Kaze Emanuar has done so much great work in optimizing Mario 64's engine over the years (check out his YouTube videos, they're fantastic) but guys like him are such an anomaly, I'm fine if robots are breathing new life into retro games and empowering consumers to be able to play these games in more ways instead of paying the IP holder every ~7 years to play a (likely lazy) port of a game they already own on a new system.
I think the people who are relying upon AI the most, might not contribute to OSS anyway. I can certainly say I am in that boat because I do not have software development skills and I do not want to learn how to do it. However I am very much using AI to write alternatives to some software I use like Kodi, because I can have something bespoke to my needs and perform "better" in terms of metrics that I care about, which may not align with metrics the contributors care about.
Have you tried making a skin for Kodi? Awful experience, poorly documented, and something only a handful of the community can do. They tend to perform poorly because of an over dependence on python plugins, have many foot guns, and can feel sluggish and unresponsive. But I can say make me a media player that looks like Netfix and pulls trending from trakt, and in one shot have something working on Android TV that performs far better for me.
There maybe arguments that AI couldn't have done that without OSS like Kodi to train on but I dont think thats accurate.
A huge reason for that is the knee-jerk reaction of some communities (gaming especially, for some weird reason) at AI usage. So people build for an audience of one (maybe sharing with their closed friend group), and move on with their lives.
In the US at least, the gaming industry as a mismanaged trash fire. Workers are underpaid and unemployment is high. Executives are regularly shuttering studios responsible for highly acclaimed games and touting AI as the solution to all the problems. Given this framing, the way to support the studio making your favorite games is to make it clear that you don't want to replace everyone with AI. In fact, no AI use at all. It's one extreme in response to another.
From a hobbiest perspective, it's not great either. Translation projects that have been in the works for years have gotten beat to the punch by (extremely shoddy) AI projects helmed by people who don't speak the language they're supposedly translating. In one recent case, a half-completed human translation was stolen, finished with AI, and presented as an original work. Decompilation projects have had similar issues; AI use isn't disclosed until people start discovering that the result isn't accurate to the original.
Ah, yes. Thank goodness the FOSS community never generated many different tools for the one purpose before, right? \s
It's not preservation though, it's basically remastering. We'll still need to preserve as much data from the original games (including, if possible, original source assets and source code). And yeah, I have no qualms about the legality of it all, a proper legal definition of the concept of abandonware would be nice though.
(I'm not looking forward to people automatically AI-upressing of old games, I'd just prefer them to render-upscale and be faithful to the resolutions the games were built for back in the day).
Software engineers are devoid of copyright and trademark laws and want everything to $0 and will become the new starving artists without knowing it.
Don't be surprised to see far more mass layoffs in the games industry.
Maybe putting some pressure on making games that are actually new and different isn't a bad thing.
I don't think you do. But please continue.
> Maybe putting some pressure on making games that are actually new and different isn't a bad thing.
That's not the point. It is what comes afterwards and software engineers cannot have it both ways.
This will make game studios move to world models with the real game being never released, but only simulated and streamed to you.
So let's see what happens.
Also, video game programmers are already starving artists comparatively. To many people want to make video games to exploitation is rife. Only publishers benefit from your rhetoric. At least artists get royalties
So this is making it better for them?
> To many people want to make video games to exploitation is rife. Only publishers benefit from your rhetoric. At least artists get royalties
Now both the publisher and the artist (we can now include game developer) will get $0 and cannot have it both ways.
We can accept mass decompilation of games and existing ones being sold today and offered for free, and also accept significant layoffs and the collapse of an entire industry.
The industry needs a shake up.
People have an idealistic view of the world, "democratizing" the software industry, but people are not going to get fed. And the remaining will move onto other industries, the supply of labor will create a kind of involution you see in China, where labor chase after a smaller supply of money.
A 2 trillion dollar industry destroyed, because we want to run games on the cloud, or something
In this case, the user is distributing the ROM which is illegal. But the method to make it work on the web is fair use. The legal way to do it would be a website where users “insert” their own rom and the website simply lets you play that ROM on the web.
This seems to be a trend. A person decompiled Halo and put it online[0]. It also requires you to bring the ROM. Exciting times.
Doesn't really matter that they're not distributing the assets.
How? The ISOs/ROMs were already preserved and playable on emulators on newer platforms
It's like not this represents something like a cycle accurate Cave CV1K board, which are very expensive and imperfectly emulated.
and cracking up the cracks bubble. Denuvo, a very popular and until recently quite successful DRM solution was cracked repeatedly over the past year or so via AI which caused the company to try to sue this anonymous cracker.
Port is about 80% done, but completely mechanical with AI and an oracle (the Dolphin emulator)