This is pretty incredibly - Fabrice Bellard builds stuff that just has such a wide spread impact - so cool that QuickJS enabled an old system like PS2 to have a bit of a homebrew revival through this AthenaEnv project
My photoshop skills are near zero, otherwise I'd have long gone and edited xkcd 2347 [1] to say next to the pillar "Something Fabrice Bellard probably implemented while half asleep just to prove he could do it".
There's a lot of FOSS projects that have something written by him in their dependency chain.
Why use an LLM to do something that would take exactly the same amount of time and a lot less energy to just do in something like MS paint?
> Why use an LLM to do something that would take exactly the same amount of time and a lot less energy to just do in something like MS paint?
Can you prove that it'll take same amount of time for someone with
> My photoshop skills are near zero
to replicate the same level of quality as the generated image? From the looks of it, LLM managed to generate pixel perfect (or at least similar) font and probably took a fraction of a minute for the author to generate.
1] delete the text
2] select any handwriting font
3] replace the text
no one will know the font was changed, no skills required.
AI is going to utterly cripple people intellectually and motivationally.
If you can't even do the above ten second process, you may want to make more of an effort before you find yourself utterly fucked and starving.
>no one will know the font was changed
You're underestimating the effect typography has.
>you may want to make more of an effort
You seriously saying someone should put effort in editing a comic they didn't even cared on editing until they saw someone's comment? And somehow you equate the not putting effort to editing such comic to being fucked and starving?
AI hate sometimes makes people really lose their mind. Doing pointless random shit like this is a legit AI good application. Something that needs no creativity nor intellect to do. Just time. (And, most certainly, more than 10s.)
Two parent comments suggested that a deep level of skill is required to:
1] drag a box around the text and press Delete
2] type some new text in there in a similar handwriting font
The implication is that we're all too stupid and everything is too hard to do even tasks so simple that they take double-digit seconds to accomplish for people with rudimentary computer skill.
We can do things. Saving 5 seconds is going to hurt worse than it helps in the long run... like asking GPT what 2+2 is because you can't figure it out.
> Saving 5 seconds is going to hurt worse than it helps in the long run... like asking GPT what 2+2 is because you can't figure it out.
Looks line it has already started. See a therapist, please, you have an obsession.
It's better to consider the consequences of possible futures than not to; considering the future makes us human.
“ AI is going to utterly cripple people intellectually and motivationally.
If you can't even do the above ten second process, you may want to make more of an effort before you find yourself utterly fucked and starving.”
This does not sound like intellectual curiosity. Closer to polarized discourse that imho is making us less human.
When someone is not willing to even attempt to do a 30 second task, assumes they can't, asserts they can't, and people chime in to say AI is the only way they can achieve it, it seems worthwhile to point out the consequences.
Should we not be trying to do things?
Is it not in fact harmful to give up early on even such trivial tasks?
What happens when we actually need to do hard things?
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Actually, a fair number of us will see the font change.
People are more aware of typography than you may realize.
...maybe you do!
In which case, this makes real sense: "[almost] nobody will care."
I wouldn't, but I sure would note the font change.
I don't really know, but finding the right font family might take more time than the LLM
In the case of xkcd you can mimic it with this one:
xkcd-font
Fonts derived from the handwriting of Randall Munroe, the xkcd webcomic author.
1. I heard about nano banana and wanted to try it
2. I’m on my phone so no photoshop or whatever
Because Nano Banana is better than wasting time for someone who isn't a 10 year veteran of MS Paint arts.
I'm tired of this kind of argument from anti-AI folks.
"Why not pick up a pencil instead?"
What if illustration was never "art"? What if it was always just a rote mechanical skill and the art itself was what the person was trying to communicate?
Maybe the technical aspects don't matter. Maybe it's the message we're conveying, our taste, our curation, our unique lens?
Yes. The art is "take a comic I didn't draw and replace some text." The pro-ai crowd is certainly brimming with artistic ingenuity. So much insight! Thank God they're boiling the oceans for this.
I'd like to see metrics on that. But intuitively I'd say AI is faster.
