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My experience with the Nintendo 64 Decomp/dev groups and why it is unfair. - Printable Version

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My experience with the Nintendo 64 Decomp/dev groups and why it is unfair. - Raion - 08-21-2024

This is going to be a little bit of a rant post and I apologize for everybody who doesn't want to read this type of shit. Unfortunately for me I'm the one who has constantly be dealing with this and I would like to vent my frustrations in a constructive manner. 

TL;DR: the N64 dev/decomp team has always consulted me on various aspects of IRIX IDO (pre 7.2 MIPSPro). I feel however that they are wholly uninterested in contributing back to our community, participating or offering solutions to ours issues, and as I've aged and become much wiser, I sometimes feel as if I'm being used. 

The community of N64 dev/decomp people mostly consists of young millennials and zoomers, I can't call them "kids" anymore as most are grown men, but they seem to have no appetite for forums, or the fact they are searchable, open source and not a hive of toxic discussion (99% of discord is just a replacement for Facebook and IRC for younger people and they don't interact outside of it). 

I offered community members several times money in exchange for a decompilation and documentation. Nobody ever really offered much of a gesture. And I mean, I offered $2500 cash for someone willing to go down a deep rabbit hole on IRIX stuff. Nah, yet they always asked me for "why doesn't this hacked together qemu shit work right???" And wouldn't take multiple opportunities to actually use a server or system with IRIX appropriately loaded and set up, nah they wanted the WSL1 experience. 

My point is not to disrespect anybody in that community and there are some people that are awesome and knowledgeable but rather to express frustration as to why I don't want anything to do with their closed community and I'm starting to become pissy when people ask me to trace down manpages or replicate behavior on ancient IRIX versions I don't even have access to. 

They don't want to document anything in a way that is easily searchable, they rely entirely on Discord's emphemeral and proprietary trash. When I tell them to go email somebody for a lead they whine until I do it, or complain about "boomers". 

It's very unproductive and toxic. And yes I know that some people have been annoyed because I tend to be a little bit grouchy nowadays and less inclined to waste my time on pet projects that don't have any oomph, but it's mostly because I'm used to now being compensated for my time. Whether it's in regards to my locksmithing career, for my maintenance here (by the patrons who have graciously stuck with us) and other things, it's just 20lb of shit in a 10lb bag when someone asks me to work for free on something that's going to take me hours to track down. And they aren't going to ever lift a finger or even willing to contribute back. And it's not that I am stupid or lazy, but it is readily apparent to me that I'm not cut out to make a living as a developer, I prefer to do that only when necessary to do it myself and it's not fun trying to sit here and wrap my head around things that I was burned out on from being years in technology fields. My brain is still just starting to recover from that shit. Maybe then I'll have much more time and my enthusiasm back but whatever. 

I tried everything possible to get these guys motivated to actually contribute to the community at Large. I had an n64 subforum. It was crickets. I repeatedly asked them to contact or interact with people here. Ask them to document interesting findings here. Or even just wikify their findings. And when I tell them that I don't understand something they just kind of look at me like I'm Jason Vorhees after he takes his mask off... You get the idea. 

So basically my philosophy going forward with outsiders interacting with this community is that unless they can prove good faith in a willingness to contribute back (e.g. as most users here have, the vintage community at large and most of SGUG as well, especially nowadays) I don't know how much effort I want to spend on these people. I'm going to do a little bit out of good faith here and there but I'm not going to sit here and be their StackOverflow for SGI shit. 

Sorry for the long winded bullshit but that's basically been my life as of this evening.

RE: My experience with the Nintendo 64 Decomp/dev groups and why it is unfair. - Shiunbird - 08-22-2024

I am starting to believe that this attitude is something mostly related to how incredibly addicted to comfort younger people are. It is never about the journey, but about the result (preferably shareable) and fast.

I've been having a lot of trouble in working with my clients during my getting-out-of-IT-journey just because most people will only interact through Instagram and Whatsapp. No, they won't send an email. They won't even send SMS.

Getting out of where they are means logging into something else, learning a different tool, interacting and acting in a way that is profitable not only for you but for the other person, too.

