r/3dshacks • u/killermike523 • 28d ago
Unofficial 3DS Port of F-Zero X based on G-Diffuser & the decompilation of inspectredc (entirely AI generated)
Hey all, three weeks ago I started using Claude Code to generate a 3DS port of F-Zero X based on the hardwork of Zorkats and Inspectredc (and others).
The crazy thing is, it works. And it works pretty well. It runs in 3D at near 60fps for 50% of the time with dips down to about 45fps in crowds on complex stages. I've been playing it and having a blast.
Note: I understand there is a lot of pushback around AI usage, let alone 100% created ports.
If the existence and usage of AI bothers you, feel free to not play. I understand. The ethics of LLMs are muddy and their incoming impact on society is understated. This project, in my opinion, serves as proof of the latter. However, to anyone who has ever dreamed of F-Zero X 3DS, enjoy.
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u/dwalker109 26d ago
This is actually an impressive delivery of something which I find somewhat uninteresting. If you’re going to use agents to do something then I guess detailing all the stuff around they is a good way to go.
I do think that the underlying work this all builds on is not to be underestimated. And that it cost $5000 (and in reality much more because these prices are giveaway cheap right now) is sobering, because the true victim in a lot of cases is a level playing field (you now need capital to do this stuff, not free time).
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u/killermike523 26d ago
my $200 subscription is the subsidized cost, the $5k is probably closer to real cost. even at $25k, it's still less than my estimate of $200k for a professional engineer to deliver this within a year.
out of curiosity, why do you find this project uninteresting?
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u/opa334 26d ago edited 26d ago
So I understand this right? You're estimating $200k for someone to port an already existing decompilation to the 3DS? And a year of work?! I think this is an extreme overestimation, granted I have no background in 3DS development, so I can't know for sure, but I am experienced when it comes to software development and reverse engineering in general. First of all, there is no market for this, so likely nobody would be paying someone to make this port at all. Secondly, from what I have read so far, this doesn't seem like the most complicated thing in the world. I would estimate a professional 3ds (homebrew?) developer to be able to deliver this port within a month and the "cost" to be somewhere closer to $5-10k. Like if you paid an experienced 3ds developer even just $5k, I'm pretty sure they'd happily work on something this.
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u/BlasterMaster4264 26d ago
The Claude subscription needs to get justified somehow. And what better way than to make a lot of bs up
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u/killermike523 26d ago
I'm a Software Engineer of 10 years & a game developer and those are very realistic numbers. Don't know what to tell you. That's why this project is both amazing and scary.
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u/Lucid_lion1 25d ago
i have vibe coded a lot of stuff including apps that right now is in closed beta, no i dont need capital to do this, its time AI is about 20-30 dollars /month and u can do a lot. Makeing games thow that are advanced u need 3d grapics etc, yes u might need captal to finish it but you can code the basic with placeholder elements and when done buy assets, however this is a port we talking about so some time and inported assets and its done
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u/dwalker109 25d ago
No.
You do need capital to vibe code. Don’t know what to trll you.
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u/Lucid_lion1 25d ago
Okay, can you explain how I, with 0 capital, have made one Windows app that is currently in the final stages before closed beta, and one Android app that is already in closed beta through the Play Store?
Sure, I paid for for the AI. And yes, the Play Store fee was $25 to publish it there, but you can also distribute an Android app for free through sideloading.
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u/dwalker109 25d ago
I mean, that’s it. You paid for the AI. At massively subsidised rate. That’s capital.
Now, you might consider that a fair trade. All good. You do you. Me, I enjoyed the point in time where writing the code was just labour, not the output of a SaaS. That was a bit more egalitarian.
But agajn, if you think that’s a worthwhile trade then cool.
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u/Lucid_lion1 25d ago
tbh if i didn’t have a job i could do all my work in about 2 weeks and one payment
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u/dwalker109 21d ago
But again. Than subscription model is heavily subsidised. If you actually payed in full a value which allowed the vendor to make a profit, it would cost you a hell of a lot more.
