My idle-speculation project for the Plus is Beamrider. I’ve got about a years worth of occasional archived back and forth with ChatGPT and other design notes and documents on how I’d implement it as a Mode 1 game (with a ton of raster splits) with HW Sprites.
I had a PoC for doing it in Mode 2. It might have been the most colourful Mode 2 game ever if I actually sat down and glued all the bits together. Maybe I should get into the AI stuff more to make up for the lack of continuous time to do things.
Edit: No actually that was Ballblazer. Similar concept though.
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You could make some cracking Mode 2 games on the Plus. The wee thin narrow pixels though would drive me insane though.
How much of your response @cpcitor was made by an AI, then? Almost all of your post reeks like it. The emdash being the most obvious trace.
Only the list at the end, and I said so when I introduced it: Claude did the web search, I selected and edited the items and checked every link before posting.
I strive to write good prods and good prose. I hope careful writing does not become a sign of AI. 
Long answer for those who wants details
Here’s how I introduced it:
Just noticed the typos “to to” instead of “to do” an “personnally” instead of “personally”. AIs typically don’t do that. 
Why do you feel that?
I write my posts myself. I benefit from the forum, I try to share something thoughtful back… which easily becomes too long, so I cut it with Markdown sections and a TL;DR as a courtesy to readers. It is different from most people style but it’s my style, not any AI style.
I also have a discipline, before posting, of reading what I wrote “in the shoes of a reader passing by” and checking if it’s clear. Traditionally I would check for better words with a dictionary or sometimes Google translate one or two sentences. Nowadays when I think it’s not good enough I sometimes ask Claude to re-read, criticize and rewrite parts (which I did for example in my other post about “any-setup keys”).
Oh, plot twist ahead.
I just discovered that the dashes in that list (they mark date ranges) are not em dashes but en dashes, and according to En (typography) - Wikipedia that is the proper mark for a range. So it is correct typography. (Edit: but you were right on the main point: those dashes are in the part Claude produced.)
In the past I sometimes used -- (double-hyphen) when writing Markdown (here’s the result: – , also triple-hyphen yields: — ), IIRC because I read once on a typography geek site that those were more proper than the ASCII hyphen/minus sign in non-mathematical context. Now I don’t even consider it because it makes people believe an AI wrote the text.
As an exercise I asked Claude to rewrite the whole answer above. See its version below. That version is shorter. Mine has typos. 
Genuine question: would anyone prefer that I post Claude’s version next time?
What Claude suggests
Only the list at the end, and I said so when I introduced it: Claude did the web search, I selected and edited the items and checked every link I posted.
The rest is my own writing. My posts tend to be long, so I add section titles and a TL;DR as a courtesy to readers. That is my habit, not an AI’s.
Before posting, I re-read my text as a reader passing by would. I used to check words with a dictionary, or Google Translate for a sentence or two. Now, when a text is long and unclear, I sometimes ask Claude to re-read, criticize and rewrite parts. I did that in my other post about “any-setup keys”.
The dashes you spotted are in that list. They are en dashes in date ranges, which is standard typography. I used to type -- myself, because a typography site said it was more proper than a plain hyphen. I stopped, because now it makes people believe an AI wrote the text.
I strive to write good prods and good prose.
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A “good enough” conversion certainly might put someone off, but then it’s also possible they wouldn’t have achieved any better. But equally a poor port might motivate someone to try harder, just as things like the original Bubble Bobble or R-Type ports lead to people pushing harder.
I don’t think it’s enough of a reason not to do it. If someone has the passion for something enough to do it, chances are they’ll do it anyway. And, as people get better with AI tooling at least a few of those will probably lead to amazing conversions of things we’d never see otherwise.
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I don’t totally agree with your point about improving the original Bubble Bobble and R-Type as those were games we paid for back in the day, and some of these developers may be doing it to make the games they wish that they’d bought back then!
There’s two good points here. I want to play games created by people who have the passion to want to make games (which includes conversions of old games as well as new games). Contrary to that, I don’t want really to play a game, no matter how good it is, when it’s been made purely by prompting AI. As @Ivan_Avila said in another topic:
For me, playing games is also a hobby, I’d rather experience games created by someone who has put their passion into it.
