Adam Kratch

Just a chill guy who commits to main and lets his users test prod updates

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

I was concerned that you really needed to pursue byte exact decomp. I know it’s frustrating but the result will be great! Different platform but I’ve been building an agent harness to help for N64: https://t.co/wXdIEQdZal you and your agents can probably lift a bunch of concepts from this.

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

This is great! Is there any way to have Golden Balloon for DKR added under the native ports? It has come a long way to 1.5.2 and has had all of the bugs eliminated. Next release this week will add online lobbies (beta). If there are still gaps on the current build that would prevent it from being listed I’m happy to keep fixing them.

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

@ClaudeDevs This is awesome! Instead of my plan $200 max plan being gone in 36 hours of work it can be gone in 30! Think of all the extra free time I will have!

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

Having worked on this decomp and used Claude, yes it was an assistant. Nobody should be ashamed of that - humans who understand the problem domain using AI to build novel tooling to understand compiler behavior better is just gained efficiency. Nobody is just saying "claude pls decompile" and all of the hate towards AI is so overblown. These decomps always hit the long tail of functions that humans have stared at for years without solving, and using AI to create tooling to solve those final pieces is obvious and good. How do you think DKR, SF64, GE, etc. all got over the finish line at roughly the same time?

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

@LinneLover69 @_MrR1_ @4D3s12 @TSRStormed Have you read the decompiled c yourself to make these claims? Claude isn’t being used to generate slop - it’s being used by the community as a tool to figure out the long tail of stupid causes of non matches that are just compiler quirks. You’re spreading disinformation here.

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

On a different note - have you considered bundling all of your iOS ports into sort of a "mega-app" and doing app store distro of it? I would imagine with the amount of shared/vendored resources between them the footprint wouldn't be so big, and it would be sort of funny to have a general purpose native port player at some point. On my long to-do list is to extract the WebGPU framework from Golden Balloon into a standalone framework that could be re-used else across any title.

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

Yeah I understand it for the decomp community since it’s more or less a hobby and solving puzzles, but for ports where the goal is just to play the game optimized and translated for a new platform I don’t understand it as much. I contributed the final few decomp matches for a few N64 games recently and there wasn’t any real push back to using AI and everybody was cool about it and kind in those communities.

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

Golden Balloon 1.5.0 is out! Play it here: https://t.co/QG5A5HoH2y - I am hopeful this is the final real "bug fix" release, and next work can focus on more fun stuff like netplay. Thank you to everybody who has reported issues.

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

@momo5502 Awesome! Excited to see the progress and where it all goes!

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

@tlohtzin123 haven't looked at that yet but can now that the vast majority of bugs are gone!

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

Expanding the lineup for Golden Balloon! v1.2.1 releases today with minor bug fixes, v1.2.2 will follow with more character options seen here, and then it will be time to move onto web enabled multiplayer! Play here: https://t.co/yUqFAi3eLs macOS/Windows/Linux and browser.

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

@thsottiaux /rc

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

Sorry for the second reply - something that has worked very well for my decomp work is having Fable build hyper specific instrumentation to the problem at hand (very compiler specific, pattern specific for the code base) and build memories/skills based on that specific code base to steer thinking. This helps it converge way faster with its own purpose built instrumentation compared to using off the shelf RE tools.

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

@momo5502 @Kaleggez It’s interesting fable is refusing for you - I have had zero issues getting fable to do matching decomp of N64 games

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

@chrissotraidis Hey! Awesome to see you pushing my project to the next step - I plan on continuing to release many more bug fixes and improvements so hopefully it won’t be too hard for you to keep pushing this forward as I do so.

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

@VEsoterica @DefaultDNB v1.0.5 is out for Golden Balloon - includes several bug fixes, Taj as a playable character, and some quality of life fixes with the launcher. I'm tracking one or two more bugs remaining, otherwise the basic port work is complete. I plan on releasing the unlocking "horseshoe gulch" level in a future build.

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

@chiguinoki @VEsoterica Just wanted to follow up - have you tried the latest versions? Any improvement with those settings?

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

@VEsoterica @DefaultDNB I will be releasing a new version of Golden Balloon tonight that fixes issues with macOS pre-built, fixes a few other bugs (Boulder Canyon already fixed!), and includes experimental FPS and simulation speed uncap features. The FPS work will take a lot of testing since it's a huge change to the underlying game code. Current release seems rock solid through all gameplay I have had, but please send bug reports my way!

[Adam Kratch @KratchAdam]

@arram This is why enforcing ADRs, git best practices and test coverage is important from the beginning. It can slow velocity up front but makes projects much more stable