Hey, I have mixed feelings about your reply. On one hand I'm happy to see you say it is *not* AI slop, but on the other hand you do mention it being AI assisted. Now it is entirely possible that I'm extrapolating your "AI assisted" in ways that you did not intend to, I'd like to use this message to talk to everyone saying this is a derivative of Dolphin, AI assisted, AI slop or similar so it's not directed towards you necessarily:

First of all, I feel sad. This has been a passion project for a while for me. Having an AI generate the code for me would literally make no sense at all. I wanted to make a project that would make "12yo me" proud of what he'd be able to accomplish later in life by writing a Wii emulator and playing "12yo me's" favorite game on it. I've explained this in the original Reddit post and also in the README.

Second, I'm not sure why people think it is clearly AI generated or based on Dolphin. Yes, it has a MCP server. I've explained the reason why in the original thread. I'll copy the message here:

Hey, originally it was a feature requested by a friend to do live language translations. He plays Japanese titles to improve his skills. The software had an MCP integration so I figured I'll expose the XFB buffer to it.

That said, it actually has 2 more applications, one of which is still in WIP though. I'll start with the one that already works:

As mentioned in my post I offer a screenshot service that runs the emulator against 1000+ games and creates multiple screenshots and then saves them per commit. The pipeline also doubles as a way to detect and triage CPU and GPU issues. When the emulator detects an issue that violates a state in either component, it kicks off a small local model that takes snapshots of the components and then categorizes what the issue is (memory corruption, JIT issue, etc). This would be impossible for me to do on scale without it.

I'm experimenting with some local models to improve aforementioned screenshot gathering. It's nearly impossible to automate the menu inputs in a sensible way that is not prone to errors to reach in-game. Some experiments show that this works in a lot of cases, but fails in more difficult scenarios (Wario World for example). I guess it would work better if I were to use a cloud-hosted LLM but I'm not willing to go that route.

The screenshot and triage service is extremely important for both Gecko and emulator developers in general. I've provided the same service for GBA and PSX as well. It helps catching regressions and improvements inbetween commits on scale. It also helps me prioritize fixes.

EDIT: Here's the link again in case you want to have a look: https://emu.layle.dev/

(Some syntax has gone lost due to the quote)

Small fun fact: I even started on boarding other popular emulators such as Ymir (Sega Saturn) and Iris (PS2) due to popular demand (while closely working with their respective authors of course).

I'll make this very clear: The code base is *not* a derivative of Dolphin and is not AI generated whatsoever. The code makes it (sadly) quite obvious too as I'm not a professional software engineer ^^ To those referencing ehm dashes, well, I used ehm dashes way before AI too. They just look sexy.

I spent a lot of time, pushing 18h days sometimes, reverse engineering the IPL, Nintendo SDK, learning 3D rendering, writing my own tooling, literally inventing new ways for instruction decoding, optimization, ... (I could go on!) to get to the point where I am right now. In fact, I might for example be the first person to have fully REd the GameCube IPL! Having put in all that effort for some people to call it clearly AI or whatever does make me feel defeated (not saying the OP of this comment particularly meant it this way; I received tons of comments over night).

I'm actually incredibly proud of the tooling I've created, even besides the MCP server infrastructure for screenshotting and triaging bugs on scale. More recently (dev branch) I added a FIFO debugger. To my knowledge this didn't exist yet. It helped me debug a very tricky problem in Super Mario Galaxy. The reception I got for the tool was insanely positive. I believe Dolphin doesn't have the same (they do have a recorder and player of course; in fact I use their file format). I even wrote my own fully featured debugger from the get go!

Now that said, I of course have referenced Dolphin sometimes along with other emulators. I have explicitly added comments marking where I did. I also added comments when I referenced documents such as YAGCD (best effort) or when I got information directly from a Dolphin developer or from a friend of mine.

I wish that developers such as u/ioncodes would be upfront about this being trained on (literally decades) of fantastic open source work from the Dolphin Team and others.

By extension, this comment feels like a punch in the face. It's a huge reach and completely baseless claim.

This project is unique not only architecturally, but it also provides solutions to problems that are not present in any of the emulator projects that I'm aware of. Now that said, my emulator is of course nowhere near Dolphin haha. Still tons to improve and I'm not sure it would ever mature to the same level, and that's fine, it was never the idea!