Basically it's opening the tab and typing your thought vs speed running paint.
@sandermvanvliet what was the process and how long do you estimate it took you?
Personally it would take me awhile to find the template, the exact font and get the positioning just right.
I could make a crude one fast, and I've seen many crude versions of this meme. But matching the font is a bit more work, maybe there's a generator for it, but that's not paint nor do I know where it exists.
“Speed running paint”? You mean opening the image and dragging a text box over the existing text, changing the font to comic sans, and typing the text?
There are complicated workflows in Paint, this is not one of them.
> comic sans
It's not comic sans though, you've already failed.
Why have you failed though? Is the point to try to deceive people to think that XKCD actually published something else? Why not modify the xkcd one without hinding the fact that you modified it?
that fact you think it looks so good that it deceives is a point for ai.
the point is to make a quality meme fast. the guy he replied to appreciated it.
any fan of xkcd knows the original.
Ok
Yeah, everyone knows xkcd uses its own font, Humor Sans.
Oh I did not know that.
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Do it yourself on live video. Otherwise this is such a baseless and needlessly accusatory comment
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thanks!
Looked him up, he quite literally pushed the first commits of QEMU ever.
Edit: And was the sole developer until 2007!
Fabrice’s DNA is infused in the FOSS ecosystem. He’s an avid and prolific developer. FFMpeg, Qemu, libbf, softfp, BPG, jslinux, etc, etc, etc.
And ffmpeg. And TinyC. And a bunch of other things. The dude is a legend.
The author's short diversion about the hassle of using a random website for zip2iso functionality and asking about a cli tool for doing such conversion lead me to create this cross-platform python script with no external dependencies: https://github.com/scottvr/GENISO/blob/main/ZIP2ISO.py
Longer explanation in the comments of TFA, but short version is that it was mostly "vibe-coded" using Gemini3 Pro instead of having to read the ISO9660 spec, which was also impressive to me.
mkisofs might also do the trick.
It would, but it would be platform-specific and an external dependency. It was my first thought too until I started planning out it working cross-platform.
Mega cool, I’m curious if there’s a way to burn the ISO to a disc and get this playing on a physical console?
You'd need to hack the console to get it to load a burned disc, but if you can do that, you can also just load it from USB.
Though I guess you could burn it to a disk anyway purely for the sake of authenticity.
USB on the PS2 is limited to 1.0 or 1.1 speeds, so a disc may work better anyway.
Just to clarify, the difference on the PS2 is:
* CD: 3.6MB/s
* DVD: 5-8MB/s
* USB: 0.8-1.1MB/s
So the disk would almost definitely be the better option.
USB is fine for PS1/retro games; should be more than enough for AthenaEnv. The difference only matters for PS2 backups. And there're more options than those two. HDD/SSD, Ethernet, MX4SIO/SIO2SD, MMCE (SD2PSX et al).
Is it possible to use PS1 games and USB simultaneously? I thought the USB was handled by the B/C chips.
That's true; network too. Can play digital backups (off USB/Eth) only by using POPStarter (for those unaware, POPS being Sony's PS1 emulator ripped off the single game that was officially used on). Although POPS isn't really that good (was used, experimentally, only once afterall), USB throughput isn't an issue.
Can also use a micro SD adapter through the mem card slot. Generally considered a bit better experience than a USB drive.
FreeMcBoot on a memory card + USB flash drive (or internal disk) is a popular option to play on real hardware. Saves wear and tear on the optical drive too.
I have sat on a freemcboot mem card for probably 6 years now. I’ll get around to it eventually…
It's a good time! I feel the PS2 is an iconic member of any living room TV setup, especially with an SSD, a couple controllers, and component out. Nice to have for hangouts!
Oh damn can you get some real performance boost out of an SSD? Do you install it or does it hang out externally?
The original Phat PS2 models support internal IDE disks, though it's easy to convert them to SATA with an inexpensive adapter. Then prepare the SSD and install (I use WinHIIP, "obsolete" but works fine). It noticably improves startup and load times in games!
Some also swap the fan for a Noctua to give it a complete "quiet upgrade", but my stock fan isn't very loud.