My brother got a job as a general-assistant-of-everything at a middle-eastern country embassy in my home country. He takes photographs, books hotels and cars, updates their webpage with content, etc.. They sent the in-house translator a banner to be translated and printed at A0 size (huge). The person who received it opened it on the phone, used some phone photo editor to paint over the original Arabic text, wrote the translated text on top of it using on the phone and sent him the result via whatsapp. He received a 400kb highly compressed JPG.

When he complained, she said she did her job and if he can't handle getting the banner done out of the file he sent, it is his problem. This is the attitude.

Not everyone knows everything, but most people here will contribute with what they can, and you can feel that, even though there's a lot of asymmetry in skills and dedication, that everyone is doing their best. But when I deal with people at large, especially younger ones, it is mostly about getting the most of you, getting their results done in the most convenient way possible, and moving on. Interacting in Discord increases their social standing in that group and anything outside of that means little. They are only motivated by external validation, and there's little inner drive for anything.

The WSL1 experience they seek is convenient and gets the "braggable" results out fast. And, unfortunately, it helps no one but themselves.

I am really sorry you had such bad experience.

RE: My experience with the Nintendo 64 Decomp/dev groups and why it is unfair. - Raion - 08-22-2024

I don't think people understand how valuable someone's time is and that chat rooms are not the norm for intelligent discussion

RE: My experience with the Nintendo 64 Decomp/dev groups and why it is unfair. - Shiunbird - 08-23-2024

(08-22-2024, 07:40 PM)Raion Wrote:  I don't think people understand how valuable someone's time is and that chat rooms are not the norm for intelligent discussion
They never were...

RE: My experience with the Nintendo 64 Decomp/dev groups and why it is unfair. - chulofiasco - 08-29-2024

I've visited some of the groups on discord where they're porting zelda to pc.. they found my query bothersome when i asked where the irix port was. lol

RE: My experience with the Nintendo 64 Decomp/dev groups and why it is unfair. - robespierre - 08-29-2024

I may be getting too far forward on my skis, but would a binary translation from the N64 to the O2+VICE be feasible? The VICE has a lot in common with the RSP.

The point is that you don't need to "decompile" if you can translate mechanically to a (slightly) different architecture. Like QuickTransit.

RE: My experience with the Nintendo 64 Decomp/dev groups and why it is unfair. - Raion - 08-30-2024

You can probably do a recompilation, it's just never been explored.

RE: My experience with the Nintendo 64 Decomp/dev groups and why it is unfair. - Raion - 08-30-2024

(08-29-2024, 03:15 PM)chulofiasco Wrote:  I've visited some of the groups on discord where they're porting zelda to pc.. they found my query bothersome when i asked where the irix port was. lol

They are windows users, don't give a shit about portability is my personal experience... I'm not trying to be an asshole while I say that, but like seriously they chose to go with cmake... In lieu of autoconf. Autoconf isn't perfect, but it's not retardedly painful to set up correctly and it has flexibility. Meson/Ninja is what the new kids use but similarly, it seems retarded to use. Now, I just use POSIX make, and make a separate makefile with optional env flags, but autoconf isn't hard to set up.

RE: My experience with the Nintendo 64 Decomp/dev groups and why it is unfair. - Shiunbird - 08-30-2024

Not only Windows users...

Linuxisms are also everywhere now. Hardly ever just typing make works (even with modern installations) but in the past a non-programmer like me could fix just about anything.

Now a lot of the issues I come across are not trivial anymore to fix to get things working, even from modern Linux to modern BSDs.

RE: My experience with the Nintendo 64 Decomp/dev groups and why it is unfair. - jan-jaap - 08-30-2024

(08-30-2024, 04:37 AM)Raion Wrote:  like seriously they chose to go with cmake... In lieu of autoconf.
So would I. CMake is pretty much the modern cross-platform solution. autoconf is a UNIX-only hack from the nineties.

I've used autoconf extensively in the past. And we use CMake at $WORK on all sorts of platforms, including oddball embedded targets like VxWorks. So I know what I'm talking about.