Retro Gaming Has a Port-Slop Problem

found ape escape on the quiver launcher; its definitely janky compared to an emulator, but still interesting to see if i can have some fun moving code around

I’ve been into the retro scene for decades (Oric-1/Atmos!) and also am quite a synthesizer nerd, so I’ve been kind of keeping my eye on how AI slop is effecting these subjects with kind of a keen interest .. and let me tell you, things are getting wild and woolly, indeed.

There are folks who are taking 40–year old games developed for their favourite systems, packaging them into an emulator with AI slop, and bringing them into the app stores for a new generation to enjoy - and yes, this is great. Nothing quite like seeing Jet Set Willy on an Android phone, attribute clash galore… or seeing folks take the firmware for their expensive German DSP synths and running them, directly and simply, in a VST plugin built for the purpose.

This is all great and fun.

But it is getting exhausting for users - who rapidly experience a kind of personal fatigue of the infinite novelty.

The abundance can feel exhausting.

For example, in the past few months, there has been a revolution going on in the digital-synth scene in the form of the M-VAVE FM1 synth - a cheap ($60) little digital FM synth clone from a relatively unknown Chinese manufacturer, which had its firmware reversed and is now a veritable hive of new, user-generated firmwares.

Every day I log on to the firmware distribution hubs (which, themselves, are getting forked and AI slopped into oblivion) and see brand new firmwares doing wild and woolly things - and to be frank, its getting really exhausting trying them all. Almost to the point I might just give up synthesis as a first-class activity and just have AI write my tracks for me.

One solution to this dilemma is to just buy another FM1 dedicated to each firmware that might be of interest, of course its cheap so why not - but what an interesting phenomenon!

I have two predictions out of this:

1. Hardware will be more important than it ever was. The ones making money in the age of AI slop are those building hosts for it.

2. Traditional Software is irrelevant now - the Prompt Is God. Instead of downloading the firmware blobs and installing them, I’m at the point where I’d rather just have access to the original prompt which generated the firmware, run it through my own local LLM (running on my own private AI slop host), and get my own special firmware out of it. After all, the developer/user line which used to exist, has simply been obliterated. Every rock star can write their own firmware now.

Another thing I’ve noticed, which I’m less inclined to think is positive, is that folks are not playing with each other any more - forming community, contributing PR’s back to each other, improving the beach-head projects which got things started - but instead, going on this kind of insane mega-fork approach of taking something, running it through an LLM, slapping their brand on it, and disassociating themselves from the originator. Perhaps syndication is the solution, maybe the era of AI Guilds™ is on the horizon - but right now, it seems like an Ayn Rand’ian clusterfuck of epic proportions is going to kill the software industry.

I guess this is a form of #2, but I really don’t see much hope for the software industry any more. It was like all the doom and gloom that traditional commercial software folks were grumbling about when F/OSS started to gain traction, on steroids. On one hand, Windows didn’t die the spectacular death that folks in various F/OSS camps predicted/desired - but on the other hand, maybe the sad state of Windows today is a result of its designers kind of getting apathetic about things in the face of the major advances that Linux and co., have made since it was just a twinkle in Linus’ eye… The AI era just seems to be an extension of the F/OSS ideology that information wants to be free. And oh, how information is free now!

In any case, another thing that I think is going to happen as a result of all of this, is that older, retro hardware, is becoming way more valuable.

Heck, folks are doing insane things with old hardware now - and there is for sure a hardware revival going on in the retro- scene. Old platforms are being dug out of history and being made to do new, astonishing things - at an incredible rate. Want a multi-tasking, window-based OS for a machine that simply wasn’t designed for it - easy, LLM. Fetch! That alternative-timeline, you know the one where SGI made the tiBook and rose to the 21st Century position that Apple now occupy - why not just throw an LLM at the problem and produce that very SGiBook design?! Oh, you want your C64 to function as the interface to your DGX Spark9000? Sure, why not, LOL…

Tl;dr - Everything old is new again, and nobody is paying for any of it. Everyone wants to be a rockstar, nobody wants to be a roadie or light guy - including the audience, who are also now rock stars... so I’m just gonna ‘make guitars’ now, I think ..