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Here's an embarrassing thing to admit on the internet: when I was a teenage subscriber to Nintendo Power magazine, I picked the Donkey Kong 64 soundtrack as my "sign-up gift" because I wanted to be able to listen to the DK Rap on CD . Why I was obsessed with the song I can't say 25 years later, but Donkey Kong 64 is a memorable mess of a game—sprawling, ambitious, funny, inventive, and often infuriating, with a predilection for collectibles so infamous that the developers made fun of themselves for it a few years later.

The point is, Donkey Kong 64 is a game that inspires strong feelings in those who've played it. So it seems fitting that members of the DK64 randomizer community, who've dedicated years to picking it apart and putting it back together, would start developing an unofficial PC port with a specific rallying cry:

"Fuck AI vibe coding bullshit."

DK64 Recompiled, announced in a YouTube video in late June, is actually the second project with that exact name, and that's no coincidence. It's the latest example of an increasingly common point of friction in the game emulation and hacking scene, as experienced programmers butt heads with those eager to use new AI tools to spin up new ports of old games in record time. In some cases, ports written with AI tools like Claude are ostracized or ignored. But in the case of Donkey Kong 64, the game's biggest fans weren't about to cede ground.

"The DK64 randomizer dev team is owning this shit now," contributor 2dos wrote in the N64 Recomp Discord server, shortly after the video's debut. "We have decided to take on and own this development due to the poor development direction of another recompilation project of DK64 happening concurrently that is heavily leaning on AI vibe code, and thus is resulting in a poor quality project that will make it progressively harder to manage as time goes on. Our DK64 recompilation project is backed by folks who have worked on and tinkered with the backend of the DK64 code for well over a decade, and do not rely on vibe coding to make code changes."

Static recompilation is a technique that, in short, translates all of a game's code from one system's language to another; unlike emulation, it's not simulating the original hardware holistically. The most prominent hobby project using this technique so far is N64 Recomp, announced just over two years ago , which is a recompilation tool specifically geared towards Nintendo 64 games. Since its debut we've seen modders use it to create PC ports of Banjo-Kazooie , Star Fox 64, Mario Kart 64, and more, while similar projects have sprung up for other consoles like the Xbox 360.

Legally, the freshly written code is clean because these recompiled ports don't contain any of the assets from the original games—players have to provide a ROM file themselves. The porting process has become an ethical, rather than legal, battleground in the last few months, as "vibe coded" projects have begun cropping up practically every day.

One developer has used Claude's AI coding to spin up recompilation tools for the NES, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, Super Nintendo, Game Boy Advance, and Virtual Boy, each with a handful of games at least bootable so far. Another's got GitHub repositories for everything from the PS3 to the ZX Spectrum. Others have used the Xbox 360 recompilation framework ReXGlue to pump out ports at a seemingly astonishing rate—but once you get past the YouTube videos hyping them up, the reality isn't quite so impressive.

"Vibe coding a recomp has started to become significantly more prominent and not in a good way," says Ballaam, a contributor to the DK64 randomizer and now DK64 Recompiled alongside 2dos. "I think GoldenEye was released somewhat recently with being heavily vibe coded and, as a result of that (and probably either dev inexperience or overconfidence in the AI output), it leads to some very critical bugs which make the recomp borderline unplayable. The main N64 recomp server has gone as far as to not promote any recomp which uses AI for a significant portion of it."

(Image credit: Rare, Banjo Kazooie Recompiled) That GoldenEye project has also drawn criticism from those who know the game inside and out. The paradox of current tools making it easier than ever to start projects means anyone can vibe code their way to a partially working port, but shaping it into an accurate, crash-free, feature-rich version of a game is a different story.

2dos warns that a big risk with relying on AI is technical debt—a codebase becoming harder to understand and modify as it grows, with maintenance becoming "a nightmare" if you don't put in the work to thoroughly document it. The knock-on effect is that other humans are less likely to want (or even be able) to contribute. If a developer doesn't thoroughly understand the code the AI writes, that will also require them to spend more tokens to fix bugs. Those costs can add up fast, and the AI's "fixes" won't necessarily be good, either.

In the case of the AI-based Donkey Kong 64 recompilation, 2dos discovered that the agentic coding had modified RT64 , "the base module that makes the N64 graphics render."

"That would lead to significant management and compatibility issues down the line, and cause other unexpected side effects that are currently visible in preview videos in the other recomp," he says.

