God of War on PSP, recompiled to WebAssembly and running in the browser (github.com)

Yeah, maybe that's the difference. I was trying to probe the semantics, not so much a "gotcha". Parts of this stack are quite bespoke for this one game.

You are no longer emulating the CPU but the rest of the system you are absolutely emulating. So I think it's very close to traditional emulation.

We called emulation back in the last century and it hasn't changed.

The original hardware doesn't exist on the target system.

Taking a famous example out of many others I could have reached for,

> Emulation had been around for a while as a concept, but FX!32 went one stage further. It analyzed the way programs worked and, after the program ran, used binary translation to produce dynamic-link library (DLL) files of native Alpha code that the application could execute the next time it ran. This way even in the early 1.0 release, the FX!32 achieved speeds for Win32 x86 applications that ran 40-50% as fast as native x86 code, with a 70% speed projected as likely with improved optimization. Version 1.5, released by Compaq in 1999, added support for the Alpha 21264 (EV6) CPU, including emulation of Intel's MMX instruction set.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32

That made me chuckle

That 32MB ram is impressive.

> Isn't this technically illegal to reverse engineer and share?

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.

It’s legal to have a ROM of a game you actually owned and ripped. This is simply allowing the ROM that you actually own to be played on a different console, the web.

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.

They are playable on current platforms. Will they be playable on platforms ten, twenty years from now? Some games and systems might slip through the cracks. It's a never ending process

In theory it would be great if we had a bunch of experts reverse engineering these things and making better decomps but in reality most people find the work miserably boring, no one's gonna pay you for it, and it almost never happens.

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.

> AI is kinda motivating everyone to do everything on their own instead of gathering up and contributing to one (or two) projects, which is something I'm worried about in Open Source software as a whole.

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.

> AI is kinda motivating everyone to do everything on their own instead of gathering up and contributing to one (or two) projects, which is something I'm worried about in Open Source software as a whole.

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.

> AI is kinda motivating everyone to do everything on their own instead of gathering up and contributing to one (or two) projects, which is something I'm worried about in Open Source software as a whole.

Ah, yes. Thank goodness the FOSS community never generated many different tools for the one purpose before, right? \s

Original source assets isn't really feasible imho, could be custom toolchains and specific compiler versions that things were built with (and breaking on others), sure IF you manage to collect everything to rebuilding (probably needing some kind of VM image to preserve for rebuilding), what's the difference from just making sure the rebuild binaries is capable of running with the prepared assets?

(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).

To add some context, in this case, PPSSPP exists and is certainly no less accurate, and you can get a psp and games for a reasonable amount of money.

It's like not this represents something like a cycle accurate Cave CV1K board, which are very expensive and imperfectly emulated.

Yup, I think it's playgta5.com but you will probably have to look for mirrors or on wayback

Or they can just save their time/money, use a human-crafted emulator, and not deal with their game crashing constantly and all manner of stupid bugs. It is genuinely insane that you believe your average joe video game player would rather spend $100~200 on a subscription, prompt for an emulator, then prompt it over and over to fix showstopping bugs rather than playing something that works for free, and yet that is what you are supposing when you suggest they "don't care" about the "elegance" of the emulator.

You would at least have a point if people were slopping out emulators for things that didn't exist but, surprise surprise, we still don't have a Switch 2 emulator. Almost like this entire notion is a complete fraud and all it can do is regurgitate existing code poorly.

> There's kind of a bitter lesson variant with AI coding

Yeah, it feels like we've entered the era of disposable software.

Also I do like how everyone in this thread seemed to immediately and unanimously clock this project as slop.