Very cool. Jotting this down for later, appreciate it
Why use physical disc instead of some optical drive mod
ODEs aren't common for the PS2 because they already support flash drives, network shares, and (for fats) full size hard drives.
The interesting part here is about AthenaEnv. It looks like it uses QuickJS for the Javascript interpreter and wraps around the native system libraries that the PS2 provides.
I'm wondering if there's a modern similar project that would allow writing Javascript Canvas games (WebGPU / WebGL) and publishing on Switch/2, PS5, and Xbox.
From my understanding, they explicitly disallow JITs so you can't just wrap your JS game with Electron / Node Webkit and use V8. I'm not sure if anyone has tried publishing a game using a V8-jitless electron fork - the sdks for consoles are under NDA so there's not really much written about it publicly & most games using Unreal or Unity don't deal with these things themselves.
PC, Mac, and even mobile are surprisingly easier here because you can just run the JS via electron or in a webview on mobile.
I think the game Cross Code (a game written in JS) was ported to consoles using a pretty complex process.
Yeah, I saw the video about that earlier which is what led me to wonder if there was a native JS way now.
They used Kha in order to port only the console versions, the desktop versions remained JS from my understanding: https://github.com/Kode/Kha which is built on top of Haxe. This works, but it also means not having a single codebase anymore which would be one of the benefits of a JS based system.
There are other options here - something like using an AOT JS compiler like Porffor, but from my understanding it's never been tested (and would probably be missing a lot of support to get it working - like shimming canvas & providing a WebGPU context that the compiled JS could execute against).
The official Nintendo 3DS and Wii U SDKs both provided an Electron-like framework that allowed games to be written with web technologies. I seem to recall that it was discontinued at some point before the Switch? The Switch does have a WebKit browser applet that games can call to display web-based content, but it's pretty limited since JIT is disabled like you say. I've only ever seen it used for e-manuals.
Maybe they could simply make a modern web browser for PS2, where you would simply open a website with the game :)
Chrome apparently has a minimum memory requirement of 4GB, so you'd need to shrink it down to one-one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth its size to squeeze it into the PS2's 32MB of RAM.
Nice, this is similar to what I was wondering about - it looks like it's pretty limited in capability right now (looks like it only supports canvas2d at the moment: https://nxjs.n8.io/runtime/rendering/canvas), but in theory it would allow you to make a layer to convert WebGPU or WebGL games for Switch (ignoring the huge performance drop going from v8 / jit JS engines to QuickJS).
Cool article. AthenaEnv is an alternative follow-up to, also by same dev, Enceladus which uses Lua instead. Besides games they're used, and even more popular for this use case, homebrew apps. Examples being RETROLauncher & POPSLoader for Enceladus, and OSD-XMB for Athena.
Even the PS2 isn't safe from JavaScript.
Super cool. Thanks for sharing this. I've been looking for something like this for a while.
people will do anything to avoid using .gdscript and Godot....
I like Godot, but you're not getting it running on a PS2.
gdscript does not do any fancy JIT or AOT compiling. I don't see why you can't get gdscript running fairly easily.
gdscript itself, sure, why not. Porting the entire Godot engine would be a real feat though, especially because of the PS2’s technical limitations.
Someone did compile Godot (v2) for PS2 and did run it but seems like they gave up trying to run/export any games with it[1][2]. Somehow, the PSP port[3] (also v2) is more successful[4].
This is pretty incredibly - Fabrice Bellard builds stuff that just has such a wide spread impact - so cool that QuickJS enabled an old system like PS2 to have a bit of a homebrew revival through this AthenaEnv project
My photoshop skills are near zero, otherwise I'd have long gone and edited xkcd 2347 [1] to say next to the pillar "Something Fabrice Bellard probably implemented while half asleep just to prove he could do it".
There's a lot of FOSS projects that have something written by him in their dependency chain.
[1] https://xkcd.com/2347/
Nano Banana to the rescue https://box2.codenizer.nl/cloud/index.php/s/ZYHdsYZ9rdRNM2B
Why use an LLM to do something that would take exactly the same amount of time and a lot less energy to just do in something like MS paint?
