Thank you for calling out the port slop. Decompilations and reverse engineering projects used to be worthwhile and exciting and now it’s become an ocean of half baked Claude code projects with no contributors and no base to stand on.

I’m glad we got big ones like SM64 and OOT before the vibe coding craze, now I see a recompilation or port and it doesn’t even register now

My interest and excitement for recomps etc has almost disappeared now :(

I had noticed it a lot on the PSVita subreddit, and it bothered me. Sure the first time you see it, it might be interesting from a technical perspective, but aside from that what's the point? You learn nothing as a developer and you leave nothing meaningful to the community.

There's more questions to ask beyond "who is playing the recomps/decomps"

Regardless of AI, these questions pop up:

• What is the use case?
• Is it worth spending my time and energy as a developer (or from developer's perspective) doing this?
• Who is this for? (Same question as before, yes)

Even before the AI boom, I asked these questions. Some games are indeed an enigma (Sonic Unleashed is a perfect example), but a lot of others are just... there I guess.

Don't get me wrong, it's nice to get a better version on PC with keyboard and mouse support and better graphics and undefined aspect ratios, that's all fine. But you have to understand one thing and one really big thing - not all games need or even deserve this treatment. A lot of people are just fine with what an emulator offers already.

If you think that "oh all of those features are impossible or really hard to do without a recomp" - think again. I can tell you from first hand experience as a reverse engineer and developer that you can do a lot of those things without doing a decomp (and especially a recomp). All on the original hardware's limitations sometimes, too. It's provably quicker and easier to do (some of) those hacks on top of existing games rather than recompile it.

As for the "broken games in emulators but are fine in recomps" - those fixes and hacks should've been presented to the emulator project first because it can not only fix this one game, but sometimes fix others too.

Ports onto platforms like PSP or iOS sure are nice to have, but be honest - it's not the best way to play these games. It's not even a good way to play it portably a lot of the times either. A lot of the times, those same people have other means to play them too. I don't think most gamers even care about an hour or two of extra battery life playing the game because it's more power efficient than running the emulator.

The more and more you think about this, the more irrational it becomes to spend time and energy on doing these things.

And to a certain degree - it always was. It was always a "just because you can" type of deal. Some were doing it for clout (even before AI, yes, there are talented people who also are obnoxious doing it), some for the love of the game, etc.

Now - you just have a lot of people doing it for clout and opening up dono pages in ko-fi and patreon. To them, this isn't a hobby. It's a business venture. It's a job. And that is where the spirit of doing this kind of thing is undeniably and truly lost.

AI isn't the problem on its own

I can accept a plagiarism machine that is exaberatting multiple international crises, but I draw the line at too many posts on a subreddit!

like c'mon, i'm also frustrated at what's going on in retro dev communities, but that's small potatoes compared to just about everything else concerning LLMs

The incessant oversupply of vibe-coded decomps/recomps/ports comes from the same sense of entitlement as people going around emulator communities asking for free games.

Those people finally found someone who wouldn't say "no," and that someone was Claude. They're the "give me something" or "make me something" crowd, and they never had high standards or shame in the first place.

All of F(L)OSS has a slop problem right now.

Everything has a slop problem right now.

I can't even take part in any pro/contra AI-assisted coding (see, I'm trying to be polite) discussions because whenever I admit that the other person has a point, I remember AI's political, social and environmental impact, and i'm back to nope. And I can't separate local models from all that, not completely. Maybe in 10 years when US corporate fascism is quenched for good.

I read "port slop" and said "yeah, it's called UDP, but that's not new, why is there an article about it? click...oh."

/facepalm

I need to stop browsing before I've had caffeine.

Some of the ports we're seeing in the retro handheld community lately have been great, and I love seeing developers push these little devices beyond what they were ever intended to do. But I've definitely noticed what feels like a growing amount of 'port-slop', with new projects appearing seemingly every few hours, many of them feeling more like quick experiments than anything particularly worthwhile.

I'm not against the experimentation at all, but I do wonder if we're reaching a point where quantity is starting to overshadow quality. Anyway, I put together a short opinion piece about it, just my own thoughts on something I've been noticing lately, especially here with my favorite old system: the PSP.

There’s so many established emulators on PC that I don’t understand the issue. If you wanna actually play it, why not play it on the intended console it released for?

Are there not established repos for PSP gaming? I don’t really know how you’re supposed to get new psp games unless you’re burning them to those tiny discs yourself.

Is it difficult to avoid these quick demos / proof of concept ports? I have no experience (or desire) to go into the physical realm of retro gaming, emulators are good enough for me.

They totally miss retro appeal and hobbies.

How many of the games were worth playing on the original platform?

This is a form of preservation. Let people enjoy things.

I played AAI2 (the Capcom localization) on DS and the translation was vibecoded. Thousands of lines of Python (to do what?) just to replace some dialog. It kept crashing through different episodes but I’d reload my (last) save and play through the last half hour again, to then battle through a few crashes and then eventually proceed. I’m not sure I would bother with vibecoded stuff anymore.

G*mers are ok with AI if it allows piracy.

Thank you for writing and posting this. I'm not huge in the scene but have noticed a large amount of posts in this community claiming XYZ game from 30+ years ago has been emulated. Recently there was the post here from the guy that recreated "Z" (a game I admittedly had not heard of), and he responded to every comment in the thread, accept the one asking if AI was used to port it. Like, if you used AI, just say you did! I'm not vehemently against it in the right application and recreating an old game seems like a decent use case for it. But the fact that they shied away from the question says that not only was it made using AI, it was probably entirely made with AI and barely tested.

I used to see a headline saying that a game had been recreated, and immediately think "hell yeah" and move on. I don't think that I have ever installed one of these games and actually played them before. With the rise of AI development, I don't even get the blip of excitement anymore, I just say "neat", assume some people are really happy to play a childhood favorite, and that's it.

I'm mixed on it. On the one hand, it's AI and ruins shit, but on the other hand, it is really helping some of these retro projects get done, and some of them are pretty good quality....