Yet another Hacker News

Reverse engineer of PC-98 Touhou games retires

20 points mimasama 2 days ago 19 comments

oceansky 1 hour ago | parent

Although I love the new era of LLM assisted reverse engineering, it really breaks my heart how much it negatively affect veterans in their area of passion.

weezing 1 hour ago | parent

So was it really a passion project if it affects them anyhow? It's like saying that concept of dynamite fishing affects passionate anglers.

ginko 1 hour ago | parent

Well if dynamite fishers show up in your favorite fishing spot you might want to consider moving somewhere else at least.

oceansky 1 hour ago | parent

I don't see why it wouldn't, passion does not exists in a vacuum.

weezing 1 hour ago | parent

So it's about visibility and not passion?

anonymous908213 1 hour ago | parent

This idea that if you want recognition for your work you aren't passionate is literally insane. Humans are social creatures by nature, the two aren't in any way exclusive.

simias 20 minutes ago | parent

I really struggle with this argument that I see everywhere lately, especially when we see many vibecoders clearly desperate for clout who post "decomps" and automated translations of works they clearly have no interest in and just want to claim a spot on the wall of fame. I'm talking about people bulk-translating old ROMs and not even booting them up to see if they work before releasing them in the wild for instance.

Their lazy cloud-chasing is normal but my high-effort clout-chasing is lame and makes me a fraud?

We're social animals. We like doing cool stuff and getting social status for it. We like breaking new ground. We like going where nobody has gone before.

Is it irrational and emotional? Maybe. Being human is being irrational and emotional sometimes. It's fine.

wzdd 6 minutes ago | parent

Of course, passion here meant feeling good about putting effort into something which doesn't have obvious external life benefits such as money or visibility. If an LLM can just knock it out then it's hard to feel good about putting that effort in.

rvz 1 hour ago | parent

What happened [0] to Lee Sedol (Expert Go Player) 10 years ago after playing against AlphaGo is now happening to everyone else.

As I said before [1] we are all Lee Sedol.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50573071

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49505141

anonymous908213 1 hour ago | parent

This is nothing like that. The disillusionment comes from imposters getting more attention and credit than the real thing. These shitty projects are nowhere near being superior to what a human can do, and most of them are blatantly lying and exaggerating their accomplishments. ie. dozens of "no emulator recompilations" that are actually just embedding an emulator into a binary with the game, and people are too fucking stupid to check and upvote it to the top of HN because we all love a good fraud here. Now this garbage can be mass-produced and get the adoration of the AI hype crowd, drowning out the content that people put hundreds/thousands of hours into despite the slop being of wildly inferior quality that doesn't hold up if you inspect it for longer than it takes you to click the upvote button. Not only here, but all over the internet. Of course it's demotivating.

thenthenthen 58 minutes ago | parent

Never stick your head out it seems is a legit tactic.

grumbel 54 minutes ago | parent

> dozens of "no emulator recompilations" that are actually just embedding an emulator into a binary with the game

Even those, which take about 20min, are incredible useful, as you can add save state, level select, cheats and gamepad controls on top that most emulators would struggle with or at least make a hell of a lot more complicated.

> Now this garbage can be mass-produced and get the adoration of the AI hype crowd

Those games wouldn't exist without AI. Decompiles that ended in a fully playable state have been incredible rare before AI. Best you would get was often just an incomplete reverse engineering of the data formats involved.

anonymous908213 36 minutes ago | parent

??? emulators already had literally all of those things

> Decompiles that ended in a fully playable state have been incredible rare before AI.

Actual decompilations are still rare. I'm repeating myself here, but the vast majority of these, they're not doing much more than embedding an emulator. You have to understand that an emulator is sort of a JIT decompiler already. It's really not impressive, or an accomplishment of any kind, to put the emulator into the binary with the game. There are a few AI-accelerated ones that have some legitimacy to them but still involved months of human effort too, it is by no means as automated as the hypers would like you to believe.

rvz 24 minutes ago | parent

okay.

thenthenthen 1 hour ago | parent

I need that on a tshirt

haunter 1 hour ago | parent

People should really read the whole thing (well at least the last chapter) because it's not as simple as "vibe coders made meg go away".

The writer equally hates ZUN, vibe coders, and AI haters (Bluesky crowd)

And if not then the TLDR is basically: ZUN made the games for japanese people. Western people wanted to play the games. Reverse engineers came along but they relied on community funding. Now the community is taken apart by vibe coders but the same community is not willing to fund manual labor. Also the community is still paying for ZUN which enforces the status quo of not bothering with english releases.

oceansky 1 hour ago | parent

He does say LLMs made things worse, even if he's not opposed to it.

numpad0 44 minutes ago | parent

> it is not only morally correct to pirate Windows Touhou, but in fact morally wrong to pay for it.

> I have no interest in doing anything else in this scene, and especially no interest in working on closed-source games for a media empire in a humble doujin trenchcoat.

wth is ... this anglosphere otakus assuming anime content creators to be high-double-to-mid-triple-digit millionaires only when they don't seem to be ones? I don't know how many digits are in the bank account for ZUN so there is a chance that he is a multiquadrillionaire, but it frankly looks like a twisted edge case of right makes might mindset rather than a logical argument.

Though, granted, I am aware that it gets quite stressful when a seller isn't able to take your money.

Philpax 4 minutes ago | parent

I wanted to be sympathetic to someone watching their hobby and source of income disappear, but I'm finding it quite difficult to do so when they're this smarmy and unpleasant. I would not want to involve this person in any of my endeavours, either.