Nothing in the original thread asserts that this is more than an intellectual curiosity, which is the ethos of Hacker News.

GPT-4 is not going to replace emulating GBA games.

“Write my civil war essay”

“Write a poem about farts”

“Write a JavaScript wrapper for this API”

99% of the usage is a “waste”. Who cares. Some of us are poking around to find that other 1% and some of us are just entertaining ourselves.

Oh it is absolutely a waste of compute practically speaking. I just find it incredibly interesting that it's even possible for GPT to convincingly recreate many aspects of the original game, including the rules about what is and is not possible at various points, and I haven't seen many others exploring in this direction. I'm very curious as to what Pokemon-simulation-adjacent things GPT is capable of.

The 90% of the tecnology used in the internet and even in your pocket was born because some guys wanted to play Space War under a PDP-8 machine with no OS.

The technology to draw "widgets" in your Unix console was born to play computer games depending on them.

Do you believe the amount of time developers have spent building hello worlds is a waste because those are useless applications?

Should go without saying, but the interesting thing about this thread is not that you can now play a flawed text version of an old game. It's that this example toy use case manages to explore the new capabilities and limitations of this new promising tool. This improves our understanding of this technology, and helps us make better use of it in the future, for more productive and innovative applications that we may not be able to predict yet at this point.