> Why use an LLM to do something that would take exactly the same amount of time and a lot less energy to just do in something like MS paint?
Can you prove that it'll take same amount of time for someone with
> My photoshop skills are near zero
to replicate the same level of quality as the generated image? From the looks of it, LLM managed to generate pixel perfect (or at least similar) font and probably took a fraction of a minute for the author to generate.
1] delete the text
2] select any handwriting font
3] replace the text
no one will know the font was changed, no skills required.
AI is going to utterly cripple people intellectually and motivationally.
If you can't even do the above ten second process, you may want to make more of an effort before you find yourself utterly fucked and starving.
>no one will know the font was changed
You're underestimating the effect typography has.
>you may want to make more of an effort
You seriously saying someone should put effort in editing a comic they didn't even cared on editing until they saw someone's comment? And somehow you equate the not putting effort to editing such comic to being fucked and starving?
AI hate sometimes makes people really lose their mind. Doing pointless random shit like this is a legit AI good application. Something that needs no creativity nor intellect to do. Just time. (And, most certainly, more than 10s.)
Two parent comments suggested that a deep level of skill is required to:
1] drag a box around the text and press Delete 2] type some new text in there in a similar handwriting font
The implication is that we're all too stupid and everything is too hard to do even tasks so simple that they take double-digit seconds to accomplish for people with rudimentary computer skill.
We can do things. Saving 5 seconds is going to hurt worse than it helps in the long run... like asking GPT what 2+2 is because you can't figure it out.
> Saving 5 seconds is going to hurt worse than it helps in the long run... like asking GPT what 2+2 is because you can't figure it out.
Looks line it has already started. See a therapist, please, you have an obsession.
It's better to consider the consequences of possible futures than not to; considering the future makes us human.
“ AI is going to utterly cripple people intellectually and motivationally. If you can't even do the above ten second process, you may want to make more of an effort before you find yourself utterly fucked and starving.”
This does not sound like intellectual curiosity. Closer to polarized discourse that imho is making us less human.
When someone is not willing to even attempt to do a 30 second task, assumes they can't, asserts they can't, and people chime in to say AI is the only way they can achieve it, it seems worthwhile to point out the consequences.
Should we not be trying to do things?
Is it not in fact harmful to give up early on even such trivial tasks?
What happens when we actually need to do hard things?
[dead]
Actually, a fair number of us will see the font change.
People are more aware of typography than you may realize.
...maybe you do!
In which case, this makes real sense: "[almost] nobody will care."
I wouldn't, but I sure would note the font change.
I don't really know, but finding the right font family might take more time than the LLM
In the case of xkcd you can mimic it with this one:
xkcd-font
Fonts derived from the handwriting of Randall Munroe, the xkcd webcomic author.
https://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font
1. I heard about nano banana and wanted to try it 2. I’m on my phone so no photoshop or whatever
Because Nano Banana is better than wasting time for someone who isn't a 10 year veteran of MS Paint arts.
I'm tired of this kind of argument from anti-AI folks.
"Why not pick up a pencil instead?"
What if illustration was never "art"? What if it was always just a rote mechanical skill and the art itself was what the person was trying to communicate?
Maybe the technical aspects don't matter. Maybe it's the message we're conveying, our taste, our curation, our unique lens?
Yes. The art is "take a comic I didn't draw and replace some text." The pro-ai crowd is certainly brimming with artistic ingenuity. So much insight! Thank God they're boiling the oceans for this.
I'd like to see metrics on that. But intuitively I'd say AI is faster.
Basically it's opening the tab and typing your thought vs speed running paint.
@sandermvanvliet what was the process and how long do you estimate it took you?
Personally it would take me awhile to find the template, the exact font and get the positioning just right.
I could make a crude one fast, and I've seen many crude versions of this meme. But matching the font is a bit more work, maybe there's a generator for it, but that's not paint nor do I know where it exists.
“Speed running paint”? You mean opening the image and dragging a text box over the existing text, changing the font to comic sans, and typing the text?
