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Someone posted a vibe-coded Genesis/Sega CD/32X emulator to the emudev Discord today. It's not particularly fast (a debug build of BlastEm is faster), it's not particularly accurate, it's not portable and the code looks about as you expect, but it does run games. Not sure how I feel about it.

Michael Pavone

@retrodev.com

On the one hand, at least in its current state, it kind of sucks so I don't think it will get much use. I'm not really surprised that this is possible. Kind of expected better results given that the README claims a number of other emulators (including BlastEm) were used as a reference.

8/10/26, 8:38 pm0 reposts4 likes

Michael Pavone

@retrodev.com

On the other hand, I spent a huge number of hours over the past 14 years to get BlastEm to where it is today. Some of that time was spent expanding our knowledge of the platform and I guess that's more durable than the software itself, but a lot was writing code or fixing bugs.

kayla, belated reptilian 🏳️‍⚧️🐊

@kaylagator.bsky.social

don't be surprised; it copied and pasted code from other emulators. this is the same trick as always, earlier this year anthropic bragged about claude "writing a C compiler" but it was very bad and the project is completely dead now. these people do not actually have the skill to write anything new

Michael Pavone

@retrodev.com

So I'm not really familiar enough with the code of the other emulators referenced to say no copying happened, but none of the code I looked at seemed very similar to anything in BlastEm at least.

kayla, belated reptilian 🏳️‍⚧️🐊

@kaylagator.bsky.social

from my poking around in blastem, it's not really structured like a typical emulator. (this comment is meant as praise) even stuff like 68k and z80 cores there are plenty of them out there implemented in different ways, so: hard to tell. but i imagine the more obscure CD/32X bits give it away

Anaël seghezzi

@anaelseghezzi.bsky.social

Why not just refactor "x"emulator function names and say it's "new"emulator. All vibe coded retro games are ports. Most of the time from source. Sure we have to do a lot of basic coding, but all important works are works where you thought hard about it, typing it means nothing.