People like to hate on everything AI, but where is the problem here? You are getting ports of games. Which is awesome. The project might be abandoned by the dev sometime in the future, but that is also happening with every other hobby project out there. And those ports are also not taking that many tokens to produce, so even the energy consumption argument is not really working here. Someone going on a ski trip will produce much, much more CO2 than someone creating a port from home.

All of F(L)OSS has a slop problem right now.

Everything has a slop problem right now.

I can’t even take part in any pro/contra AI-assisted coding (see, I’m trying to be polite) discussions because whenever I admit that the other person has a point, I remember AI’s political, social and environmental impact, and i’m back to nope. And I can’t separate local models from all that, not completely. Maybe in 10 years when US corporate fascism is quenched for good.

There’s so many established emulators on PC that I don’t understand the issue. If you wanna actually play it, why not play it on the intended console it released for?

Are there not established repos for PSP gaming? I don’t really know how you’re supposed to get new psp games unless you’re burning them to those tiny discs yourself.

Is it difficult to avoid these quick demos / proof of concept ports? I have no experience (or desire) to go into the physical realm of retro gaming, emulators are good enough for me.

I played AAI2 (the Capcom localization) on DS and the entire thing was somehow vibecoded. Thousands of lines of Python (to do what?) just to replace some dialog. It kept crashing through different episodes but I’d reload my (last) save and play through the last half hour again, to then battle through a few crashes and then eventually proceed. I’m not sure I would bother with vibecoded stuff anymore.

They totally miss retro appeal and hobbies.

How many of the games were worth playing on the original platform?

This is a form of preservation. Let people enjoy things.

Some of the ports we’re seeing in the retro handheld community lately have been great, and I love seeing developers push these little devices beyond what they were ever intended to do. But I’ve definitely noticed what feels like a growing amount of ‘port-slop’, with new projects appearing seemingly every few hours, many of them feeling more like quick experiments than anything particularly worthwhile.

I’m not against the experimentation at all, but I do wonder if we’re reaching a point where quantity is starting to overshadow quality. Anyway, I put together a short opinion piece about it, just my own thoughts on something I’ve been noticing lately, especially here with my favorite old system: the PSP.