One of the standout features of the Analogue Pocket is openFPGA—a term used to describe its support for various open-source custom emulators. However, across all areas of the retro development scene, maintainers of these FPGA emulator cores have had to deal with low-quality, haphazardly assembled code from well-meaning contributors. The developer responsible for the SNES emulator on the Analogue Pocket platform is just one of many developers frustrated by these AI-generated codes.
Yesterday, a contributor named nasonliu submitted an "experimental MSU-1 streaming" feature for the Pocket's SNES core. MSU-1 is essentially a virtual enhancement chip designed for the console that doesn't exist in reality; it's a standard established by emulator developers to allow Super Nintendo ROM hackers to add CD-quality audio and similar enhancements to various games.
"It would be pretty cool if it actually worked. I never thought I'd see someone implement this feature," said agg23, the developer who ported the SNES FPGA core to the Analogue Pocket. But you can probably sense the twist coming. "You sent me a pull request with nearly 50,000 lines of code changes, without any prior discussion, entirely generated by a large language model, and expected me to review it," agg23 continued. "There's just too much irrelevant junk code in there."
In other words, this MSU-1 feature consisted of 50,000 lines of machine-generated code, which agg23 had to manually review line by line before merging it into the emulator core.
"This behavior is unacceptable," agg23 added. "You force-pushed 'your' work, which involved barely any mental effort, wasting other people's time and energy without being asked. For the sake of all responsible maintainers, I hope you stop doing this. Again, I think it's impressive that you and your large language model managed to produce this. But it has no place in my world."
You might recall that developers of the PS3 emulator RPCS3 expressed similar sentiments. Earlier this year, they implored contributors to "stop submitting low-quality AI-generated code." It should be noted that RPCS3 does not completely ban the use of AI by contributors; rather, it requires developers to thoroughly understand every line of code they submit.
Many programmers firmly believe that AI is merely a tool to improve coding efficiency. However, in enthusiast communities dedicated to building emulators and exploring new ways to play classic games, experienced developers are now being overwhelmed by AI-generated code submitted by newcomers—beginners who code by feel and don't even fully understand what they've created.