You can compile in only the used stuff with various build flags, not sure if they did that though. I've done that before to make a pared down SDL that only does audio playback.
It was "I need you to sit with:" that immediately made me close the article. I like LLM programming, but I really don't understand why so many people just post LLM-generated articles. What did the human even do at that point, press the start button?
Not to criticize your work too harshly, but you specifically call out that this showcases attention to detail, and it's actually very inaccurate to the actual Windows XP, for anyone who's ever used it before. The UI elements are all haphazardly sized relative to each other, there are alpha-fade ins/outs, the loading bar in the boot screen animates smoothly when the real thing popped along block-by-block, fonts are antialiased when they shouldn't be, hover-over dropdown menus appear/disappear instantly when moused over, the fake scanlines are just a pixel grid overlay, the selection box on the desktop is filled but should be a dotted outline... these are just the few I saw and I haven't used XP in years.
This one does. You can configure the noise injected into the signal and when it gets too much, it loses sync and the picture starts rolling. It's actually a software NTSC modulator/demodulator, not just an effect to simulate it.
He's clearly doing a bit where he pretends to be confused and incompetent, and the punchline of the video is that he ends up with a working Windows CE port. He did a bit of soldering on the N64 board in the video so I think he probably does know what he's doing to a certain degree.
That said, LLMs have gotten extremely good at this kind of thing and you'd be shocked what you can do with this kind of low level work.
As the other commenter said, I don't think contributing it would be that useful, since QBE is a rather zen-garden project and I don't think the author would accept slop. Also he could just generate it with a prompt himself :P
The backend is only ~1300 lines. QBE is a super simple project which is why adding a backend to it worked so well. I just pointed Claude at the existing RISC-V backend for reference and it whipped up the MIPS one. It really does work, though there might be bugs I didn't run into. I compiled an Amiga MOD player, written in my language, to the N64 and it worked fine, if that gives you an idea of how stress tested it was. IIRC it runs about 5x slower than GCC-generated code.
Cool project, and FWIW it's like one Claude prompt to add MIPS support to this. I did that and then was able to compile my little custom language to the N64.
You can plug your ears and accept riding run-down trains full of shit, litter, puke, and threatening mentally ill people, in the name of not being "hateful," or as a society you can choose to have dignity and not put up with that.
I maintain a niche-popular project that I didn't do any marketing for. My understanding is that even for popular projects, the usual dynamic is that there's just one guy doing all the work. So "getting off the ground" just means getting people to use it, and there shouldn't be any reason to artificially force that.