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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2026
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N64 recomp is a good example, but I would argue that the n64 is quite a few steps below the "modern" consoles of the 2000's. As for RexGlue it relies on Xenia which started in 2013 and took 5 years to get 3D.
I can build a house in a day given a front door and a finished house missing a front door.
N64 has historically been one of the more complicated consoles to emulate. Being old is no indicator for complexity. The latest xbox for example internally is much more like a generic pc than the PS3 was (also a complex one to emulate).
N64 emulation has been notoriously difficult to perfect and has historically relied on per-game hacks. Only recently with projects like ares and FPGA cores has emulation gotten much better. Try running any libdragon software on any older N64 emulator to see what I mean. Also N64Recomp specifically is worth mentioning because it is the first notable static recomp tool for video games that I can think of, being used with Zelda64Recomp first.
There's also XenonRecomp that came before, not based on Xenia (AFAIK), Suyu's recent Switch recompilation tool, PS2Recomp, DolRecomp (for GCN and Wii), nWiiURecomp, and probably way more that I'm missing.
You can keep naming static recompilers but there is still years of emulation research behind each one. I could keep going through them and pointing out the fact that most of them say "inspired by X" in their respective readme's but we would be here forever. But just to name a couple more: XenonRecomp - relied on Xenia as a reference (check special thanks) N64Recomp - went ahead and looked at the readme for this and he mentions IDO static recompilation project as inspiration for it (not sure if anything was actually used) Suyu - obviously built using the existing knowledge gained from the emulator (and in the end still falls back to emulation) PS2Recomp - references pcsx2, also still in very early stages. Its hard to tell how many games have been recomped with it but Playported only shows 10 playable Recomp/Decomps
My point is, kairuByte is right, these projects are measured in years. We don't see it because we are standing on the shoulders of giants.
And AI stands on the shoulders on human labor.
Obviously these static recompilation tools (and I purposefully picked ones where I saw no obvious help from LLMs, though I didn't look too carefully) had massive help from prior emulation projects, but they were/are still novel projects (maybe barring Suyu).
Also, it's very possible that N64Recomp used direct ideas or even code from IDO Static Recomp, since that's a project that recompiles IRIX programs, and there is a direct link there given the SGI lineage of both hardware architectures.
The main point I was trying to make is that AI doesn't need to be used to attain speed when it comes to porting games now that these ideas and tooling exist, as these tools can now be used, or new ones creates for consoles that don't yet have them.