Reverse engineer of PC-98 Touhou games retires
rec98.nmlgc.net
rec98.nmlgc.net
There's one part where he goes over how he felt scorned because a remake of a different Touhou game that he wasn't decompiling came out, and people in the Western Touhou community worked on it, but nobody told him about it prior to its public announcement. There's a different part where he's complaining about how some FreeBSD user submitted a PR to fix his Seihou port to build on FreeBSD since the niche build system he uses doesn't have good support for *BSD. He spends a paragraph ranting about how he would never support FreeBSD, then the next paragraph is about how he would have loved to get it working on FreeBSD if the person went about asking for the feature the "correct way", then he says he'd rather quit programming entirely than support FreeBSD on desktop.
I think he saw the project as an obligation that he couldn't get rid of rather than something he did out of passion. There's a section at the end where he goes over how his life will improve now that he doesn't have to work on the project. Notably, throughout the post he calls out by name various people in the Touhou community that he doesn't like, but he never calls out any of the vibecoders. I hope that he can now spend his time doing something that he actually enjoys.
Bellyaching about a benign-if-mildly-presumptuous BSD request by making a point to complain abou C++ Modules support, of all things, doesn't demonstrate a less-narrow perspective on the part of the maintainer.
Also, comparing AI skepticism to GamerGate really reveals a mind forever locked in decades-old grievances.
Personally I will keep doing things I love. For instance, I didn't stop studying and playing chess when it was obvious that my career would be in engineering and I would never be a pro, or when computers became clearly much stronger than humans, which happened while I was already playing chess somewhat seriously.
I intend to keep rawdogging my stuff, especially the stuff I do for myself. It's more of a personal drama when it simply rug-pulls somebody's livelihood all of a sudden. This is not a new phenomenon, but it's happening at a remarkable rate right now. I wonder if this time around there will be enough people that they won't be dismissed as losers against progress.
Incidentally I've also been writing Z80 and x86 Asm for roughly as long, and saw the complaints about "compiler slop" (we didn't call it that) at the time. I could probably still beat one if I wanted to, but clearly "close enough is good enough" and there's so much useful software which would not have been created if compilers couldn't exist and everyone still had to write machine code using a hexpad.
Edit: got any counterarguments? It's not like I won't get a boost from using LLMs either.
You can outcode the compiler but ofc that's not a way to go with tens of thousands of instructions and so on. LLMs are just much faster in writing code, just like compilers are much faster at assembling all the functions.
And yes, in a roundabout way, this is Stallman's dream fulfilled to the tip with his printer driver ;)
Many of these people wanted a project to run and gatekeep the people "not worthy enough" to hack on it or to use it. That's changing now, everyone can prompt together a bunch of crap. Fun fact I think I've got like... probably more than ten people into C++ programming simply by helping them prompt AI on how to get started, then they've picked up actual skills along the way. Note, they weren't any kind of programmers before because code is scary, but with a much lower barrier of entry, many more people can do stuff. It's amazing to see.
In the modding community I'm most active in, counter-strike, I have seen someone come in and literally ask if there was money in it and if not what game would be best to make mods for to make some money.
Their lazy cloud-chasing is normal but my high-effort clout-chasing is lame and makes me a fraud?
We're social animals. We like doing cool stuff and getting social status for it. We like breaking new ground. We like going where nobody has gone before.
Is it irrational and emotional? Maybe. Being human is being irrational and emotional sometimes. It's fine.
I can see there are still lot to do in the generated code, but I also feel something went away, Now I start working on it, and realize I'm reminded I just have to dictate what I need and it will be generated
It's like I have to pay for the best gun in the game to win, otherwise I can't just progress. Then why am I playing the game for?
Are you implying that it does not?
If dynamite fishing were deployed on the scale the AI infra is, with VC capital and government backing, we'd run out of fish in a week.
The concept doesn't affect much, deployment of it affects a lot.
