AI Being Used in Recomps, PC Ports and Emulation; What That Means

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:01]Everybody, welcome back to Video Game SO. Today I've got a super fun and interesting video for you guys today and one that's going to turn into an eternal debate in the comment section. Hopefully everyone keeps it cool, but I'm expecting this maybe to turn into a train derailment that ends up in a burning dumpster fire mess. That is because we're going to be talking about the topic of AI developments in fan games and even emulation because it has been a very hot topic recently and even in my comment section people definitely debate whether or not it is a good thing or a bad thing or somewhere in the middle. Now to kick this off, I'm going to tell you right now I'm going to let you guys decide for yourselves amongst yourselves how it is you feel because I always stress on this channel. I am here to provide you information, you get to decide what it is you like and don't like and that is totally cool with me.

[00:00:45]And I will say right off the top as far as AI usage in games that are sold at retail or using any sort of generated AI to develop art for video games, I don't want it in there. I want artists and developers to work on these things in and of themselves. But when it comes to fan games, PC ports, re-comp FP J cores and things such as that, the usage at least in part of AI tools to speed up the process is definitely here and it really isn't going anywhere. And honestly this got first kicked off conversationally at least with the Animal Crossing PC port that was made in conjunction with AI development tools.

[00:01:19]It's not 100% done that way, but we do have some ports now that are 100% start to finish made by something like Claude.

[00:01:26]And again, you guys can decide if that is cool to you, not cool to you. I'm going to be going over all of it in the video today and just recently maybe about 6 hours ago, the RPCS3 team talked about AI commits to their code and the people were basically sending in commit requests or merge requests that made no sense whatsoever. But one of their actual answers as to what is and isn't permissible with AI is going to be interesting for a lot of you. The people that say that absolutely no AI can be used and you'll never touch anything that actually uses it. But you leave me a comment down below first and you tell me, have you tried the Animal Crossing PC port or not or the port over to the Vita? And just recently, maybe about a month and a half ago, a developer used some auto translation tools to bring something like Lupin the Third: The Pyramid of Sage over to Sega Saturn in English. It doesn't really have that much text and no one was interested in actually translating it whatsoever. So, they basically just used a tool to say what the Japanese said in English and then rewrote it conversationally. And honestly, having played through the entirety of this game telling people it is one of my favorite Sega Saturn hidden gems, I think the translation works and it allows you to understand 100% more of what's going on in the game.

[00:02:34]But again, that was done with automatic tools. It wasn't done by a human hand.

[00:02:38]Obviously, getting the actual text into the game and over the FMVs, that was done with actual code and actual human beings being involved. They just didn't have the ability to read and understand Japanese natively cuz they didn't speak that language. And clearly, as we talked about on the channel twice now, Super Smash Bros. the Nintendo 64 version of the game that is basically almost 100% decompiled now has a PC port that is receiving updates. The developer on that on the GitHub page was very clear exactly how they made the port utilizing cloud basically get this thing working on PC. And I would say about nine out of 10 of you were perfectly fine with that in the comments when we talked about it.

[00:03:13]One out of 10 of you didn't like it. I'd say maybe one out of the 10 of the 10 sent me some of the weirdest emails and messages ever. You have to remember, I did not make this. I don't make anything on the channel. I am not a game developer. I I'm a filmmaker and a YouTube channel cuz I love retro gaming.

[00:03:29]And as far as my workflow is concerned, it's 100% done by my hand. Not just because I find it to be the fastest way to do this work cuz I am a veteran filmmaker of 22 years. There really isn't anything that I can speed up on my end. I use my workflow. I use my tool set, which is all basically done by my hand to [music] make everything else work. But interestingly, our PCSX2's team just talked about people sending in merge requests that were basically absolute garbage code. And you think to yourself, well, 100% of RPCS3 would be done by human development hands. [music] But it's actually interesting what they said as far as what they're allowing in the future and what they utilize. And I'm here to tell you, I'm not going to say every single project, but a lot of the things that you play, [music] a lot of the emulators you use, a lot of the FPGA cores that you have experience and absolutely love have utilized some sort of automation tool set to be able to speed up the work. A lot of times it's just because [music] if a human did it, it would take 10 hours even though they know how to do it, but the tool might take maybe 20 minutes. And you'll see here the RPCS3 team said that they're putting in new guidelines for this AI-generated code in emulation.

[00:04:34]What they're stating is use of AI tools for research and reverse engineering purposes is permitted. That means when you're using RPCS3, at least in some small way, you are utilizing AI developed developments for lack of a better term. So, the people out there that say they never want to see it, RPCS3 would be something you would want to avoid.

[00:04:54]Now, just recently, obviously, the announcement of DLSS 5 from the Nvidia team came out and I will say I absolutely hate, despise, and loathe everything it is doing. It is changing up the artist's intent. It is making things up whole cloth, things that were never in the actual game. It's even changing the color ways and overall tone map of the image, basically making something out of absolutely nothing. And this is something obviously you don't need to turn on, but this is what I point to something like GenAI and say it is just absolutely not adding anything to a game, it is subtracting from it.