There are complicated workflows in Paint, this is not one of them.
> comic sans
It's not comic sans though, you've already failed.
Why have you failed though? Is the point to try to deceive people to think that XKCD actually published something else? Why not modify the xkcd one without hinding the fact that you modified it?
that fact you think it looks so good that it deceives is a point for ai.
the point is to make a quality meme fast. the guy he replied to appreciated it.
any fan of xkcd knows the original.
Ok
Yeah, everyone knows xkcd uses its own font, Humor Sans.
Oh I did not know that.
[dead]
Do it yourself on live video. Otherwise this is such a baseless and needlessly accusatory comment
[dead]
thanks!
Looked him up, he quite literally pushed the first commits of QEMU ever. Edit: And was the sole developer until 2007!
Fabrice’s DNA is infused in the FOSS ecosystem. He’s an avid and prolific developer. FFMpeg, Qemu, libbf, softfp, BPG, jslinux, etc, etc, etc.
And ffmpeg. And TinyC. And a bunch of other things. The dude is a legend.
The author's short diversion about the hassle of using a random website for zip2iso functionality and asking about a cli tool for doing such conversion lead me to create this cross-platform python script with no external dependencies: https://github.com/scottvr/GENISO/blob/main/ZIP2ISO.py
Longer explanation in the comments of TFA, but short version is that it was mostly "vibe-coded" using Gemini3 Pro instead of having to read the ISO9660 spec, which was also impressive to me.
mkisofs might also do the trick.
It would, but it would be platform-specific and an external dependency. It was my first thought too until I started planning out it working cross-platform.
Mega cool, I’m curious if there’s a way to burn the ISO to a disc and get this playing on a physical console?
You'd need to hack the console to get it to load a burned disc, but if you can do that, you can also just load it from USB.
Though I guess you could burn it to a disk anyway purely for the sake of authenticity.
USB on the PS2 is limited to 1.0 or 1.1 speeds, so a disc may work better anyway.
Just to clarify, the difference on the PS2 is:
* CD: 3.6MB/s
* DVD: 5-8MB/s
* USB: 0.8-1.1MB/s
So the disk would almost definitely be the better option.
USB is fine for PS1/retro games; should be more than enough for AthenaEnv. The difference only matters for PS2 backups. And there're more options than those two. HDD/SSD, Ethernet, MX4SIO/SIO2SD, MMCE (SD2PSX et al).
Is it possible to use PS1 games and USB simultaneously? I thought the USB was handled by the B/C chips.
That's true; network too. Can play digital backups (off USB/Eth) only by using POPStarter (for those unaware, POPS being Sony's PS1 emulator ripped off the single game that was officially used on). Although POPS isn't really that good (was used, experimentally, only once afterall), USB throughput isn't an issue.
Can also use a micro SD adapter through the mem card slot. Generally considered a bit better experience than a USB drive.
Combined with https://github.com/CTurt/FreeDVDBoot, I think it would be possible
FreeMcBoot on a memory card + USB flash drive (or internal disk) is a popular option to play on real hardware. Saves wear and tear on the optical drive too.
I have sat on a freemcboot mem card for probably 6 years now. I’ll get around to it eventually…
It's a good time! I feel the PS2 is an iconic member of any living room TV setup, especially with an SSD, a couple controllers, and component out. Nice to have for hangouts!
Oh damn can you get some real performance boost out of an SSD? Do you install it or does it hang out externally?
The original Phat PS2 models support internal IDE disks, though it's easy to convert them to SATA with an inexpensive adapter. Then prepare the SSD and install (I use WinHIIP, "obsolete" but works fine). It noticably improves startup and load times in games!
Some also swap the fan for a Noctua to give it a complete "quiet upgrade", but my stock fan isn't very loud.
Very cool. Jotting this down for later, appreciate it
Why use physical disc instead of some optical drive mod
ODEs aren't common for the PS2 because they already support flash drives, network shares, and (for fats) full size hard drives.
The interesting part here is about AthenaEnv. It looks like it uses QuickJS for the Javascript interpreter and wraps around the native system libraries that the PS2 provides.
