AI-assisted development is bringing old games to platforms we'd never have thought possible. That's exciting, but the growing flood of unfinished ports is beginning to raise an uncomfortable question: how many of these games are actually worth playing?
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 only had a partial backup of the original assembly. It turned out it was slightly out of date compared to the shipped binary which is archived on various scene servers. The target for the agent was for the build to be byte identical with the scene archive which did necessitate a few macros to coerce GNU as to do what DevPac would do.
The additions the agent identified vaguely tickled my memory of things I had fixed but this was something I originally wrote when I was a teenager in the 90s 😅
ah,ok, i followed most of that and it makes sense.
Thanks for the explanation