| Alex_The_Hedgehog said: Not playable yet, but it's scary to see a game that was just released getting booted on an emulator. |
The purpose of emulators like these are little more than piracy. I don't like Sony at all due to their braindead decision to kill physical games. So I'm not really upset about these newer emulators. If someone wants to write an emulator for the purpose of preservation then they need to wait until that console is off the market. Back in 2017 people erroneously claimed that immediately writing an emulator for Wii U was needed to preserve BoTW. Here we are nearly 10 years later and copies of BotW are easy to come by as well as a working Switch. Nintendo even went as far as to make a Switch 2 edition of the game. People developing a Switch 1 emulator were caught red handed pirating games on their own personal discord. This was discovered years after I had a huge argument with several users and mods over the issue. They all claimed that preservation needed to start right away and that people who developed Nintendo emulators didn't have piracy in mind at all. History proved them all wrong.
Just writing this now because I don't want people to conveniently forget what the Yuzu devs did once a Vibe coded Switch 2 emulator comes out.
Also I'm of the opinion that unless you make an exact 1:1 recreation of how a console operates you aren't preserving anything. If all the original Sega Genesis systems were destroyed and all the well written FPGA Genesis cores were lost then we would have effectively lost the true behavior, sound, reaction and graphics of Genesis games.
My biggest fear with all this vibe coding is that Gen Alpha loses all interest in any semblance of true preservation and 50 years after a system is gone there are multiple emulators for one system all with their own inaccuracies and quirks. Even the best human coded PS3 emulators only work right with 75% of the games. And by work right I mean work well enough for someone that hasn't played countless hours of a specific game on a PS3 system to miss all the errors.
And just like news on the Internet, vibe coded emulators will value clicks over accuracy. It will be a race to see who can make something the fastest and accuracy will fly out the window. So we will wind up with the majority of people playing on even more janky emulators than the best human coded PS3 emulators. I think that goes for vibe coded decompilations too.
Then we have the issue of AI making ram and other computer parts unaffordable. If you can't even afford local hardware then all preservation goes out the window. Sharing tons of roms of ancient expensive games is only possible because we all have our own personal computers. Imagine an age where personal hardware is unaffordable for 90% of consumers. Even the storage required to save all these games is becoming unobtainium. I can't buy a new SD card anymore thanks to AI. So moving my rom files to a fresh storage medium before a the old storage dies goes bad becomes a real preservation issue.
I'm sure intelligent people will use AI to eventually make an FPGA PS3 core or a perfect PS3 to PC decompiler (if someone hasn't already done that in regular coding methods) but preservation is also about getting people to care about accuracy and preservation. It doesn't matter if a traditional coder uses AI to make a perfect decompiler if everyone is just using slop coded emulators. Also a perfect decompiler doesn't matter if personal computers and storage become unaffordable to 90% of consumers. Does anybody really think the Epstein class will let us run emulators, decompilers or save roms to their AI data center cpus or HDDs?
Anyway I just don't think AI will be good for the preservation of videogames at all.
Last edited by Cerebralbore101 - 1 day ago
