I’ve been a part of the modding scene for these games for about a decade now.

As easy as this is to get running, which is a great thing, I feel the effort to make this has been misplaced and that this is a fad which will die off in a month’s time.

There are many better ways to go about this and, more importantly, there are much bigger issues to solve (such as lack of any meaningful new content for these games). It’s historically always been limited due to the lack of tooling that is functional and user-friendly enough to craft mods for this game.

And that is changing for the better, for sure. But all of these slopped up mods and ports are just made for clout to ask for donos. It doesn’t feel right because there’s almost always no passion (or even any effort) put into this.

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.

That I can confirm firsthand. Recompiled code is just prebaked CPU instructions in another language that can be compiled. That’s all there is to it.

So for modding, it’s only slightly easier technically as you have the option to inject code easier than on the emulated platform and providing facilities for the host OS to load them (dynamic libraries, which is a big benefit which most of the slop coders don’t fully understand how or why it is).

For proper modding research, a decompilation (of the portions of the game you want to mod very extensively) is needed.

For a simple aspect ratio and UI fix patch (and other simple improvements) - that is achievable on the original code itself via cheats/code injection (anything that has an FPU should work, PS1 and older are harder generally). You generally do not need a whole recompilation/decompilation for this kind of a thing.

Sometimes even the original hardware without any performance boost can handle it, but most of the times this is where emulator’s overclocking and memory extension features come into play to help.

Honestly, in my opinion, machine code hacking is not that hard. It takes way less time and energy to do it than this to achieve the same “improvements” with way lower barriers to entry.

pipotam

You’re right.

The only decent-ish extension I know of is Sink It for Reddit. It’s on App Store.

The website is still buggy as hell, though…

There is a third party tool called AltDrag that brings this exact thing to Windows. See if you can sneak it into your work machine somehow.

Plus, if something seemingly can’t be terminated with that, 99% of the time it’s a kernel level lockup (e.g. disk IO). At which point you only have 2 options: kill it via a kernel debugger or (the more likely scenario) perform a reboot.

Not having CFW isn’t the end of the world. It’s a slight inconvenience having to press the button at boot and maybe sometimes randomly a game not launching.

Also, later super slims are using more modern chips and therefore are much quieter and nicer to use.

Lastly, currently there is a modchip being developed for a qCFW (quasi-CFW) which will allow for basically 99% CFW capabilities on later models anyway, so there is that going for it too.

Super slims are a hidden gem imo

From a glance, this is just a value parser that exports them by symbols and allows you to edit the static values from a file neatly.

I don’t know how practical this is yet since I haven’t seen the video, but in order for it to be more practical it needs to be easier to implement and use than other methods to accomplish tweakable values for debugging.

There are many already:

• parsing a config/text file in runtime
• parsing commandline args
• parsing environment variables
• using a debugger and a memory watch
• using external tools that can edit memory

Now, not all methods are available on all platforms, but, it needs to be better than any of these methods in some way for it to have any point in using it.

Game devs often have their own frameworks that can communicate with the game via network to tweak exposed values anyway for realtime debugging. Adjust.h from what I can see requires the program to be reset on each iteration.

Wii U

Except for CTR Nitro Fueled. I’m still annoyed that there’s no PC port of it.

It is, but in a sense that it’s more strict to make new setups. Existing ones are going to contine to work as usual, but the new “Steam Families” is a thing now that replaces it and it has stricter conditions. Correct me if I’m wrong on that.

So you can’t have a “family” in another continent like you used to or whatever like that.

Is it really that much worse? Think about it long and hard.

Ewaste is a bigger problem than the inability to resell or trade digital games (in my opinion, at least). One can be solved fully digitally, while the other cannot.

Besides, Steam did it properly with Family Sharing when it was a thing.

This to me feels like Nintendo wants a stronger grip on digital key redistributions by adding a physical element into it to screw over key and account resellers. People are much less likely to sell a physical item when compared to a fully digital one.

Sending something physical is more time consuming and just more costly in general. I could always share a code via a message or an image to a friend, whereas with game cards I’d have to mail it over.

Now, only time will tell if game key cards will affect digital key sales (and their overall existence), but knowing Nintendo, it probably will.

And also - the whole point of “having a game catalog tied to your account fully digitally” is moot anyways if the game itself has to be downloaded anyway.

🗿

I care about MIDIs! I’ll check this out asap.

Pretty cool, I’m interested to see how far you can take it!

If you can match BASSMIDI in terms of features then you got yourself a serious synth on hands. (If you can match Sound Canvas or Yamaha MU synths, even better!)

Just keep in mind that most (and by that I mean like 99%) of soundfonts aren’t exactly made to proper specifications. A lot of them miss certain parameters (such as filter cutoff frequency, LFO frequencies, etc) and even misuse them (reverb and chorus pre-set on layers being cranked up).

The only soundfonts I recommend you develop this with (as your target) are the ones made by E-MU themselves. CT4MGM.SF2 especially. They basically cloned the Roland SC-55 as closely as they could on their sound chips at the time and most sounds match the behaviors correctly.

Licensing/legal issues very likely. They licensed that version of the engine for Killing Floor and some other games.

I bet the OP has no spine to refute that

Unironically, the best bet for them is nvidia 540xx drivers on the AUR with an LTS kernel.

Oh you mean Android Studio automagically “updating” your versions so that your build breaks and you spent 3 hours figuring out what just happened without you even touching anything?

It’s just their ego showing through.

It basically now comes down to the current devs depending on new Rust devs for anything that interacts with Rust code.

They could just work together with Rust devs to solve any issues (API for example).

But their ego doesn’t allow for it. They want to do everything by themselves because that’s how it always was (up until now).

Sure, you could say it’s more efficient to work on things alone for some people, and I’d agree here, but realistically that’s not going to matter because the most interactivity that exists (at the moment) between Rust and C in Linux is… the API. Something that they touch up on once in a while. Once it’s solid enough, they don’t have to touch it anymore at all.

This is a completely new challenge that the Linux devs are facing now after a new language has been introduced. It was tried before, but now it’s been approved. The only person they should be mad at is Linus, not the Rust devs.