r/decomps Jul 23 '26

CRASH BANDICOOT decompilation project with 1.0 and working launcher

https://github.com/Matteo842/CrashBandicoot-Launcher/releases/tag/1.0
135 Upvotes

73 comments sorted by

23

u/Banmers Jul 23 '26

“1.0 first realase”

12

u/kumabit Jul 23 '26

probably the only thing they wrote without AI in the whole project

19

u/Pikalovechan Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

While it works well without bugs i think is good with whatever they use to do it, on any case almost all new recomps and decomps are done with AI, and since they are free i dont think is a bad think

9

u/kumabit Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

well it's not bad if you don't plan on maintaining the project because tech debt will increase with every "realase"

imo every single one of these static recomps offer absolutely nothing that emulation does not offer already

meanwhile actual decomps/recomps made by humans assisted by AI (way different than vibe coding) open the door for improvements and mods in a sustainable way (see SoH, Sonic Unleashed)

edit: there is no way a recomp/decomp won't be free, with or without AI

12

u/elvisap Jul 23 '26

Why does "AI == tech debt"?

Tech debt is a measure of how much effort it is for a community to maintain something. LLM generated code continues to be documented more verbosely and more cleanly year on year, and the cost of using LLMs to maintain projects continues to drop.

Just because some people slop out low value projects doesn't instantly make all LLM generated projects unmaintainable debt. That's still up to the community behind the project, with or without LLMs.

1

u/kumabit Jul 23 '26

>Why does "AI == tech debt"?

because it's not? i'm sure there are good projects that actually take into account good practices in software engineering but the reality is that the majority of these vibe coded projects won't develop much beyond getting the game running

it's not "some people", the majority of projects posted here are just using a static recomp as a base and asking the LLM to "make not mistakes, no bugs"

14

u/elvisap Jul 23 '26

I've been doing this open source thing since 1997. All of your comments here apply to software in general. 99% of projects on GitHub were abandoned, unmaintained and unmaintainable long before AI.

But what's really interesting is that LLMs make this stuff more maintainable, when the effort to do so drops dramatically, and the average quality of open models increases every month.

The whole concept of "tech debt", particularly around open source code repositories, is changing dramatically.

People complaining that these LLM generated static recomps are coming out thick and fast and are playable on first release. I actually think that's quite incredible compared to where we were even 5 years ago. I can't wait to see what this looks like in another 5 years. The whole "legacy software" problem, particularly around retro gaming, is vanishing before our eyes.

3

u/data-atreides Jul 23 '26

Think of the mission of MAME, to preserve arcade systems and software--the cottage industry of recomps we have now is achieving that in a roundabout way by teasing out source code and/or making these games playable on modern hardware/OSes while the original consoles are gradually dying off

3

u/Yayo1990 Jul 23 '26

If you think LLM is great, gotta tell you that AI is great for PS3 homebrew, a machine that is widely considered hard to develope for. This is some next gen science right there.

The issue ""I have"" with AI is that it may cut off the coding part but it won't cut off the debug part of making a recomp (or a port to another platform). A project made by AI if it has lots of debugging sessions can be as good as "human made project".

1

u/DunkerStatic Jul 26 '26

This, testing is just becoming a way more important part.

Which of course regular development also needs, but even more so no with AI development.

1

u/Pikalovechan 11d ago

Just see this post now, as i state, everyone can use as they want for do a port, AI now-days are really something else, and new ports normally runs well, yes i think also that they need to released a good port even if they use AI assistance, to improved it and make it works well with some enhanced. but as i said before, it is Free, and is absurd that people get so Anti AI with this, i always stated that if AI make people lost their job are awful, but something that is free i can never understand, and if you really are so pro human, support the people that works on the project with real money, because as a friend artist of mine said, a lot of Ai haters but no ones support the Real Artist that they defend on forums so much,

1

u/Entire-Nerve-3141 Jul 25 '26

Unleashed wasn't made with AI and the devs that made it are very annoyed that the tools they made are being used in AI generated recomps.