That’s not to take away from anyone who is happy to play AI-created games, that’s fine, enjoy yourself.
First comment back here and it’s just to let people know my opinion on AI. It should be called ZI (not SI as Trump has called it, although Stupid Intelligence fits). It has Zero Intelligence, it’s just an auto-completing, plagiarising knowledge base and search function. It’s great as a tool to help an educated intelligent person find information, do a complicated search and replace, flesh out some repetitive or boiler-plate templates or try a millions of combinations to see what works, but it doesn’t actually have any actual intelligence.
It is most dangerous because management believes, based on what the AI billionaires advertise that it is much more useful that it actually is and that good developers are generally more productive when using it, and although this can be the case it usually isn’t.
I don’t mind people using it, but when they start claiming that it’s done a better job than real people then I have a problem.
There are a lot of good programmers in this community who published a lot of the optimised code which could be used by these AI agents for free and they don’t deserve to be belittled in the way I saw above in this thread, thanks @rexbeng and @gryzor for voicing your opinions here.
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I don’t have the theological objections to AI/LLMs that others have (I’m not disputing their reasons and their views, I just don’t share them). But what I do have is too much programming experience as a professional dev, and someone who came back to Amstrad programming after decades away.
AI can help you do a better job of programming. What it can’t do is provide you that level of programming ability that you need for it to help you do a better job of programming.
For me as the, ahem, tired and hoary old (ish) programmer (who has been coding as a day job for nigh on 30 years) it’s excellent. When used as part of my craft. It’s a blessing for a senior dev.
But Junior Devs need to kept well away from it in most cases. And the same applies to the CPC Scene. The biggest thing I think with use of AI/LLMs is knowing when the stuff they produce is not correct (for your use case) and being able to push back. Just like you’d push back on a human who didn’t produce required or correct code. If you can do that successfully, then it’s a great help.
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They’re just notable examples of game remakes that sprang to mind. I don’t really think the fact that the originals were commercial changes things much.
Consider a world in which AI development didn’t exist: Should you avoid trying to hand write your own version of Galaga because, maybe, a better CPC coder might see it and be put off from producing a more polished version? What if everyone thought like that? That way madness lies and nothing ever gets made.
Mostly I just think hobbies should be as inclusive as possible. If something helps someone enjoy the process of making a game, good for them. Doesn’t matter if it’s AI or something old school “Game Maker” and, to be quite honest, it doesn’t matter if the end result is garbage. They did something, felt proud and enjoyed the process.
Now if they try to turn it into some sort of low effort, slop machine that they pay little attention to and expect a huge revenue stream from - then they deserve to fail. I know there are some people who will, very generously, but almost any physical release but maybe it’s time for those people to be more discerning rather than worry about people making crappy games for their own pleasure.
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It was not my intention to spark excessive controversy by suggesting that AI usage be labeled. But from a “consumer” point of view, AI is not a tool, but an entity—a substitute. It makes decisions and creates based on the references allowed by its level of freedom.
Identifying it is essential to maintaining the essence of any scene, including programming, since AI removes the main factor that brings us together: the human element.
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I don’t exactly know why you would use AI to compose a response in Spanish on an English forum which makes no sense at all (unless my AI translator got it wrong). Eliminating the human group doesn’t seem to be the way to make the scene prosper, but rather to fill it with AI slop instead of carefully hand-crafted code. If the reply was not written by AI, I apologise, but your logic is very much like that of the I in AI, non existent.
This sentence makes no sense at all. What is the point of the scene if you remove the humans? Certainly not a scene I would want to be involved in. Was this reply written by A(-I)?
It appears to be English now, unless the other post is in a different thread?
I don’t mean to be nasty, but I don’t actually agree with this. Inclusivity is a good thing in general, but not everything has to be inclusive in the sense of being able to do everything.
I’m not a good artist or musician, but I don’t want to use AI to make graphics or music for me. I’d rather ask someone else to do it, or make do with my own creations in the games I’ve made, but I know that’s just me 
Enjoying the process is fair enough, but, for me, the process isn’t putting prompts into an AI without understanding what it then outputs, which is what you’re saying they would be proud of.
