Yet another Hacker News

42 points bpierre 2 hours ago 25 comments

bpierre 2 hours ago | parent

Author’s notes: https://github.com/cruxxxxxx/gdx-3ds#authors-notes

coffeesoda 1 hour ago | parent

Hey, author of the project here! Thanks for posting! It's been a really fun project to work on, and a great way to learn about how to use Claude more efficiently. I'm just a few hours away from posting a big update with:

64dd on original 3DS

Local & Online Multiplayer

QR Code sharing for Custom Courses

I hope ya'll check out the authors notes, post-morterm, and give it a try on your 3DS.

aculver 1 hour ago | parent

Haven't had a chance to check the project out yet, but wanted to say I love the idea of having a section dedicated to your human-written thoughts. It's the best of both worlds, with as much detail as possible throughout, but also still getting to hear from you personally. Congrats!

coffeesoda 56 minutes ago | parent

Thanks! As fun as the project is, the scope of it is not lost on me. I wanted it to serve as evidence of the frightening power these recent models have, and make it clear.

cynicalkane 51 minutes ago | parent

Look, I'm gonna say what's been said a lot of times, but bears repeating: when the very first two or three sentences I read are mind-blanketing AI prose breathlessly em-dashing together fragments of stuff I don't care about, it makes me skeptical that there's value perusing the rest of the project. Like, you can't even be bothered to make your lede some form of human-to-human communication.

ryan_n 43 minutes ago | parent

In the "Read On" section at the bottom it says "Author's notes: The one page written by a human." Seems they're pretty open about everything being written with Claude.

coffeesoda 25 minutes ago | parent

Appreciate it, but the info is there for anyone (or their LLM) to learn about the project in a technical sense. Like others have kindly stated, my notes (written by a human, for humans) are in a separate section.

The technical notes are dense and interesting in their own right, but I don't expect anyone not already familiar with the N64 to 3DS port scene to care.

echelon 23 minutes ago | parent

Get used to it. This is the future. It's okay.

Gigachad 1 hour ago | parent

The costings here are based on API pricing, but my understanding is that no one is paying the API pricing and everyone uses the subscription pricing, or even multiple accounts with a subscription each. I'd be interested to know the actual cost incurred here.

ivraatiems 1 hour ago | parent

I think the API pricing is a good proxy for "what was the actual physical cost of doing this," but even if you increase it from 5k to 30k or even 100k, it's a huge savings over getting a human to do it, AND it was faster.

I don't think the productivity gains from AI can be ignored for contexts like this. It's what they're best at.

I just hope it goes to good uses (more ports of fun games, more interoperability and opennesS) instead of bad ones (firing humans instead of retasking them), and that hope feels faint.

Gigachad 1 hour ago | parent

In no way am I suggesting that doing this without AI would be more practical. What I want to know is roughly how much is Anthropic subsidizing this stuff through the subscriptions currently and how much we can expect the real price paid to go up in the future.

coffeesoda 1 hour ago | parent

Yep, I agree. Further in the notes it's mentioned this probably would've taken a handful of Senior Engineers anywhere from 6 months to 2 years. The range of budget on the project is like $200 to $500k. This was done for peanuts in my spare time. I share both your optimism and pessimism, depending on the day, lol.

bakugo 34 minutes ago | parent

> it's a huge savings over getting a human to do it

This of course assumes it's something anyone would consider worth paying a human to do (it's not).

coffeesoda 22 minutes ago | parent

It was, 15+ years ago, when porting N64 games to 3DS was a lucrative market for hired guns. We have the magic 'port' button and this tech just showed how easy it is with severely different architectures & constraints.

cdnutter 51 minutes ago | parent

I’m curious why people have started using the 3DS as the gateway device for ports of games, like Melee and F-Zero X.

Don’t get me wrong, the 3DS is a gem of a console, and it harks back to when Nintendo put more thought into what they released instead of just another Mario sports game; but since the Switch is so much more powerful, I’d expect ports to that be more of a priority.

tempest_ 41 minutes ago | parent

I would guess the 3DS is far more "jailbroken" than the switch.

tourmalinetaco 34 minutes ago | parent

It is. Any 3DS can be jailbroken with CFW with a simple Internet guide and no physical modifications. As far as I know, the Switch CFW is locked to only V1 motherboards or modchips, making it far less accessible even if it is more powerful.

prophesi 29 minutes ago | parent

Jailbroken 3DS scene is usually for modding the console OS itself given how easy it is to run custom firmware. And for ports, and emulation. While the GBA has a pretty dedicated community for custom games and romhacks, people often create games for the platform at gamejams because of how great the dev tooling is. It's a bit lackluster on the 3DS, but I did find the Love Brew[0] framework to be really nice. Even has simulator support[1] for testing your builds locally, though fonts will look much different on real hardware, with likely a bunch of other gotchas. Running out of RAM being a big one.

[0] https://lovebrew.org/

[1] https://github.com/lovebrew/nest

edit: compared it to the GBA homebrew scene since it's a large dedicated community to derive pros and cons between the two from. Switch is still receiving updates from Nintendo to brick your system.

Gigachad 35 minutes ago | parent

Not sure why others are doing it, but the switch is kind of a boring console imo. You may as well just use one of the million PC handhelds with the same form factor, and persistent hacks require a hardware mod.

The 3DS is a fun pocketable form factor which a lot of people already own and easy to permanently mod on any firmware version or hardware revision.

coffeesoda 33 minutes ago | parent

The 3DS has the novelty of 3D. I always wanted to play F-Zero in this form factor and it seemed like a reasonable port to accomplish.

26d0 48 minutes ago | parent

I wonder how many years it would take to slopport every ROM-available game on every viable piece of hardware /s

pizzathyme 37 minutes ago | parent

we are going to find out very soon

echelon 22 minutes ago | parent

> slopport

Screw that word.

This took effort.

I don't want to share the internet with this bombastic negativity.

I wish anti-AI folks would find usenet or something and leave us to reinventing the web back into a magical place.

This is the Web 1.0 Wild West again. And it's beautiful.