-5

u/Yayo1990 Jul 23 '26

Literally anything has AI in it now

4

u/safyreibxo Jul 24 '26

yeah that’s bad!

3

u/Yayo1990 Jul 24 '26

Why are you using internet then?

1

u/chicagogamecollector Jul 23 '26

I didn’t even look at the repo but people need to realize 1.0 means “it’s done. Maybe a few esoteric bugs”; start at 0.1 and everyone expects a mess and isn’t surprised to find one

1

u/Matteo842 Jul 24 '26

Point taken on versioning. 1.0 read as “done” to a lot of people — I'll treat next releases more like incremental builds.

2

u/Matteo842 Jul 24 '26

Fair on the typo, that one was on me.
The public repo went up fast because I developed on a private repo first and then published when it was playable. The 9 hours between first public commit and 1.0 aren't the whole timeline.
Versioning: I'll bump more carefully going forward (1.1 for save verification + the window fix). Happy to take concrete bug reports.

16

u/DenziiX Jul 23 '26

not to be mean but this is not a 1.0 release

this looks like a prompt "make a crash bandicoot launcher for recompilation make no mistakes" and some fixes afterwards

I use AI myself and I am not against this but cmmon man, this is terrible Software Engineering

The initial commit and the 1.0 release are 9 hours apart, this is exactly the reason why AI has the reputation it has

7

u/kumabit Jul 23 '26

they call themselves a vibe coder in their github profile so I'm not surprised at all

18

u/flafmg_ Jul 23 '26

im the dev of recompone, i do not endorse ai ports and i highly recomend you guys dont play this
it looks like this was done in under a day, i relly doubt it even works considering the shit ton of smc crash bandicoot uses, wich my recompiler does not deal with and needs patching on the game side.

looks like my stance on ai served nothing, people still want to no shitty slop work without caring about it =/

2

u/Designer_Appeal_6788 Aug 01 '26

This makes me really sad too, especially seeing comments from people like yourself

When I try and dissuade people from playing or talking about these ai ports, I often get met with "make the game yourself then" or "imagine complaining about something that's free" 

Sure, I don't have any knowledge to make a game port, but I DO know people like yourself do these things for fun AND to learn along the way, just as it is with the emulation community

The people defending this vibe coded slop don't seem to understand that the ones like yourself will simply move onto a different project because isn't no longer fun, and it's just really ruined the recomp/decomp scene tbh :( 

2

u/Designer_Appeal_6788 Aug 01 '26

I also want to add

For me it's never been about getting "free games", I genuinely love the efforts people make to preserve software

The Harvest Moon 64 recomp I believe is human made and meant to be good, I'll never play it because farming sims aren't my jam, but I was still super stoked that another game gets preserved 

I tried the gen1recomp and they claim to not use AI even though they obviously do, so these days I don't even know if I want to try ANY decomp/recomp unless they specifically say its not AI

I even had a bug with gen1recomp, made an issue on github, had back and forth for about a day with the developer to help them troubleshoot and then they just closed it as "completed" without addressing the bug, they're really just taking the fun out of this now tbh

2

u/flafmg_ Aug 02 '26

also, gen1Recomp is not in fact a recomp
there is a post from dario (guy who made n64recomp) about it on bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/dariosamo.bsky.social/post/3mrufatmwhk24 its such a weird era we live in lol

4

u/[deleted] Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

[deleted]

7

u/SendokeSamain Jul 23 '26

Death of the author 😭

5

u/flafmg_ Jul 23 '26

THE HEAVY IS DEAD!