Vibes: Questionable

Using AI is attractive because it skips past the slow, manual process of figuring out exactly what every function in a game is doing, which can often take years. Many of the polished recompilation ports available currently are for games that have previously been decompiled , creating fresh, human-readable source code. It's an enormous undertaking even for old games, but understanding what the source code is doing helps enormously when troubleshooting.

Decompilation also makes modding much more viable, which is one of the most attractive features for modern ports of retro games. (DK64: Recompiled's debut trailer touts support for a tag anywhere mod that will let players swap between Kongs on the fly, addressing one of the most common complaints about the game's backtrack-heavy design.)

Developer SrBananaMan64 recently released a PC port of Harvest Moon 64 alongside a range of mods to speed up messages, zoom out the camera, and so on. A completed decompilation by another developer helped make that a reality.

"They're using a powerful tool without putting in the work to actually learn what it does"

ReXGlue developer

"Recompilation doesn’t actually need a 100% decomp to work, just enough for the symbols to be mapped out to produce a viable .elf file that N64Recomp uses," SrBananaMan64 says. "But this game seemed like it needed the proper enhancements to spruce [it] up… The quality of the game is lacking so it needs the widescreen and high frame rates to compensate for that in my opinion."

He shares the DK team's view that developers "should never let AI take the wheel," even if it can occasionally be an "amazing tool" for specific uses. "Minuscule tasks such as searching through a decomp for a certain function you would like to patch or mod," for example.

Lines for acceptable AI usage are now being drawn across the open source development scene. The maintainers of the Godot engine are now rejecting "substantial pieces" of AI-generated code . A nascent recompilation project for the GameCube & Wii declares "No AI code is used," and that it's a "human hand-made project by a group of passionate developers, who want the best for the Retro Gaming community." So does a solo project tackling recompilation for the PS1 .

An in-progress recompilation of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night via RecompOne (Image credit: RecompOne, Konami) A port for Sonic Advance also has a "strict no AI policy," championing the endeavor's underlying purpose: "We want humans to use this project to practice their skills. Reverse engineering, documenting, understanding, being part of the process."

Tom, the developer behind ReXGlue, sees the low-effort ports as a "people problem," not an issue with the tool itself. "The real issue is people who don't bother to understand what they're posting," he says. "They're using a powerful tool without putting in the work to actually learn what it does, and then wondering why their project falls apart, performs poorly, or has nothing genuinely new to bring to the table. It's like riding a motorcycle before you can even ride a bike."

One common defense for vibe coding ports boil down to "this is just my hobby project, so ignore it if you don't like it." One counter-argument to that point is ethical. Even setting aside the broader environmental impact and stolen training data of generative AI models, there's an argument that even a fan-made port should endeavor to do justice to the original work—to honor the game's original creators by representing it as accuracy as possible. Another is that a vibe coded port that's likely to have those long-term maintenance issues 2dos warned about could pull interest away from a human-coded project that's more likely to be perfected in the long run. The existence of a half-assed project could even turn another developer away from putting months or years of their work into a game at all.

"That’s a big risk," SrBananaMan64 says. For example the Smash Bros. Battleship project which was completely AI generated will take away from the release of mine." (He's currently working on his own recompilation of the N64 fighter).

Another common defense from those simply eager to play a game they love—that anything is better than nothing—also doesn't necessarily hold up beyond the initial burst of excitement.

(Image credit: Nintendo, DK64: Recompiled) "I think there is some sentiment from those who haven't experienced a vibe coded recomp that 'who cares if its vibe coded as long as it works," says Ballaam, "when they don't fully realize that for the most part, they really really don't.

"LLMs nowadays have lowered the skill floor of producing a functioning piece of code that those who are technologically curious but don't have the patience or passion to fully learn a language can feel like they're coding. They scale up their projects but don't scale up their learning to accommodate their desires because they rely too much on the AI crutch."

Perhaps someday, as agentic coding continues to advance, vibe coded ports really will be sufficient. Perhaps a small portion of this initial wave of vibe coders will even pick up enough interest in the process to learn to do the programming themselves. Or maybe the rising costs of AI models will dissuade casual hobbyists from burning tokens on projects that are hard to see through to completion.

For now we're in the thick of it, and we're sure to see more competing projects like Donkey Kong 64 Recompiled before we come out the other side.

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Open AI formally welcomes the GTP-5.6 models to its lineup: Sol, Terra, and Luna.

In addition to the new modesls themselves, there’s also a new “ultra” option for running multiple models in parallel.

