Mario Kart Wii recompiled for PC using AI, with 4K potential and uncapped frame rates — 'first static recompilation of a Wii game' supports over 200 tracks thanks to Retro Rewind compatibility
a month ago by JensSpahnpasta to c/games
Lmao, gottem.
Yes. But think about it this way: if companies are going to use AI to rip us all off, we might as well use it to rip them off too. (No shade at Nintendo who doesn't resort to AI slop...)
I hate to break it to you, but we're never getting rid of AI.
Like how we will forever have trace amounts of cesium and PFAS/microplastics in our blood, AI generated content is going to be around in most things.
The question is will you also use it for good, or just leave it for the bad actors only?
No, sadly it wont.
However, decompilation and recompilation are areas that AI could theoretically be extremely effective (due to the fact that much of it is based on educated guesswork in the first place, whether done by humans or not), and being able to turn proprietary software into plausibly "open source" software will be an effective tool for fighting back against big tech corporations (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Adobe, etc.) as well as for preserving classic, beloved software and games.
Listen, I'm as big of a generative AI hater as the next guy, if not bigger. I see myself as much as an artist and musician as a programmer, and I hate big tech for what I can only call the most egregious act of IP theft and cultural strip-mining in human history. It's plagiarism on an industrial scale. It's ethically wrong, economically a house of cards, and generally fucking sucks.
But at the same time, machine learning is an effective method of data-driven guessing and pattern recognition. Arguably it is the most effective method, which is why it's much easier to use ML to make a program for things like image recognition than traditional algorithmic coding. Having recently read Chris Lewis' blog on the decomp/recomp effort for Snowboard Kids 2 on the N64, it's clear that LLMs are absolutely not a silver bullet of decompilation (at least, not yet), but it is almost an ideal problem space for what ML really does--guess shit based on a big pool of data.
So, my feeling is, if big tech companies are going to leverage these tools to steal from the people, then I think turnabout is fair play and I look forward to seeing the people leverage these tools for relative good. If people who sell art are going to be pushed out of the market due to slop generators, then it's only fair for people to reverse engineer any and all of the software that matters in return.
No, not really. That actually is awesome. If AI enables people to do cool stuff like this in their free time, that is great.
People really need to get a sense of energy consumption. Someone sitting at home creating a AI version of Mario Kart and distributing it via the Internet uses less energy than Nintendo having its team commuting into an office, producing Discs/carts, shipping them into stores and so on. The amount of energy used here should be less than a single person driving a few hundred kilometers with his car to do another Hobby.
Nope, not in the least. Just happy to have the recompile regardless of toolset
with no discrimination.
Sir, this is social media.
95% of it is people brainstorming to finding new ways to define an out-group and coming up with creative insults to use against them. (The rest is cat pics, thankfully.)
Discrimination is a key ingredient in self-righteous outrage, don'cha'know?
Or I could just play Mario Kart Midnight without AI
I always liked the wii version because it didn't have such aggressive "balancing" and you could win by half the racetrack or more if you played well and didn't get blue shelled. I don't know if the newer ones are like that, but it was a welcome change at the time in my opinion.
8 was somewhat like that, while World is very shortcut and item dependent. Items are extremely powerful, and if you’re unable to take a big shortcut, because of a lack of mushrooms or skill with the new mechanics, and especially in the routes/intermission tracks (they’re basically tracks between the normal tracks and they mostly kinda suck), you lose. Even if you’re first spot for the most part. Still really fun tho.
Cool and all, but I’d prefer they worked on games and consoles that don’t already work amazingly well via emulation.
I wonder if recompiling will be the new emulation, since architecture for consoles has gotten more complicated.
So someone else can correct me, but the architecture for consoles has gotten less complicated.
The GameCube, Wii & Wii U run on a PowerPC CPU architecture. Switch & Switch 2 run on an ARM architecture.
But the recent PlayStation and Xbox consoles are all x86/x86_64, which is the same as your PC. So these consoles won't need recompilation.
For the Switch series, while ARM would need recompilation, it's also hugely popular. I know Valve is doing some ARM magic, although I think that's to ARM and not from ARM, but it still might be helpful. But importantly recompilation of these should be much easier.
ARM is a RISC ISA, which should make it way easier to emulate/statically compile. The main difficulties wouldn't be hardware quirks like a lot of past emulators, but system OS quirks. The wine project has dealt with a lot of both (x86 has a ton of instructions and windows has a lot of system shit going on).
I do think you are 100% correct that hardware is much simpler now. The Switch has had several emulators for a while now bc of this.
It has become more complicated. You are forgetting to mention that there is now os' running on consoles that you also need to emulate. And if you dont want to emulate that, youd need to emulate the actual hardware in more detail ( + need data dumps of consoles ) and have to emulate the chips with all its co-processors and securities. Encryption cores/engines, mmu's, hypervisors, ...
Back on the gamecube and wii days you had to emulate... The cpu, nand ( or bios ) and disc drive. All games had all information anf software contained on the disc or channel. Thats it.
And yes, ps4 was , for example, a x86 cpu. But that doesnt mean its instantly compatible with your pc. The architectures and features are completely different.
For example, ps5 has a feature that the gpu can read from the ssd without passing cpu or ram. While some pc's can now do it too, this was long not the case.
And there are other things too ( no bios, no pch iirc, completely different os design/syscalls, ... )
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@sh.itjust.works
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
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- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
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Comments.
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Anyone else wince when they read "using ai"? I like the whole recompiling thing though.
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