There's nothing stopping you from making an emulator without using AI or whichever way you think is best for your own learning.

AI allows players to have decompiled and in turn ports of games to new platforms, enhanced versions of the game, etc.

Seems pretty egoistical when nobody's forcing you to use AI in any way, and it provides an objective benefit to other people.

Yes people will lazy their way out of it. Many of us program, but few of us ever bothered to learn, with fluency, assembly. Those who wanted to did, and those who didnt stuck to higher level languages.

Personally, I think it's fascinating to see how the industry greats actually made the magic happen. Everyone talks about the endless fine-tuning of controls that Miyamoto asked for in SM64: now we get to see what that actually looks like! Or maybe the game had a hidden secret debug menu that no one's ever seen in 20 years, or an unfinished character is hiding in the code.

Maybe my perspective is different because I've worked on games for most of my career, so seeing how _other_ teams solved the hard challenges is exciting for me.

MAME is doing some amazing reverse engineering work on some more recent arcade boards by using AI[1] that would've taken decades to do so by hand, and it's being conflated with some rando committing to github the result of 5 hours of Claude stirring over the Golden Eye N64 rom and then publishing on twitter "Done, here's my Patreon link, please and thank you".

[1]https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2026-working-with-what-we-hav...

Yes: https://patrickjohnston.org/bank/index.html

This isn't to say it's impossible to guide good context-aware commenting style from.an AI, but there would be much terser/usable comments on all of the weapons source for example.

The biggest problem with this stuff is, as usual, that the people guiding the AI don't know what "good" decomps etc look like IMO. AI tool usage tends to reflect ones own tastes and understanding.

We live in a golden age of emulation because that attitude died out. With more powerful computers (and less hack-oriented development) it became possible to properly emulate a complete console with a high level of accuracy. For preservationist purposes, accurate emulation is much more important than being the first to emulate a game, or even being able to decompile it. The only reason that we can point and laugh at low-quality efforts like Nintendo Switch Online is because the community cares even more than Nintendo did. The reason Wine/DXVK/Proton works so well is because it didn't fracture itself into a thousand downstream forks to fix one specific game. It's a holistic effort.

A lot of the hand-wringing comes from a justified place that doesn't want to see emulation backslide into a bazaar-like community. You're free to disagree with their logic and vibe-code a thousand game decomps, but in all likelihood emulation will be a more popular choice for the foreseeable future. Lots of people emulate stuff on their iPhone or Steam Deck, almost nobody is playing a game decomp on it though. I can't imagine AI tipping the scales on decomp popularity, especially among average Joes.

You could put an Einstein paper on a photocopier, mask the author, put your name in the place and publish. Except everyone would have thought you are an idiot.

You could clone the Linux kernel, erase all copyrights and release under Idiux. Except everyone would have thought you are an idiot.

Now that there are laundering machines financed with unlimited printed and previously stolen money a large number of developers affirms and praises the idiots.

void foo() { bar(); }

int foo(int x, float y) { return bar(x, y); }

This is because parameter-passing and return-value handling can sometimes be done in zero instructions in PPC, if the values are already in the right registers. So you need to continually go back and reassess old functions once you learn the signatures of newer ones!

There are also creative choices made in reverse engineering because there are many possible source codes that could compile to the same executable output. The author has to make countless choices around how to interpret assembly as higher level language constructs, and code organization in terms of functions and variables used. This isn't anything like zipping and unzipping some file, it's not a one to one transformation. As you can see we can absolutely have byte for byte identical output without having access to the original source code.

I agree that it would be copyright infringement if you distribute the original game assets (sounds, fonts, textures, models), but I strongly disagree when it comes to the source code because of above factors. And clearly distributing reversed source code without those assets would not enable someone to even obtain the original binary. They'd need to already have them in the first place (e.g. by buying the game and dumping them).

Also this is anecdotal but Nintendo is known for being quite belligerent with their copyright enforcement, they will take down various fan games in the name of protecting their IP. However to this day there are multiple full byte for byte decomps of Pokémon GBC games available on GitHub that haven't received so much as a DMCA takedown. Why wouldn't they care to take them down unless they couldn't do anything about reverse engineering? Nintendo still profits from reselling their old games after all (under their "Virtual Console" releases). The pattern repeats with Nintendo game console emulators, the only reason Nintendo is able to take some of them down is when these emulators include decryption keys for ROMs, they have never had a case for taking down an emulator on the basis of it behaving identically to the hardware they sell.

Both in theory and in practice I fail to see why you would be right that game decomps are illegal or even in the gray area.

If you are "significantly similar", you are probably infringing.

Feel free to explore the myriad of precedent setting cases in the music remix community.