Access to all three GPT-5.6 models opens today in ChatGPT and Codex, but may take 24 hours to hit everyone.

Last month, OpenAI gave us a little preview of what to expect from its next big AI model launch, detailing plans for the three faces of GPT-5.6: Sol, Terra, and Luna . Rather than going one-size-fits-all, the three models are each tuned for specific usage demands, prioritizing maximum performance, or trying to get the most bang out of your AI buck. And today, all three are finally making their formal debu t, ready for you to begin using them across ChatGPT and Codex.

GPT‑5.6 Sol is the heavy hitter, and this is the one that you’re going to want to turn to for tasks like coding, or researching cybersecurity vulnerabilities. When you need more power still, OpenAI is introducing a new “ultra” setting that allows you to deploy multiple agents in parallel for even higher performance.

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Two of the Milky Way's gigantic spiral arms appear to be much farther away than we realized, scientists have discovered after listening to the echoes of distant cosmic explosions. The findings could potentially force us to reconsider our galaxy's mass and maybe even its shape, researchers say.

The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy made up of a dense central region containing a supermassive black hole (dubbed Sagittarius A*), orbited by four major arms — the Sagitarrius arm , the Scutum-Centaurus arm, the Perseus arm and the Outer arm — that curve and stretch outward like a giant pinwheel. Most of our galaxy's stars and gas are tightly packed together in these cosmic limbs, although some stars, including the sun , exist in the gaps between them or within other smaller structures .

Until now, researchers have estimated the size of these arms based on the Milky Way's rotation rate , because it is impossible to see our galaxy's entirety from Earth's position inside the galaxy. This, in turn, has helped us estimate the galaxy's total size (around 100,000 light-years across) and its mass, which is equivalent to around 1.5 trillion suns, according to NASA .

However, this way of measuring the massive structures is not foolproof and has led to several uncertainties about our galaxy since we first discovered its spiral shape around 175 years ago, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported .

"We usually model the Milky Way's outer arms indirectly based on what we know of how our galaxy rotates, but doing it this way leaves room for error," study first author Beatrice Vaia , a researcher at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics who led the new study as part of her doctorate, said in a statement . The farther away from the galactic center, the more uncertain the measurements become, she added.

In the new study, published June 19 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics , researchers came up with a new method of measuring the arms using the most powerful and luminous explosions in the universe, known as gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). As X-ray light from these cosmic outbursts passes through dense clouds of gas, like those within our galaxy's arms, it creates luminous rings, or echoes, whose size corresponds to their distance from Earth.

Researchers studied echoes of X-ray light leftover from GRBs as the radiation from these powerful cosmic explosions passed through gas clouds in our galaxy's arms. (Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF/B. Vaia et al.; Optical: Pan-STARRS; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N.Wolk & P.Edmonds) The team used data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton observatory (both of which orbit Earth) to analyze echoes from three different GRBs that shone through gas clouds in the Perseus, Outer and Scutum-Centaurus arms, respectively. This revealed that both the Outer and Scutum-Centaurus arms are likely around 10% farther from Earth than we thought. This may not sound like much, but it equates to several thousand light-years.

The biggest potential implication of this discovery is that our galaxy is wider and, therefore, probably more massive than we realized, which could have major knock-on effects for our understanding of our cosmic neighborhood.

"The differences are small, but any revision of these distances is important because they are so fundamental for understanding our galaxy," study co-author Ilaria Fornasiero , an astronomer at the University of Bologna in Italy, said in a separate statement . "For example, this could mean that astronomers have to revise estimates of the mass of the galaxy, because that affects how wide the arms stretch."

The new positions of the Outer and Scutum-Centaurus arms (shown in red) suggest that the Milky Way is not as perfectly symmetrical as we thought. (Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/M.Weiss) Animations released alongside the new paper show how the Milky Way might look based on the new data, revealing the Outer and Scutum-Centaurus arms extending farther into intergalactic space, making our galaxy look more like a lopsided snail's shell than a perfect spiral.

These visualizations do not necessarily show the true shape of the galaxy, as the Sagitarrius arm and other minor galactic limbs have not been measured using the same methodology. However, the fact that the Perseus arm was not as distant as the other two GRB-illuminated limbs hints at a surprising asymmetry throughout our galaxy that cannot be easily explained.

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The researchers are now on the hunt for more GRBs that can be used to map out the rest of our galaxy's shape and help us better understand what our cosmic neighborhood actually looks like. However, finding these cosmic explosions is easier said than done.

