The question makes perfect sense

No, it does not, and I explained it multiple times and even made comparisons to help understanding the issue.

This is effectively the same question, as a period of time that long may as well be infinite to us.

No it’s. This reply is proof you didn’t understand the issue I brought up. Even if the universe exists for an infinite time, that has nothing to do with the issue I was talking about.

Okay, add another hypothetical to circumvent this.

You changed the question. That is not what the question in the original post and the article is about.

This is the exact same question

It’s not. You crafted a new question with new rules, just to justify for you to have right in a discussion you do not understand.

an unnecessary added layer of philosophical baggage that you wont engage without for some reason

The issue I brought up is not unnecessary and this is not just philosophical. It is core to the logic and thought process.

Ah right, forgot about that Z: drive. I actually just loaded stuff from the Z: drive (Wave Race 64 PC recomp, but using GE Proton) before making that reply, so my brain was shut off I guess.

Those efforts aren’t going anywhere. It’s only a problem if everything is replaced. What I mean is, figuratively speaking: In the past we had 5 decomps done by human hand. Now with Ai we have 5 decomps done by humans, plus 25 done by Ai agents (with human oversight). So we do not lose much actually. This is my thinking.

Is it? The game does actually work with modern PCs, at least the Steam version: https://store.steampowered.com/app/32370/STAR_WARS_Knights_of_the_Old_Republic

Yeah, it definitely leaves some sour in the mouth feeling with Ai involved. Especially if its vibe coded without the code fully documented and understood by humans. Those efforts aren’t going away and people still do the time consuming and well thought out decompilation projects. I see the new flux of Ai driven recompilation as a bonus. At least it works, I mean i was waiting decades to play Wave Race 64 with 120 fps. Without these Ai tools, it could probably take another decade if anyone else than me was interested into it at all.

So I understand your point and I’m not the biggest fan of Ai too (but I’m not the biggest hater as well). But at least this is used to give it to us for free, its not a commercial project we pay for (the ports).

Yeah I guess Flatpak could help here. But I always read there can be issues with some games, due to the double isolation from WINE / Proton layer too. I thought about installing Flatpak version instead, but to be honest, it’s not a real issue in my opinion that warrants this (at the moment).

As for the SteamOS fake home folder, interesting method. Is this command active in the Steam game parameters (commandline call)? So that when closing the game then everything is normal. Sounds pretty good to me. For the read only system files, aren’t the system files in SteamOS read only anyway? I’m currently not really concerned with the security in SteamOS / Deck, but its good to know that there are solutions (or helpers) to that.

Edit: Actually using a Proton version is almost doing lot of this already, as the “Windows” games are routed through filesystem to use the WINE directories. It’s still not completely isolated off course, but at least that part is more secure than installing Linux games natively, I think.

And 8 players at the same time!

over-commenting things can be annoying

Not only that, it can also be a wrong comment when forgotten to update them when changing the code. In such cases no comment is even better. So I do less comments than before nowadays, especially with Python. You also have to think who your target audience is (future you? teams of professional game devs? scientist without much programming knowledge? random online beginners?). Finding a middle ground is mostly impossible, so having the target audience in mind is important in my opinion.

Self documenting code goes only so far. At some point, you want to explain why you do it, not what you do. And commenting blocks of code will be necessary to have good documentation. Sometimes having too long function and variable names can make the code less readable, so that is not always a good idea. For an LLM it is excellent, but if a human reads the code, then its different.

So don’t forget writing / changing code is not just for reading by agents (LLMs) and code reviewer tools. You can satisfy them, but it might cost you readability for humans. I also like having code searchable through grep (line wise thinking, also good for git changes) or search and replace (variable names in example). These are interactive tools as I call them, and are meant for used and read by humans too.

There is lot of consideration when it comes to make code readable and usable in long term.

I’m sure someone will attempt it. Currently the scene is going crazy, even doing weird crossovers. Super early experimental phase! Soon a new Crazy Taxi comes out, so there will be interest to port the original, I’m sure.

Huh?! None such project is listed on https://decomp.dev/projects . I thought there was already one. All the later Mario Kart games have such projects, and on SNES even F-Zero got it (amazing).

BTW there are lot of Romhacks like just recently a fullscreen mode for single player, without half the screen covered by the map. I still need to test it out: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/10083/ Imagine what people could do with a PC port and without limitations of the SNES.

I just got into the decomp scene and the tool I chose is Quiver Launcher: https://quiverlauncher.com/ I don’t know how it compares to Decomp Buddy. It looks good too. I’ll definitely bookmark it for now, thanks.

That alone would be worth it. Not even the re-release on XBOX consoles through Rare Replay collection has it (it’s emulated there too).

Such a gem. What would you want to be improved and changed, other than performance?

when I download games they still aren’t ready to play upon first startup, they need additional downloads/connectivity upon first launch

This specifically bite me in the past. Despite me knowing this being an issue, I completely forgot when preparing for a longer offline session. Some games need to run once to play them in offline mode, but I believe this is not required for all games. It’s not an issue with the Steam Deck specifically, but with Steam in general.

Maybe instead running the game automatically, there should be an indicator (“green dot color” and not ready as “gray dot color”) that the game didn’t run and is not ready for offline play (at least from side of Steam). And even further, the indicator could stay at “No Offline Play” (“red dot color”) showing the game cannot be played offline. This would be a setting by the publisher to show its not possible.

I love level editors. Every game (where it makes sense) should have a level editor and possibly a randomizer / roguelike mode. I wish someone did a simple level editor for Wave Race 64, just to place the buoy (not sure if that is the right word BTW).

I have seen level editors for Adventures of Lolo games. One example is for 3: https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/759/ The Syphen Filter games would definitely profit a lot from such enhancements, generally speaking the 32-bit and N64 era of gaming.

I’m thinking of an NES game I had played back then, and wish it had Mods and Romhacks to improve certain aspects. Sadly its not a popular game, as to why nobody did it.

Over Horizon (NES, 1991, 1992): Wikipedia | MobyGames | GameFAQs

Game was published in Japan and the only country it was published elsewhere is Germany (where I live and got it). That explains why the game wasn’t much popular and known. The soundtrack is one of its highlights too, composed by Masaharu Iwata (who worked on Final Fantasy Tactics too BTW). But it had two major issues to me: Bad slowdowns and audio channels were cutoff when other sound was played. The slowdowns could be solved with modern emulators and overclocking and other settings. But the audio always bugged me.

Exactly. This is what has been told for decades since I was a child. But back then most households had only one TV, at most two. Today I think its just worse in every way.

They also link my blog article. So you know this is a good Wiki.