Egyre több olyan projekt terjed az interneten, amely régi videójátékokat hoz el modern eszközökre, például a Halo böngészős vagy a Zelda: Ocarina of Time mobiltelefonos változatát. A kódok visszafejtését (decompilation) és újjáépítését (recomposition) korábban kézzel, több éves munkával végezték a rajongók. Az MI-alapú kódolóeszközök megjelenésével azonban a folyamat drasztikusan felgyorsult, így a hobbifejlesztők hetek alatt tucatnyi portot képesek előállítani.
A gyorsaság ugyanakkor komoly feszültséget szült a retrojátékok megőrzésével foglalkozó közösségekben. Sok szakértő szerint az automatizált folyamatok miatt elvész a játékok pontos működésének és kódolási struktúrájának megértése. Ráadásul több felhasználó meglévő, nyílt forráskódú projekteket fejez be MI segítségével anélkül, hogy valódi értéket tenne hozzá, ami miatt több közösségi oldal és adatbázis is leállította a működését.
A játékipar nagyobb szereplői is figyelik a jelenséget. Az Epic Games vezérigazgatója szerint az MI-eszközök a játékfejlesztés új aranykorát hozhatják el, míg az Xbox vezetősége külön belső divíziót hozott létre az új kódújrahasznosítási eljárások és kísérleti fejlesztések feltérképezésére. A technológia így egyszerre gyorsítja fel a régi játékok megmentését és alakítja át a fejlesztői kultúrát.
Az eredeti szöveg (The Verge AI)
A rise in AI-powered decomps, recomps, and ports has thrust the community into chaos.
A rise in AI-powered decomps, recomps, and ports has thrust the community into chaos.
Retro video games are everywhere lately — especially in places where they aren’t supposed to be. Halo in a web browser, Wind Waker on the iPhone, Super Smash Bros. in mixed reality. Over the past month or so, these kinds of unexpected projects have gone viral with incredible frequency thanks to new AI tools, as hobbyists take apart games and then rebuild them for new platforms. But while AI has supercharged the pace of these ports, it’s also tearing apart tight-knit communities dedicated to preserving games.
Decomps and recomps — shorthand for decomposition and recomposition — are a form of reverse engineering that involves breaking a game down to its building blocks and then rebuilding it so it can run on hardware it was never intended for. When done manually, it’s a slow, painstaking process. A group spent years decompiling the original Animal Crossing on the GameCube, for instance. But AI coding tools have cut that timeline down significantly, and the sheer number of ports has grown dramatically in recent months.
This summer, Chris Sotraidis, an AI consultant who works on game ports as a hobby, saw a port of Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour — which EA made open source last year — for the iPhone and iPad. The “technical challenges” inspired him to try making a handful of similar ports, including a mobile port of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time using an existing community-built decomp of the game. Within just a few weeks, he was working on a dozen projects. He says that kind of productivity wouldn’t happen without the use of AI.
Some of those ports “would have been possible with minimal AI assistance if I’d had significantly more time,” Sotraidis says. “But I’m honest enough to say that the pace and volume would not have been possible for me without it. It would have been extremely slow by comparison. The tools allow you to move much faster if you know what you want.”
That speed has drawn many people to try out these AI tools, either for fun, the technical challenge, or for preervation reasons. It’s also a reason why there’s been what seems like a deluge of new projects popping up on platforms like Reddit, X, and GitHub. But these ports can be problematic from a preservationist perspective. One of the reasons why decomp projects exist in the first place is that users can pull a game apart and understand how it works, but that kind of understanding and knowledge is lost when AI does the work. Sure, you can put Spider-Man in a Batman game, but you probably won’t discover how certain programming decisions came to be, which can hurt the ability to restore games faithfully.
“The tools allow you to move much faster if you know what you want.”
The rapid pace of AI-driven decomps has overwhelmed the DIY scene. Last week, a community-focused website that tracks decomp projects and provides various resources abruptly shut down due to AI’s impact. “It is now clear that, with the right guidance, human input, and code reviews, AI can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way,” the site’s owner, writing under the pseudonym Encounter, said when announcing the shutdown. “What is also now clear is that the community aspect of decompilation has been broken. Our projects have always been open source to encourage contributions and to benefit the community as a whole. Bad actors have been abusing this in increasingly troublesome ways.”
Those ways include taking existing decompilation projects and “finishing” them with AI, as well as racing to quickly port decomps that the user never actually contributed to in the first place. In essence, one of the big problems is people who are using AI to rush through the process while building on the work of others. This is especially an issue given the community-centric nature of the existing decomp scene. “
