Any advances in emulators recently? I would love to see Nintendo get into a legal tussle with Big AI. Giant douche can fight turd sandwiches.

> It's pretty amazing what you can do when you embrace LLMs, figure out how to build one high-quality rigorous project with them, and then start working on more projects.

Indeed. But I think it's fair to say that just embracing LLMs is not enough.

It's 2026. Not using AI is deliberately hobbling yourself. You won't be able to produce as good code, nearly as fast.

I saw some news last week saying the project had reached 100%. Looking at the git repo (https://gitlab.com/kholdfuzion/goldeneye_src) that claim is a bit harder to verify, but maybe look again?

> Are their hands tied by legal

Yes.

Even if you're the owner of the game, the contracts for the voice actors, motion capture, models, etc. frequently define very narrow terms of usage. Defining the exact release platforms is common. Not to mention profit sharing if the actors or studios you're hiring are popular.

It's even worse for retro games. Many times the original rights holder went out of business, sold their rights, died, or something else that muddies the ownership chain.

Yes many games are caught up in IP hell.

Including the one my username is inspired by. It's why you see a lot of fan remakes. Another sad side effect of corporate owned IP is also a lot of times the individuals who did the bulk of the work on something can't be the ones to do a remake. They don't own their own work. A company owns it. That's what most of us sign up for to get a paycheck. But when it's something like film or games, the effect on artists or designers can be pretty depressing.

So yes, games are not unique in this way. I am hopeful in the optimistic future case where LLMs lead to lower barriers to entry, UBI, and so forth that copyright essentially disappears, or at the very least is severely reformed.

Many things should simply enter the public domain at a far more accelerated rate.

I don't know how they made it, but there was a GoldenEye made for Xbox 360 that seems to only update the UI. The controls are maybe a little different, but you can swap between original and updated renderer in game. Anyway, they couldn't ship in the end due to legal stuff.

It and the sequel were among two of the best multiplayer games on the system. It was so sad to see the series die when it went portable instead of continuing to be a ton of fun.

Clean room might get you past copyrighted code, but surely it won't get you past trademarks or copyrighted artistic work?

to be fair much of the fun in decompiling/RE is the puzzle solving, it's like a giant crossword puzzle that you fill in bit by bit, slowly figuring out how things work. Having an LLM do large parts of that for you is probably kinda boring for many.

The backlash has only been growing as the result of a significant number of incredibly sloppy decomps, either creating unreadable codebases or outright being so buggy/inaccurate as to be useless. Every day I see another decomp pop up that exists solely for the cred of being the first to do so, which is then promptly abandoned by the developer because it doesn't fucking work.

on the flip side retro games are almost completely and entirely an aesthetic experience. like if something totally subjective and personal like nostalgia is not just a valid reason, but the #1 reason, to be engaged with retro gaming, why isn't some random condition about the process of resurrecting the games also valid?

i think you agree that there is. but it should change your language about this idea of "consumers" and "benefits" - like this is the difference between making code and making a product. nobody NEEDS retro games. in my opinion, they aren't even that good! they are completely and utterly an aesthetic experience. the process IS the product.

How did you get started? I have a project in mind and would love to try, but getting a foothold on it feels really hard when you are starting with an ISO image and an empty folder.

https://github.com/n64decomp/perfect_dark claims to be “a complete decompilation of Perfect Dark for the Nintendo 64”. And: “When a matching decompilation is compiled with the same compiler that the original developers used, the output will be exactly the same as the retail game, byte for byte.”

Relatedly, https://github.com/perfect-dark-pc-port/perfect_dark forked from the above describes itself as “a work-in-progress port of the Perfect Dark decompilation to modern platforms”. Further: “The game is in a mostly functional state, with both singleplayer and split-screen multiplayer modes fully working. There are minor graphics- and gameplay-related issues, and possibly occasional crashes.”