I'm wondering if there's a modern similar project that would allow writing Javascript Canvas games (WebGPU / WebGL) and publishing on Switch/2, PS5, and Xbox.
From my understanding, they explicitly disallow JITs so you can't just wrap your JS game with Electron / Node Webkit and use V8. I'm not sure if anyone has tried publishing a game using a V8-jitless electron fork - the sdks for consoles are under NDA so there's not really much written about it publicly & most games using Unreal or Unity don't deal with these things themselves.
PC, Mac, and even mobile are surprisingly easier here because you can just run the JS via electron or in a webview on mobile.
I think the game Cross Code (a game written in JS) was ported to consoles using a pretty complex process.
Here is a detailed blog post about the topic : https://www.radicalfishgames.com/?p=6892
Yeah, I saw the video about that earlier which is what led me to wonder if there was a native JS way now.
They used Kha in order to port only the console versions, the desktop versions remained JS from my understanding: https://github.com/Kode/Kha which is built on top of Haxe. This works, but it also means not having a single codebase anymore which would be one of the benefits of a JS based system.
There are other options here - something like using an AOT JS compiler like Porffor, but from my understanding it's never been tested (and would probably be missing a lot of support to get it working - like shimming canvas & providing a WebGPU context that the compiled JS could execute against).
The official Nintendo 3DS and Wii U SDKs both provided an Electron-like framework that allowed games to be written with web technologies. I seem to recall that it was discontinued at some point before the Switch? The Switch does have a WebKit browser applet that games can call to display web-based content, but it's pretty limited since JIT is disabled like you say. I've only ever seen it used for e-manuals.
Maybe they could simply make a modern web browser for PS2, where you would simply open a website with the game :)
Chrome apparently has a minimum memory requirement of 4GB, so you'd need to shrink it down to one-one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth its size to squeeze it into the PS2's 32MB of RAM.
Easy peasy, just remove the telemetry.
A similar thing, also using QuickJS, but for the Nintendo Switch: https://github.com/TooTallNate/nx.js (I'm not the author).
Nice, this is similar to what I was wondering about - it looks like it's pretty limited in capability right now (looks like it only supports canvas2d at the moment: https://nxjs.n8.io/runtime/rendering/canvas), but in theory it would allow you to make a layer to convert WebGPU or WebGL games for Switch (ignoring the huge performance drop going from v8 / jit JS engines to QuickJS).
Cool article. AthenaEnv is an alternative follow-up to, also by same dev, Enceladus which uses Lua instead. Besides games they're used, and even more popular for this use case, homebrew apps. Examples being RETROLauncher & POPSLoader for Enceladus, and OSD-XMB for Athena.
Even the PS2 isn't safe from JavaScript.
Super cool. Thanks for sharing this. I've been looking for something like this for a while.
people will do anything to avoid using .gdscript and Godot....
I like Godot, but you're not getting it running on a PS2.
gdscript does not do any fancy JIT or AOT compiling. I don't see why you can't get gdscript running fairly easily.
gdscript itself, sure, why not. Porting the entire Godot engine would be a real feat though, especially because of the PS2’s technical limitations.
Someone did compile Godot (v2) for PS2 and did run it but seems like they gave up trying to run/export any games with it[1][2]. Somehow, the PSP port[3] (also v2) is more successful[4].
[1]: https://github.com/ivandortulov/godot-ps2 [2]: https://itch.io/t/3658957/compiling-godot-for-the-playstatio... [3]: https://github.com/technicaljicama/godot-psp [4]: https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/3D-Luck_PSP
To be fair, it's not as simple as building in Godot and exporting to PS2.
https://github.com/distrohelena/retrongin
Unity has at least one experimental option that does exactly this.
It's too bad that Unity is a horrible company and a dying platform
IBM PS2?
Yes. https://github.com/SuperIlu/DOjS
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Already been posted here twice by the dev in the past two months...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45436166
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45778448
What's the point of linking discussions that have one comment each?
The reason you see @dang link past submissions is so we can read previous interesting discussion, not to shame submissions that got no traction.
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First link isn't by the author and second link is a different article...