AI-assisted development is bringing old games to platforms we'd never have thought possible. That's exciting, but the growing flood of unfinished ports is beginning to raise an uncomfortable question: how many of these games are actually worth playing?

Some of the ports we’re seeing in the retro handheld community lately have been great, and I love seeing developers push these little devices beyond what they were ever intended to do. But I’ve definitely noticed what feels like a growing amount of ‘port-slop’, with new projects appearing seemingly every few hours, many of them feeling more like quick experiments than anything particularly worthwhile.

I’m not against the experimentation at all, but I do wonder if we’re reaching a point where quantity is starting to overshadow quality. Anyway, I put together a short opinion piece about it, just my own thoughts on something I’ve been noticing lately, especially here with my favorite old system: the PSP.

  • TORFdot0@lemmy.worldEnglish
    86·
    3 days ago

    Thank you for calling out the port slop. Decompilations and reverse engineering projects used to be worthwhile and exciting and now it’s become an ocean of half baked Claude code projects with no contributors and no base to stand on.

    I’m glad we got big ones like SM64 and OOT before the vibe coding craze, now I see a recompilation or port and it doesn’t even register now

    • CosmicDebris@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      26·
      2 days ago

      What are some other good ones?

      I know of these:

      • Majora’s Mask
      • Banjo Kazooie
      • A Link to the past (Technically a disassembly, ports to C and Zig)
      • Twilight Princess (arguably, since that one is flooded with vibe-coded mods)
      • Star Fox 64
      • James Bond: The world is not enough
    • joeschmoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      Absolutely. I am also thankful for it. I’ve been shitting on these projects, and at least people here seem to be more against them, but holy shit, on Reddit, the mainstream subs at least (PCMR cough), they absolutely love these slop projects. Any slop project really, but especially the recomps and PS5 emus / translators.

      Some projects try to hide their vibecoding, then you dig through their commit history and see first commits with like 20k to 50k lines, and the project being quite new as well. People really love this KytyPS5 emu / translation layer (not retro, I know, just mentioning it). Guess what, it has the highest line count of any first commit I have ever seen, 200k lines. Project has only been a thing since Jul 16 of this year. You can’t make this shit up. https://github.com/KytyPS5/KytyPS5/commit/147188b143f67c27d8da396e759c19336f64c105

      To me, is the clearest indicator of vibecoding, if they are trying to hide it at least. If you are undertaking a serious project and not immediately creating at least a local git repo from the very first couple lines, this shit is straight outta Claude. Keep in mind Github is just a place to host git repos. Any history before adding a remote obviously stays and will be visible. These guys are legit creating their repos only when have tens of thousands of lines already. How about managing history from the start? Vibecoded.

    • steelplatedmech@piefed.caEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Yeah, and when it comes to brand new accounts churning these out quickly you don’t know if they are safe, and don’t have something malicious sunk into compared to projects with more people involved.

      Decompilations are still exciting, but I’m not rushing out to try out every new PC port of a console game either that came out from someone with no history to have gained some trust.