[…] to ship rough PC ports

The writing was on the wall, but this really bummed me out. The game decomp community is a small group of incredibly talented and dedicated people who are genuinely interested in understanding exactly what makes a game tick, completely independent of making PC ports. In my experience, they have been very welcoming to newcomers who wanted to learn the ropes and make small contributions, which is what community is all about. But LLMs have really run roughshod over the spirit of competition and collaboration just as they have in open source software.

I hope that the less flashy, non-vibecoded projects oriented around digital archaeology can still find a way to tune out the noise and persist amid the chaos, because it’s their hard work, love, and attention to detail that has produced things like the incredibly well-documented Pokémon Emerald decomp which enabled an entire generation of romhackers to fulfill their creative visions without the limitations of traditional binary hacking. But again, even if a decomp project doesn’t produce a single romhack, patch, or port, it’s valuable in and of itself for the knowledge it adds to the world, the expertise that the contributors gain, and the bonds that form over years of toil. Plus, it’s just plain fun!

edit: fixed link