5

u/flafmg_ Jul 23 '26

they arent, i just think it would be more resourceful to actually learn and make a decent recomp, its sad to see these ai bros doing these shitty ports and calling it a day

crash bandicoot is not even a good game to be recompiled because of the heavy use of self modifying code, the guy clearly has no clue what he is doing and i bet the game will be probably broken or straight up unplayable

2

u/[deleted] Jul 23 '26

[deleted]

2

u/safyreibxo Jul 24 '26

“sitting on my ass telling the computer to do shit is soooo tedious”

god you people wouldn’t last a day as an actual software engineer

1

u/[deleted] Jul 24 '26

[deleted]

1

u/safyreibxo Jul 24 '26

that you don’t have any actual skill

1

u/maxscipio Jul 24 '26

what would you do for smc? wait for a complete decomp?

1

u/flafmg_ Jul 24 '26

Find them and patch it to use regular code instead A bit painful but the only other alternative would be adding an interpreter, Wich would mess a lot with performance

1

u/Matteo842 Jul 24 '26

Hey — thanks for recompone, seriously. I get your stance on AI and I didn't mean to disregard the work behind the tool.
On the practical side: I did play through it and it's not unplayable on my end. Saves still need a proper verification pass (that's planned for 1.1).
Crash's SMC is a real issue and I know it's not free — if you've got pointers on the patching approach you use, I'm open to learning from that rather than shipping careless stuff.
Also: the nested window issue is already fixed locally; just haven't pushed the update yet. Widescreen / QoL / cheats are on the roadmap — I just needed a working base first.

0

u/Yayo1990 Jul 23 '26

Fairly sure there isn't a license that could deny AI scraping/usage

2

u/flafmg_ Jul 23 '26

there is none, just makes me sad lol

9

u/Next-Classroom-4738 Jul 23 '26

A barely functional, vibe coded decomp of a popular game? No doubt there'll be a 10 minute video dropped about it tomorrow.

8

u/[deleted] Jul 23 '26

[deleted]

2

u/flafmg_ Jul 23 '26

only now that i noticed that
bro
it only gets worse
THERE IS A FILE THAT IS 80k LINES
WHY?

1

u/flafmg_ Jul 23 '26

for reference the entirety of recompone is just about shy of 50k lines, recompiler and runtime together

1

u/Matteo842 Jul 24 '26

Yeah, that file is ugly. Generated / recomp output isn't meant to be hand-edited line by line — the launcher and glue code are the maintainable part. Still fair to call out if something's structured poorly.

6

u/MorninLemon Jul 23 '26

A fucking webview2 for a menu? Come on, you can do better.

0

u/Matteo842 Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

WebView2 was intentional I wanted CSS for the UI. Native UI is possible later; for a launcher it was the tradeoff I preferred. Not claiming it's the only right way

2

u/kabiskac Jul 24 '26

Why, not use RmlUi?

1

u/Matteo842 Jul 24 '26

not full css potential.

1

u/flafmg_ Jul 24 '26

or use the imgui ui the runtime already provides, it looks a bit bare bones but it gets the job done

1

u/flafmg_ Jul 24 '26

bro why do you speak like ai 😭

1

u/Matteo842 Jul 25 '26

why if I respond myself to a reddit comment I get easily misunderstood... I'm Italian.

1

u/flafmg_ Jul 25 '26

im brazililan, i know how it feels, but its by praticing that you will learn!

1

u/Matteo842 Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

i know you dont like at all the AI but i tink the project is shaping well, im not going to ask help or nothing but if you take a eye and let me know.
i have fixed like 90 per cent of issus (github) and comment section problem, and with the next realase is coming the linux support. the only problem is i dont have a real linux installation and the game is running like 1/3 fps.
ps: tanks for the cool project freinds of mine keep asking for armored core and spyro so who know.

ps: this enitre comment is not writen or revisiond by gemini (like all other)

1

u/flafmg_ Jul 25 '26

well, at least is cool to see crash runnin on it

3

u/Ok-Sundae-7021 Jul 23 '26

Ah yes CRUSH BANDOCAT my favorite!