The writer equally hates ZUN, vibe coders, and AI haters (Bluesky crowd)
And if not then the TLDR is basically: ZUN made the games for japanese people. Western people wanted to play the games. Reverse engineers came along but they relied on community funding. Now the community is taken apart by vibe coders but the same community is not willing to fund manual labor. Also the community is still paying for ZUN which enforces the status quo of not bothering with english releases.
A remake of Touhou 6 had an official english release just a few weeks ago. I bought it. It's fantastic.
> I have no interest in doing anything else in this scene, and especially no interest in working on closed-source games for a media empire in a humble doujin trenchcoat.
wth is ... this anglosphere otakus assuming anime content creators to be high-double-to-mid-triple-digit millionaires only when they don't seem to be ones? I don't know how many digits are in the bank account for ZUN so there is a chance that he is a multiquadrillionaire, but it frankly looks like a twisted edge case of right makes might mindset rather than a logical argument.
Though, granted, I am aware that it gets quite stressful when a seller isn't able to take your money.
This was a huge hot take apparently and members of the community hated everyone who obtained (and played) the games legally. You'd get bullied relentlessly for it. And I don't mean "guys you gotta buy the games to support the artist" or any form of moralizing, just mentioning you purchased the games got you unreasonable amounts of anger. Even friends from Japan who bought extra stuff like the music CDs and stuff made them so angry that my friends got banned from the IRC channel and forums. I left after that because that was unsustainable, people were only there to discuss fanfics of the characters and porn.
I still like the games, but the community at large is disgusting and hate people who actually play the games. Triple so if they are purchased. This guy is the perfect representation of that attitude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_consumption
It gives the example of Hatsune Miku, who strictly speaking is a fictional character attributed to a sampled singing voice in a vocal synthesizer VST called Vocaloid 2. She was the product branding. There is now a huge industry of fans inventing stories about Hatsune Miku and rendering/drawing pictures of her and enjoying thoughts of her being their waifu. Whatever they've made up is now their headcanon.
I can totally understand Hatsune Miku fans asking you to get lost if you tell them you bought Vocaloid 2, it's cramping their vibe.
Is it the same with the menagerie of Touhou characters? Are there people enjoying thoughts of Marisa Kirisame who don't want to be reminded she's a character in a shoot'em'up?
As I said before [1] we are all Lee Sedol.
Even those, which take about 20min, are incredible useful, as you can add save state, level select, cheats and gamepad controls on top that most emulators would struggle with or at least make a hell of a lot more complicated.
> Now this garbage can be mass-produced and get the adoration of the AI hype crowd
Those games wouldn't exist without AI. Decompiles that ended in a fully playable state have been incredible rare before AI. Best you would get was often just an incomplete reverse engineering of the data formats involved.
> Decompiles that ended in a fully playable state have been incredible rare before AI.
Actual decompilations are still rare. I'm repeating myself here, but the vast majority of these, they're not doing much more than embedding an emulator. You have to understand that an emulator is sort of a JIT decompiler already. It's really not impressive, or an accomplishment of any kind, to put the emulator into the binary with the game. There are a few AI-accelerated ones that have some legitimacy to them but still involved months of human effort too, it is by no means as automated as the hypers would like you to believe.
Yes, but badly. Any old Amiga game that requires you to jump with Up or requires keyboard keys for certain functions becomes unplayable on a gamepad in an emulator. When you throw the game into the AI and do HLE emulation, you can fix it all with ease, and you can do it all context depend, e.g. a platformer level might need different controls from the spaceship levels or the menus. You can also add on-screen menus when needed.
For console games this isn't generally much of an issue, they controls map pretty well to modern gamepads and play well in emulation. But home computer games play absolutely terrible in emulation, as the controls are all over the place and each game has their own little quirks.
And when you’ve finally had enough, your announcement that you’ve had enough will get tone policed so nobody has to think about what you’re saying. This is how it goes.
It seems the author has some sort of link to Bluesky. God help them.