[00:05:26]And just recently, we had the Sega Gaga translation maybe about 2 months or so ago as of recording of this video. And this absolutely just ended up being a dumpster fire disaster. In this instance, I was a little bit disappointed because a couple different channels were sent preview builds to basically be able to capture before the release went live, and none of us had any idea that at least at the start there was any sort of automatic translation done in the background. And that really is the interesting thing right now. I'm sure there's a couple of videos on my channel where I've talked about a project and I found out that actual automation was used. And it is one of those things, it does exist in filmmaking as well. If I do need to transcribe something for a client, DaVinci Resolve has an automatic transcribe button, which will basically do an excellent job of getting a script for a video. That way you can do subtitles and anything else. And I certainly would not sit here and write out what I say by hand or write out a client's words by hand. I basically just read the script along that was auto-generated to make sure there are no mistakes and then I would run it as a closed caption loop. And it's one of those things, this is definitely something that happens in basically every single industry where there is some automation involved. For something like PS3 recap, a tool that is in development, not really showing much actual progress yet, this is definitely using a little bit of automation in the background. And that's happening with a lot of the recap tools as well. Now, I'm not going over every single project where it would have been touched by something like AI. I just want you to understand that that is happening and I totally get that most of you just think to yourselves, "Well, it doesn't really affect anybody, so who is really harmed here?" The reality of the situation is no one really is {quote} and {unquote} harmed as far as there's no jobs being lost. This money is not changing hands for these projects. So, it's one of those things as far as the individual is concerned, there really isn't anything that you could point to and say there is a downside unless you don't really like it. And that is totally fair. Again, as I've said in many videos, you do not have to like it. I support your decision if you don't like it. But I just wish you guys would converse in a manner in which you can actually debate amongst yourselves. As again, going over the same PlayStation 3 footage here in a secondary context, something like a PS3 recap tool is going to be automating some stuff like that. And we've seen it with some code ports as well. When you go to something from like assembly to C to something like an X86 architecture.

[00:07:43]Doing that in an automatic format would basically be the industry prescribed way to do it because pouring it over by hand, even if you know how to do it, would you actually spend the time to do something like that? And that is a question only you can answer. You can decide for yourselves how you feel about it, but it is a very interesting topic and something that we're dealing with today and is definitely not going anywhere in the future.

[00:08:05]And if we kind of go down the overall catalog of what is made today, and we take a look at something like an FPGA core, and I'm not going to show any particular one. I'm just saying some that have already been developed and some that are in active development.

[00:08:16]Right now, people are using it to basically develop debugging tools to be able to step through code and step through issues and identify where there's problems so that they can fix them by hand. That is just using another tool in the toolbox to develop FPGA cores, and the ending code is written by human hands, but it does in fact involve some usage of AI to automate the process. So, the people out there that say they never want to touch anything involving it should basically probably ignore a lot of what actually goes on in games these days. And something like a 360 decomp re-comp a PC port tool as well. So, the way we see on the 360, PlayStation 2, and otherwise, it does have some of this involved in it. So, this is something that you just basically need to answer for yourself when it comes to what you feel comfortable with, but it is an interesting topic at least for me to discuss and see how you guys feel about it. And I totally know the comment section's probably going to get messy.

[00:09:08]And if it gets a little bit too messy, Dad's going to come in and tell you to go back to your rooms because I want you guys to have normal discussions. It's one of those things 99 out of 100 you're totally cool. You can debate things back and forth and have a fun time with the concept of deciding how the future should feel. I say one out of every 100 of you absolutely just takes it way too far, takes that train and drives it directly into a bridge and bank but blowing everything up along the process.

[00:09:34]But what can you do? You can never make 100% of people happy. And as far as the concept of I {quote} "can't talk about these things on the channel", I will tell you right now, the list of people that decide what I talk about starts and stops with the person behind this microphone and absolutely nothing else involved. I will always continue to talk about what it is I feel like I am interested in talking about and I will always allow you to make the decision as to how you feel about it. For the people out there that saying being neutral on this is basically advocating for it, I do not understand that mindset whatsoever. We should be intelligent people and be able to discuss these topics without saying if you don't take a firm way stance one way or the other that you're somehow {quote} "doing something wrong". Because again, a lot of the instances of this, it would either be that you get it in the way that the developers decided that they wanted to bring it to you or you wouldn't get it in any way, shape or form like Lupin the Third that we just talked about. And I am stoked that there is a translation and I have absolutely no issue with somebody using an auto translation feature for a game that basically no one knows exists and never actually got an English language release. I really can't think of anything to point to to say that this is a bad development as far as gaming is concerned.

[00:10:46]Let's do a little hypothetical situation right here as we move into the next clip, a game that basically absolutely no one can play unless they own the original hardware and the original hardware is exceedingly rare and exceedingly expensive. We're talking about Battle Tryst on the Konami 3DO M2 arcade board. Now, I of course own multiple boards and I can play this game anytime I want. But if you go over to MAME and try to emulate it, it just doesn't work. There's graphics missing and you can't actually enjoy the game.

[00:11:11]Now, if somebody like me, and I'm going to tell you right now I have no plans to do this, created an entire PC port that played perfectly and I used automated tools to be able to do that and not actual human code, would you be upset and who would basically lose out if a game that nobody outside of maybe like 12 people in the world can play because the original hardware is in in of them, write it to all of you, who would actually be the loser in that situation?

[00:11:34]It's a thought experiment and you can answer however you want down below. You can say nobody loses, you can say everybody loses, you can say anything in between. But I'm just making this video to talk about the fact that this conversation's going to keep going. It's not going anywhere, it's going to be part of gaming in the future. Short of that, if you have any questions or comments, leave them down below. Try to be cool in the comments. I don't expect it, but I hope for it. And I'll see you guys next time.

[00:11:57]Bye-bye.