Falco Girgis@falco_girgis
It seems that my favorite person--only account I have ever blocked in all my time on X--is attempting to belittle jnmartin and downplay the significance of his upcoming Sonic R port to the Sega Dreamcast, due to his usage of AI tools to aid in the decompilation process. Not only that, but the Dreamcast community is being accused of being full of “AI slop” in the comments section, with people even asking whether I’m just an AI vibe coder… which is hilarious given how half of the time I’m writing SH4 assembly in a notebook by hand. 🤣
It's true, though, jmnmartin is using Claude to decompile the PC version of Sonic R—something he has never once denied. For this port, there exists no source material, and doing it by hand would take years. AI is the only reason people are about to be playing this banger of a game on their Sega Dreamcasts, and I can only assume that most people will be too busy having a good time on their DC's to really give two shits how the game was decompiled.
Love AI or hate AI, the fact that jnmartin is using it for Sonic R's decompilation does not somehow negate the fact that he's one of the most talented, prolific developers I have ever met, who has worked to bring Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Doom 64, Star Fox 64, Ocarina of TIme, WipeOut, and Sonic Mania to our Sega Dreamcasts, doing all porting of the source C codebases by hand and all for free... and no amount of anti AI hatred somehow negates his talent and skill.
Now... what does this mean about the quality of the upcoming Sonic R decomp from a technical perspective? Shit, I don't personally know, as I'm not really an AI user…but this is an enormous undertaking, and I'm not really sure that there exists any similar endeavor within the community to serve as our basis for comparison.
Will the codebase be of the same quality as if it were written by hand? 🤔
Well... We're all about to find out, as we bear witness to this grand spectacle of science and engineering, I guess! But I will say, from my first-hand experience joining in on some of the N64-to-DC ports, that some of the codebases (which I will not call out by name) are still shittily-written, UB-ridden C code, despite being done by hand. 😂
But hey, maybe my BFF, "Cosmic Eternity," here is right, and we should all take this opportunity to be as butthurt as possible that we're about to get this absolute banger of a Sega Saturn and PC game ported to the finest game console that ever existed for free, potentially with online play? No idea... DISCUSS!
