even with some visual enhancements.
All of F(L)OSS has a slop problem right now.
Everything has a slop problem right now.
I can't even take part in any pro/contra AI-assisted coding (see, I'm trying to be polite) discussions because whenever I admit that the other person has a point, I remember AI's political, social and environmental impact, and i'm back to nope. And I can't separate local models from all that, not completely. Maybe in 10 years when US corporate fascism is quenched for good.
I have executive disfunction (in other words, willpower always at critical low), I can't afford complacency to use these tools. I might get something done once or twice and then start erring too much.
It's abstractly fascinating to have a computer system that generates complex working code.
The incessant oversupply of vibe-coded decomps/recomps/ports comes from the same sense of entitlement as people going around emulator communities asking for free games.
Those people finally found someone who wouldn't say "no," and that someone was Claude. They're the "give me something" or "make me something" crowd, and they never had high standards or shame in the first place.
I can accept a plagiarism machine that is exaberatting multiple international crises, but I draw the line at too many posts on a subreddit!
like c'mon, i'm also frustrated at what's going on in retro dev communities, but that's small potatoes compared to just about everything else concerning LLMs
I agree but the silver lining here is that more geeks finally see what artists, writers and musicians had been complaining about for years. It took sucking the soul out of gaming and games preservation to finally convince a specific subset of the nerddom that, no, AI actually fucking sucks.
People like to hate on everything AI, but where is the problem here? You are getting ports of games. Which is awesome. The project might be abandoned by the dev sometime in the future, but that is also happening with every other hobby project out there. And those ports are also not taking that many tokens to produce, so even the energy consumption argument is not really working here. Someone going on a ski trip will produce much, much more CO2 than someone creating a port from home.
One of the questions the author asks is exactly that, are you really getting ports of games?
The author doesn't have an answer, but it is a question that requires further investigation.
If instead of AI we had a magical machine that gave you a bike. That's great! You can do all sorts of things with your bike. So you hop on down to the movie theater, but the wheels fall off half way. You can't fix the bike, so you walk home and miss the movie.
Now you're right that any hobby project might get abandoned. But there were also generally only a few hobby projects. They had different reputations and track records.
Back to our bike example. Now we have hundreds of thousands of different bikes being printed from our magical machine. How do we pick the right one? What if all the bikes fail? What if there are a few that are good? How do we find the good ones?
The answer here might just be waiting to see how this all shakes out. Everyone has an oven at home, and everyone can make cookies. It's great that everyone can do that. But not everyone can be a baker. Or I'm wrong. Maybe with AI everyone can be a baker. That is one of the arguments.
I would rather read a human-translated book, than a machine-translated one
Yeah and that is important: You might prefere that. But there are also people who do not speak or read English or other foreign languages and whose mother tongue is kind of obscure with not that many native speakers. For them this book they want to read is not available in a human-translated version. Machine translation gives them the ability to access the book. Nothing to complain about here.
In this case: There seem to be not that many people around with the skills and the interest to do those ports manually. So the deal here is "AI version" vs. "Nothing". You are free to chose "nothing", but I really do not understand why you would complain here.
It's not like there's nobody around to decompile and subsequently port games. Up until a short while ago there was a community of decompilers that ultimately shut down because there were too many people forking ongoing projects just to shit out a slop port of the things they were working on. It's not as simple as "AI porting games to obscure platforms", it's also a lot of "AI taking existing work, slopping it to the finish line and then flooding the market". The market is flooded with machine translations of the same book.
Check out https://decomp.dev/
Machine translation gives them access to the book; does that mean we should create dozens of machine translations of every book out there, for every possible language?
That's vastly underselling the importance of actual translation.
All pro-llm arguments are prefaced with:
"If we ignore the massive environmental, ethical and moral issues with how they came about and are continuing to be served/developed then...."
The cost of LLM's as a whole is a pretty reliable platform upon which to complain.
It's not always useful, but it is always applicable.
How many of the games were worth playing on the original platform?
This is a form of preservation. Let people enjoy things.
Storing a childs' tracing of the mona lisa in a vault is a form of preservation, doesn't make it useful outside of very specific contexts.
That's hyperbole of course, but slop conversions are a facsimile of greatly varying quality.
The problem isn’t the good ports, it’s the broken vibe coded ports that are a worse experience than an emulator.
Most of them end up using a hacked up emulator in their backend. So they push out the original reverse engineers who made them even possible.
The effort it took to port a game used to guarantee that any game someone took the time and care to port would be a great game. That filter's gone now, but even bad games should be of interest to historians.
ET has a great historical value. OK, at least a funny story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_%28video_game%29
ET: Exactly how Bad Was It? An Analysis.
Some of the ports we're seeing in the retro handheld community lately have been great, and I love seeing developers push these little devices beyond what they were ever intended to do. But I've definitely noticed what feels like a growing amount of 'port-slop', with new projects appearing seemingly every few hours, many of them feeling more like quick experiments than anything particularly worthwhile.
I'm not against the experimentation at all, but I do wonder if we're reaching a point where quantity is starting to overshadow quality. Anyway, I put together a short opinion piece about it, just my own thoughts on something I've been noticing lately, especially here with my favorite old system: the PSP.
G*mers are ok with AI if it allows piracy.
There’s so many established emulators on PC that I don’t understand the issue. If you wanna actually play it, why not play it on the intended console it released for?
Are there not established repos for PSP gaming? I don’t really know how you’re supposed to get new psp games unless you’re burning them to those tiny discs yourself.
Is it difficult to avoid these quick demos / proof of concept ports? I have no experience (or desire) to go into the physical realm of retro gaming, emulators are good enough for me.
They totally miss retro appeal and hobbies.
I did give the rea plugin a spin yesterday to restore the source for something I made in the 90s where I only had a partial backup of an old version of the code. It was able to get to a byte identical artefact but built with GNU as and all the artefacts split out into pngs.
It took a few hours for something that would have taken me days if I'd be actually been inclined to spend the time. I can totally see the appeal of offloading a boring and laborious task to an LLM agent that will just chug through the stages.
But what is the purpose of these decomps once done. Are they intending to do something interesting with the result? Study, tweak, remix?
genuine question, how did you know it was byte identical if you only had a partial backup ?
I played AAI2 (the Capcom localization) on DS and the translation was vibecoded. Thousands of lines of Python (to do what?) just to replace some dialog. It kept crashing through different episodes but I’d reload my (last) save and play through the last half hour again, to then battle through a few crashes and then eventually proceed. I’m not sure I would bother with vibecoded stuff anymore.