"We're relying on the universe to provide us with these events, and so far, over 25 years, we've only found a handful that we can use," study co-author Andrea Tiengo , an astronomer at Scuola Universitaria Superiore Pavia in Italy, said in the statement. "That said, we will continue to be on the lookout for more."

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Could Microsoft sell off Xbox amid the company's biggest restructuring strategy yet?

Analysts say Xbox, as it stands, would be too expensive for even some of the biggest buyers

It's suggested that big players would be more interested in purchasing "specific pieces" of the business

As Xbox goes through its biggest restructuring yet, and the seemingly never-ending stream of bad news for those involved continues, the future of the gaming company is uncertain.

While some question whether it would be in Microsoft's best interest to sell off the gaming company, industry analysts have suggested that the move would be a hugely expensive endeavour for interested parties, but it's possible that the Xbox we know could be dismantled piece by piece.

Microsoft's major Xbox restructuring announcement, which Xbox CEO Asha Sharma called a "reset," confirmed that thousands of employees were affected by layoffs, including 1,600 immediate job cuts with another 1,600 to come before the end of the current financial year.

The company has also let go of four studios, including Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions, which are returning to independence, and Senua and State of Decay 3 creators, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs, which are currently looking for new ownership.

This new strategy follows a year of struggles for Xbox, which has increased the prices of its consoles once again, cancelled and shuttered several games and studios , with Sharma now admitting that the company is "not healthy" in its current state, with Game Pass being a key fault.

"Our business today is not healthy," Sharma said in an email sent to Xbox employees. "We are operating at margins that are 3-10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses. We entered Gen 9 with a smaller install base and a higher cost structure. To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content. While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected."

Before the recent upheaval, The Information (via Reuters ) reported that Sharma was looking to speed up development on games in The Elder Scrolls , Fallout , and Halo franchises and that Microsoft is considering options for its Xbox gaming unit, including a potential spinoff or restructuring ​as a wholly owned subsidiary.

While some believe that the recent restructuring is a plan to make Xbox easier to sell, analysts have suggested to The Verge that there wouldn't be many interested stakeholders who would purchase the entire business, mainly because it would be too expensive considering Xbox's current portfolio.

"I think all options are on the table, considering the drastic measures already put in place to try and restructure the business at both a cyclical and structural level," said Yoshio Osaki, president and CEO of market research firm IDG Intelligence.

Similarly, New York University professor Joost van Dreunen told The Verge, "A wholesale divestiture of Xbox remains on the table, and it looks likelier given Xbox's struggles with rising hardware costs and Microsoft's focus on AI and infrastructure."

He added, "It's never been clear what role Xbox plays in Microsoft's flywheel," but a full sale is the "less likely path" since there are few buyers, including giants like Netflix, Amazon, and Tencent, who would want or afford "an entire interactive-entertainment conglomerate running north of $23 billion in annual revenue."

Instead, Van Dreunen said the likelier scenario is that big players might go after "specific pieces" of the business, with Osaki noting "it's possible that "individual studios, IPs, and teams are sold or spun off piecemeal.”

Sharma revealed her vision for Xbox after taking up the position of CEO in January and said she plans to return to the spirit of what the company was founded on, as well as reduce "the artificial divide between different types of devices."

With the latest part of her plan underway, which has notably delivered another crushing blow to the studios under Xbox's ownership, it's unclear right now where the gaming giant is headed.

According to Osaki, the full vision will be clear by "year-end," while van Dreunen thinks it will be "within 24 months."

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Credit: C. Scott Brown / Android Authority

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The Galaxy Tab S12 Plus has stopped by the Bureau of Indian Standards for certification.

The tablet was also spotted on the Safety Korea database.

The listing in the Safety Korea database includes a live image of the tablet.

The latest entries into the Galaxy Tab series are on the way. Samsung will be expanding the lineup with the Galaxy Tab S12 Plus and Ultra later this year. As the company continues its progress on both tablets, the Plus has recently been spotted on a couple of certification databases. One of those listings also gives us our first look at the upcoming tablet.

Starting with the Bureau of Indian Standards (via 91mobiles ), the Galaxy Tab S12 Plus appeared with the model numbers SM-X840 and SM-X846B. The former refers to the Wi-Fi model, while the latter is for the 5G variant. This information isn’t new, as these model numbers were revealed earlier this year when the tablet was spotted on the GSMA IMEI database. However, this latest appearance serves as an indicator that the tablet is getting closer to launch.