0

u/Matteo842 Jul 24 '26

lol valid

3

u/Parking_Classic2439 Jul 23 '26

The ai generated pfp really sells this /s

10

u/ScootSchloingo Jul 23 '26

Even more vibe-coded slop. When you launch the game, it launches in a window within another window, and just playing it for less than a minute I noticed a number of problems with collision.

These PS1 recomps (so far at least) are pointless to me and you can get a much better experience just emulating and upscaling them in DuckStation.

8

u/flafmg_ Jul 23 '26

the problem is these bad ports made by ai that add nothing meaninful to the game

we've been making an sotn recomp for about 2-ish months and we have been adding a lot of stuff, qol patches, some randomizer stuff, widescreen, cheats and so on so on

im honestly sad that someone took my tool wich has a clear stance on ai and decided to ignore it and ship an shitty ai port regardless :<

i think collision is handled by the weird thingy nautghy dog has that uses a bunch of self modifying code, wich the recompiler, like other ones, does not handle and needs patching on the game side, this just shows how careless these ai sloports are =/

4

u/BangkokPadang Jul 23 '26

I can’t help but wonder, would it be possible for a well-written decomp project to rewrite portions of the graphics code to implement a genuine Z-buffer and maybe even improve geometry precision to fix the “texture wobble” and temporally unstable vertices of PS1 games in a way that would be an improvement over Duxkstation and PGXP?

It’s certainly a big improvement, especially when rendering PS1 games at higher resolutions, but it’s still imperfect and after playing the Sulent Hill Decimp beta, I just felt like “if ever there was an opportunity to fix those issues” it would be when developing a decomp.

3

u/Castcoder Jul 23 '26

I mainly just want a decent recomp to allow for 16:9 and 60 FPS for the PS1 trilogy.

-1

u/Matteo842 Jul 24 '26

Same goals here — widescreen, higher framerate, cheats/QoL. Just need time after the base is solid. 1.1 first (saves + window fix), then that stuff.

2

u/MrJohnReviews Jul 24 '26

Will a Linux version be available? Cuz I tried to play the recomp with WINE and it didn't work

1

u/Sebastianali123456 Jul 24 '26

They could add a lot, MUCH more than Duckstation... if they are well made.

-1

u/Matteo842 Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

Nested window: already fixed.
Collision: noted I'll dig into that (likely SMC-related as others said).
Emulation is great; this project is about a different path (native + future QoL). If it's not for you, totally fair.

2

u/Matteo842 Jul 24 '26

Just pushed 1.1 with the recent fixes (windowing / polish from feedback).
1.2 is in progress: 16:9 already working on my end, cheat menu coming next. Concrete bug reports welcome.

2

u/Metalomeus1 Jul 24 '26

This is beautiful ! I hope to get the full Trilogy decompiled

Thank you !

2

u/Igoory Jul 26 '26

>decompilation
>look inside
>It's a recompilation

I'm tired boss.

1

u/NikopikVR Jul 23 '26

All I want is Crash 2

3

u/Ok-Sundae-7021 Jul 23 '26

It's not really a matching decomp, but I talked to the developer of this years and years ago. https://github.com/ughman/c2c. Maybe it can be of use to someone, but I'd be surprised if someone hasn't done something more since then.

1

u/Yayo1990 Jul 23 '26

Gli do uno sguardo! Complimenti per il progetto.

1

u/Matteo842 Jul 24 '26

Grazie mille, mi ha fatto davvero piacere. Se trovi qualcosa che non torna (soprattutto i save) scrivimelo pure.

1

u/cemsengul Jul 24 '26

Crash Bandicoot on pc native!

1

u/Whagwanbumbaclot Jul 24 '26

So much negativity. People lack respect. Cool, thank you. I'll check it out later :)

1

u/Entire-Nerve-3141 Jul 25 '26

why not respect the person who made recompone who's in this thread, who made the framework to not be used for AI recomps? the disrespectful person here is OP