And also no, it doesn’t matter if the end result is garbage, I do agree with that. But if you post that “garbage” online asking for feedback as if you’ve produced something decent, then some people are going to be honest…And, once again, just from my perspective, I’m going to be more supportive (while still being honest) of someone who has put personal effort in to create the thing, than someone who has vibe coded that project.
And finally, while I don’t like that AI has been trained on stolen content (I don’t think anyone rational disagrees with that fact), has (IMO) been shown to have pretty terrible environmental impacts from data centres, and has made our PCs and consoles cost far more than they should due to eating up all the available RAM in the world, I do understand that plenty of people don’t care about that, or disagree with my thoughts on this. And it’s not like I haven’t enjoyed several games on the CPC recently which have been helped by AI (making me hypocritical!). But I think AI has far better uses (eg in medicine, where it can spot cancer cells much earlier than humans can) and from this forum’s perspective I’m mostly against it being used to churn out games just because it can. If you’ve seen/played the recent CPC version of the GameBoy’s Revenge of the Gator, I think you’ll know what I mean. That’s a version that was a waste of AI CPU cycles…
I apologise for the long reply, I’ll shut up about AI now and just enjoy the games I enjoy
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Firstly, absolutely no offense taken and you are certainly not being “nasty”. It’s perfectly ok to have different views on things and I can entirely understand your perspective.
Which is a completely reasonable thing and, quite honestly, is pretty much how I’d feel about my own projects. And I’ll say again, I don’t use AI that much in general and I certainly have no intention of doing so in retro projects because that’s not what I find fun.
But I’m well aware that there are a lot of people who grew up on the 80s who always wanted to make “their” game. The idea sat in their head as a child but, for whatever reason, they never gained the skills to actually make it. And a lot of them are very talented artists or musicians, but don’t feel they can just hand the idea over to someone else who can code. Sometimes because it’s just their baby, sometimes because nobody else seems interested and sometimes because they’ve done that already and got burned by a developer who got bored or just wasn’t up to it.
These people should be overjoyed at finally getting the opportunity to realise their dream - to bring their thing into existence the way they imagined (or at least as close as they can get). Immediately ostracizing such projects by branding them as lesser works just because it was partially automated just seems cruel and disheartening.
Now will the results of some of them, maybe even a lot of them, be crap? Absolutely. And people should absolutely say that such things are crap. When you share your art with the world, that’s the cost of admission - critiques will come.
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If you had a brilliant idea, created an amazing game design, and used AI to implement it, why would telling the truth about how a great game was made turn it into a minor work?
I have to confess that I have a particular obsession with the technical aspects of retro video games, but Monkey Island has always been one of my favorite games even though its frame rate is a disaster. The plot is so great and the game so much fun that I simply don’t care technically how it was made.
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Marginalising things by moving them into subforums or requiring users jump through extra hoops (or just bombarding the threads with generic rants about AI) has a habit of doing that, even if the creator doesn’t mind being honest. So then the temptation becomes to not say anything.
And it’s not always as clear cut as people like to imagine. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve played around with an idea for creating a Ballblazer style game for the Plus in Mode 2, which could be incredibly colourful. Now to do that I need to create some very specific background images that are basically just a bunch of perspective lines. If I alter the screen width, playfield height, or horizontal scroll rate, I’ll need new images. They will not be fun to draw. No artist will want to do that. They are not even fun to work out the maths for. But I can get an AI to generate me some python to generate the images quite easily. And if I do that, now I have to say the game has AI generated graphics - even if everything that isn’t just a bunch of boring maths and lines is hand drawn. And the entire debate about being expected to declare this and put up with the rants against AI has almost entirely killed my motivation for doing the actual work.
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FWIW I’d be so so so interested in that. Both in the game and in the technical aspects of designing and coding it, all of it, regardless of AI or not.
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This will probably mostly be understood by people who actually produce something and not just consume
duck and cover
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First time that, being Spanish and writing in Spanish, I’m told I edit with AI. As I said, the chaos is right here at home. Suspicion aside, it’s normal that you don’t understand the automatic translator.
Now nobody knows what’s what. Me confirming my humanity to you is no longer a guarantee. Welcome to the Matrix, my little English friend.
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I’m going to take the red pill… and I’m sorry if my Spanish isn’t very good (I’ve forgotten a lot since school)