Capital. They have it right now. Soon they will ask you for it, essentially.
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u/dwalker109 25d ago
Indeed. But pro engineer costs aren’t something I usually consider for open source projects.
As for interest levels, I just find agentic AI uninteresting. It’s just a personal thing.
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u/BlasterMaster4264 26d ago edited 26d ago
You are so pathetic and so are your inflated numbers and misleading math.
Sure, porting an (already decompiled and ported to PC) N64 game to the 3DS costs about 100000 nintendillion dolars and takes 20 years to make but you were able to ""make"" it in two hours with some spare change.
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u/THE_FREEDOM_COBRA 26d ago
Anti-AI people feel like the next evolution of vegans some times. It's coming, and it's gonna revolutionize a lot of industries. We're better off preparing guardrails than trying to destroy roads.
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u/killermike523 26d ago
Further to your point, I agree that we need real societal recognition and political policy to help mitigate the devaluation of the knowledge economy. There is going to be massive displacement of jobs and further concentration of wealth. AND it's definitely a bubble until the very few 'winners' are decided, which is going to wreck havoc on retirement accounts. It's all bad, other than playing F-Zero X on 3DS lol.
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u/killermike523 26d ago
Yep. People called developers lazy for not doing ports. The magic 'port' button is finally here, and people still want to deny it AND still call devs lazy.
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u/NesNobnaz 26d ago
From my point of view, it's an artist vs coder fight. I'm an artist and so a lot of us hate specifically GenAI, so while I did read everything you wrote, I still fundamentally disagree and hate everything about this. It's really the artist side where, speaking for myself, don't want a magic "do this" button, I want to make the art myself, so I think a lot of us types, who also aren't coders/programmers, don't realize how many people don't want to code everything themselves using their own knowledge and help from others. Not every artist agrees, as some artists would love a "shade this for me" button, the lazy claims comes from a "How can you not want to do it yourself?" mindset, and the other half who are worried about their bottom line cause there exists a magic button. A lot of programmers I've read or spoken too seems like they like this cause it cuts out trying to find a specific stackexchange post for a very specific problem that artists never have to face. If we need help, it's usually one DM away and maybe 2 hours of talking on Discord.
Sorry for the long ramble, I'm still trying to fight the AI thing with myself cause I can see the good but experience the bad of it, and there's too many bad actors for me to say I could ever support GenAI. I just wish it was more of a AI assisted database programmers can draw from and not these LLMs. I don't see, right now, how there's ever going to be a middle ground. At the end of the day, I don't care how fast it was, you didn't make it, and I think that's the biggest problem people have, but I do know people will care less and less if you made it, and that it just works. I would never want my art to be done faster if I didn't do it myself, but like your own words wrote, this would have taken hundreds of hours to do, not just one afternoon for me to complete a single drawing.
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u/killermike523 25d ago
I have counter arguments in regards to coding vs art, but I don't want to derail this.
More than anything, I feel your pain. I fundamentally condemn generative AI usage in creating images, video, or audio.
I believe art is meant to be expressive, personal, and intertwined with our unique point of view. All things an AI can never accomplish and why it's been so widely rejected.
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u/NesNobnaz 25d ago
It's ok, I'm not here to argue, honestly, but I do think more people need to communicate, rather then dismiss someone instantly. Kind of why when I see an opportunity, I do want to talk with people (not argue) who are pro GenAI. Go ahead and derail a bit since I do want to hear you out. A little bit context on my end but I was using ChatGPT once upon a time, around late 2024 till about early 2025. I've also since learned how to use ComfyUI to gen images, not because I want to incorporate AI into anything, if I'm going to hate something, I want to understand what I'm hating lol. I'm not a coder or programmer though, so I am trying to sympathize with how helpful GenAI has been for people who know what they're doing. For me, I was using ChatGPT to help me world build and help flesh out characters. I just wound up forming the opinion that no matter how much time I was saving, and no matter how well ChatGPT cleaned up my writing, I was never as satisfied with it then me just doing it poorly. My want to sympathize is that coding is a different beast, in my opinion. I like to give as much context as I can, know this is completely off topic to F-Zero, so if this isn't a discussion you want to have, I do understand. For the record, I don't hate you, like, the person, it's just the tech I hate in it's current implementation.
