With the recent flux of decompiled and recompiled projects for retro games to play them natively on PC, which game do you want see tackled on? And why? Or do you rather want Mods and Romhacks for the actual Rom for emulation?
Phantom Crash. That will never happen, though…
Gladius from Xbox or PS2. It emulates OK, but the heavy reliance on button input prompts makes it hard for my brain to map PS controls to letters.
Basically every Nintendo DS and 3DS game, to make it playable on a single screen with a regular controller.
I have a DS Lite and New 3DS XL (the Metroid edition), and I am over the touch screen. It gets scratched up, is discolored, and makes using the device annoying and uncomfortable because of its weight. Would much rather be able to play the games on a single screen without those elements. Yes, that would mean some heavy changes for some games, but I would consider it worthwhile.
Good call out! The touch screen is generally pretty unpleasant to me now as well.
Wii and some Wii U stuff too, there’s a whole era of games on Nintendo platforms where devs felt it was necessary to use input or display gimmicks. Once in a while it was essential to a game, but frequently it was shoehorned into an otherwise pretty traditional game.
Some of that could be fixed by smaller scale mods or cheat codes, but you’re right that some might take big changes that need a decomp.
Kings field 1 and 2 on PlayStation.
Ah, I see, a man of culture as well.
I used to think the decomp projects were really cool, even tho I didn’t really play them. But lately, the influx of AI-driven decomp projects, the whole concept has lost its luster to me.
On the flip side, there are still projects out there that don’t (or at least claim not to) use AI approaches. Here’s a list I saw the other day: https://backloggd.com/u/WumpaGem/list/game-decompsrecomps-that-arent-vibe-coded/
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).
For sure, I get that. I started off very much in the “it’s just a tool” and “AI as normal technology” camps, and over time I’ve become more and more jaded.
Ultimately what I appreciated about decomps was moreso the effort that went into it, rather than the result. But it totally makes sense if sometimes people care more about the result.
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.
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.
