alt Hacker NewsPeople should really read the whole thing (well at least the last chapter) because it's not as simple as "vibe coders made meg go away".
The writer equally hates ZUN, vibe coders, and AI haters (Bluesky crowd)
And if not then the TLDR is basically: ZUN made the games for japanese people. Western people wanted to play the games. Reverse engineers came along but they relied on community funding. Now the community is taken apart by vibe coders but the same community is not willing to fund manual labor. Also the community is still paying for ZUN which enforces the status quo of not bothering with english releases.
Replies
oceansky • today at 12:01 PM
He does say LLMs made things worse, even if he's not opposed to it.
throwaway613746 • today at 12:16 PM
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To add some further context, all the Touhou games have been playable by Westerners for years due to fan translation patches. Even for the PC-98 games, the community has made preconfigured emulators packaged with all the games pre-patched to English so it's easy to play them without any technical knowledge. The reverse engineering project is orthogonal to this and is mainly intended to document the games' behavior as well as make them easier to mod. Having the source code available would make it possible to port the games to modern platforms, but they are pixel art 2D shooters so from a gameplay perspective there's not much of a benefit over playing them in an emulator.