I've been experimenting with AI in this space myself. Don't believe any of my projects are listed there but I posted an article some days back where I showcased static recompilers all playing at least one commercial game for the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Virtual Boy and Playstation. I actually just announced a playable build of Megaman X today that eliminates all its slowdowns.
Whether the broader communities will accept any of my work remains to be seek given the heavy correlation to those communities and anti AI sentiment.
given the heavy correlation to those communities and anti AI sentiment.
I've noticed the anti-AI sentiment is starting to die down. People are slowly realising that, along with the voluminous amounts of slop, there are others who have been able to leverage AI with much success.
You say that, but just today I showcased my Megaman X Recomp on a Megaman subreddit. I got harassed by a drive-by anti-AI cabal and then the moderators of the subreddit removed my submission after I reported the harassment, citing that AI was involved, and AI is theft.
One bizarre related thing I've noticed is often you will find people who otherwise seem ok with people violating the copyright and other various licenses by "decompiling" a game, but as soon as AI is involved suddenly it's a big controversial ethical issue... as if totally violating the authors rights is a minor inconvenience.
I've been off-and-on again. I stopped using it for years. I begrudgingly began using it again as I founded a private game server (before AI was viable, even, so it wasn't sued) for a game that shutdown a few years ago.
Perhaps hilariously, the moderators there also didn't like me and told me to eat shit when I suggested people start doing packet captures. At least they warmed up to me over the years though and actually endorse the project now.
Doesn't make the rest of the website any less of a cesspool though.
Libraries purchase books. One for every book they loan out at a time, digitally or physically.
The most recent noteworthy counter-example is archive.org breaching their "one purchase = one concurrent loan" limit during COVID, and they lost that court battle.
If you're equating libraries to LLMs, then every leading-model company would have purchased ~every book, newspaper, movie, and song in existence at least once. They have not.
Because libraries predate copyright and publishers and all the industry behind it. If libraries were to be invented nowadays, they won't let them purchase a single physical book to be enjoyed by several different physical persons over the course of time. What the publishing industry would like to have is 1 physical person = 1 or more physical copies, not the other way round.
So how do you explain LLM companies paying roughly none of it? If you're saying the protection is stronger now... how have they not been sued out of existence?
Honestly at this point a library might be an easy sell, in some ways. Copyright holders would be getting something rather than nothing (or the nearly-nothing they get from streaming), they might leap at that.
This can't be overstated! Libraries would never be allowed to come into existence today. I think we should all think long and hard about the society we have collectively created. It is not too late to make an effort to fight to reclaim the rights and norms we've ceded...
Yeah, I may give a whirl to those subreddits, but it does really show the dissonance between a sect's visceral hatred of AI relative to their interests when they're rejecting the progress of a game on the game's own franchise's subreddit.
That's a pretty valid viewpoint, honestly. Unless the AI is open weights and free of charge it's using human effort that nobody paid for to do a commercial thing.
I would make the argument that open weights models are ethically still maybe questionable, but at least it's making the output a public good
The counterpoint is that every company ever has based themselves on human effort they never paid for (usually). The entire scientific endeavour for example. Standing on the shoulders of giants and so on.
Depends on the community. From my experience, the modding scenes for certain more recent games seem abivalent about it, or more willing to tolerate it, while the communities for modding older games tend to be more heavily against it.
For example, when a Paper Mario decomp/port used AI, the subreddit for the series pretty much tore it to shreds for that. Mario fan communities in general tend to be really heavily against it, with Mario Fan Games Galaxy, SMW Central, and SMBX having rules which are basically "no AI allowed for submissions ever".
Meanwhile my experience on sites like ROM Hacking.net is that AI is more accepted/tolerated there.
So, it's very much a series by series thing. Best to check what the Mega Man community thinks of LLMs before you post it.
Is the game p2p or dedicated infra? Best thing you can do is provide the infra files that you can. Doesn't even have to be turn key. Also for the coordinator API service, anything you can provide there as well. Couple those with a configurable base url and the hackers ought to get it the rest of the way
I once worked for a retail computer repair shop that had an unbelievable amount of ethical concerns ( many things outright illegal). Among them was cracking Windows Vista or installing 7, cracking it and then rolling to Windows 10 get a license key from MS and then charging the customer for a license key.
I tried calling MS to report it and the guy on the other side said they didn't have a process for handling that and basically suggested I hang up.
Can be more than timers too. There's a funny one in Paper Mario where a block technically can be hit so many times it'll reset and award items again. Hit enough times it'll eventually crash. Of course it'd take around 30 years for the first rollover and 400 or so for the crash.
https://n64squid.com/paper-mario-reward-block-glitch/
These all sound like a lot of fun. I've built a few discord bots myself as I've run a few online communities.
1) Reminder bot for scheduled events.
We're all working adults who all played games as teens together . To actually get us together, we schedule our favorite games for once a month to play for a few hours. We all often forget when they start, so my bot posts a 2 week, 1 week 3 days, and 2 hour notice.
2) RCON bot
I run a TF2 server and a Minecraft server. You can manage both via RCON commands via slash commands in Discord. Also the tf2 one monitors player activity and alerts if players are in the server
3. Private server API bot
I founded a private game server for a game that ended service in 2023. The bot reads from our API to make a central list of lobbies and status. It also creates voice channels for each public lobby.
It's also used to help grant items and other admin commands.
4. For April Fools, I made a snarky bot that responded to random messages. It was backed by Gemini.
These have all been fun and novel to make but I've never found a great way to productize them and make money from any of them. Wonder if you've found any avenues there.
I get the impression the authors are monitoring the thread. I'm not home to check this out but I like the idea. A few questions.
1. Does the web interface allow you to download your ROMs in a similar fashion to Plex letting you download your files? I could see myself using this to fetch from my libraries and would like a nice GUI box art interface to grab a game I'm looking for.
2. How does this work with ROM hacks? How is the metadata pulled? Filename? Header? How could I set custom metadata where it doesn't match.
3. Does this have an accessible and documented API if I want to build extensions to it (or am I forced to use the interface?)
Of course! we are excited about the post and we want to answer any question regarding RomM. Answering you:
1. That's exacty what RomM (among other things) does. You will have a Jellyfin/Plex interface from where download your games
2. Right now we match using the name of the file, but we are planning to add match by hash thaat will increase the accuracy even more. If it doesn't match anything, you are able to match it manually from the interface in a very user friendly way.
3. Yes, our API docs are integrated into RomM itself, so any RomM instance you can access will show the docs. It can be your own instance, or the demo site one for example (https://demo.romm.app/api/docs) or (https://demo.romm.app/api/redoc)
Honestly Valve had it right with offering dedicated server packages. I respect any studio that does the same, like TripWire and Killing Floor.
I run my own private server for a live service game that shut down in just 1 year. We got lucky because they seemingly bundled the server code into the client. But the game was never meant to allow for that...
No, Google is being aggressive likely due to liability.
I made an Android app that used React Native and it was the simplest thing ever. It had no auth, no telemetry, no persisted storage. Quite literally all it did was take text input and output it's braille equivalent and vice versa.
Had another one that made procedurally generated credits like you'd see at the end of a game. Same thing. No auth, no telemetry, etc.
I made a total of $3.97 for those apps. I did also receive a $350 settlement for some class action lawsuit Google lost about something they did to developers.
Closing my account removes me from potential future class action pools.
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