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u/aevumanima 26d ago
Very cool - I appreciate you sharing your experience and the detailed write-up
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u/killermike523 26d ago
Appreciate you giving it a glance. It was enlightening to learn a bit more about decompilations and how they are used in these native ports, and what compromises in the process still exist.
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u/tapedeck25 25d ago
Thanks for the comprehensive breakdown and port. Very interesting and transparent.
I would have liked to have seen the environmental impact of AI vs human. Something not really looked at, at this scale. Thanks again.
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u/killermike523 25d ago
Whatever the environmental impact of a human, I think it is more justified than a machine and always will be.
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u/tapedeck25 25d ago
Thanks for replying. Genuinely fascinated by this as it’s the first time I’ve seen a break down done like yours. Very good ethics to do this. I’ve seen people say it takes more water to keep a golf course than an agent, but lack real world examples to comprehend the scale of things like this. Thanks again.
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u/killermike523 25d ago
I have no deep insight on the matter, but I would guess most of energy & subsequent resources go into training the model, inference (aka agentic use) is probably less harmful (still not great). Furthermore, I think there is water waste prevalent in many industries and may have a bigger impact, such as farming and manufacturing.
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u/firegodjr n3ds B9S 25d ago
Very slick, very impressive work on Claude's part. Glad we can get some cool 3ds ports before either Anthropic or society collapses ^^;
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u/STINGZGAMING 25d ago
Decomps are honestly an area where I’m perfectly ok with the use of AI. It’s an extremely tedious and incredibly frustrating process and it’s so inaccessible and niche that I don’t think you’re really missing out on a huge lot by just using AI to do it (unlike traditional game dev or programming)
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u/StrongNormals 22d ago
How is the societal impact understated given the tech market 😂 or wall street for that matter? Is it understated on Reddit alone or...?
But anyway, are you going to do these only for games that have been completely decompiled? I'm also curious who the AI is sourcing from, since that person, or their project could be key to understanding the porting method (mind you, N64 seems to have the bulk of documentation out there now, so I'm not particularly surprised. Now if someone manages to make ports of something from a newer generation, THAT would be shocking)
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u/RocketsDitto 20d ago
I don't care how it was made. As long as it gets made. Thanks! I really wish someone would make a port of Cubivore from the GameCube.
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u/OOOOOOO0OOOOOOOOO 14d ago
This is impressive. Can you move stuff from the top screen onto the bottom like they did with Zelda port? Having just racing on the top with all the maps, rank speed etc would make it really immersive.
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u/killermike523 14d ago
oh interesting. never thought of this. theoretically possible yeah
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u/OOOOOOO0OOOOOOOOO 14d ago
That would be pretty cool, definitive version and all that.
Ever looked at the Paper Mario decomp? Its art style is made for 3D layers.
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u/CrashMidnick 5d ago
Thanks you for this great port ! It is closed to fullspeed on many tracks. I opened an issue over GITHUB because, on my side, it cannot save the progress. Can you confirm this ?
Also, crash on O3DS.
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u/jumpbrick 4d ago
Amazing work. I got this to run on my 3ds and its mostly great. Game freezes the system when pressing the home button. also does this include the 64dd game??
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u/killermike523 4d ago
Huh, shouldn't freeze.. perhaps you can DM me the ini file on your SD card?
Also, no 64dd.. yet. I've got a build working on my system but it still needs some more polish. Had to rework the audio system and still some bugs. Maybe ready by Halloween.
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u/jumpbrick 4d ago
It seems to be a bit more stable. I'll send you my ini file if problems persist. Thanks so much for the work on this!
I also read that save implementation is still being worked on so I won't bug you on that
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u/demunted 26d ago
Honesty is the best policy, thanks for sharing how it was made. Also happy you to the time and energy to build this.