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Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly

babyloniantwins.com

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Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly

#1

Post by rabahs »

These are my notes from porting my Amiga game, which I originally built in Baghdad in 1993 in MC68000 assembly, to Godot, using Claude Fable 5 during last July holiday. It took an evening! Getting the feel right and shipping it took a few more weekends and evenings.

I spent the last few weeks analyzing what Claude did, feeding it my 33 years of memory of how I built the game, my notes and the git repos. It wrote the first draft of the article, and I edited line by line over a week. The screenshots of my 1993 map editor is the first I have run it since then. The one thing I never verified myself is the 108-byte explanation.

"Before starting everything, the model assembled the code using vasm on my Mac, and kept going till the binary is byte-identical to the binaries I had in my original game. Even after that, the there was mismatch of about 108 bytes. I originally used AsmOne which assembles into memory, and the game saved into the disk by saving that memory after running the game. So the original shipped files are a snapshot of the game that had already been running, not clean asm-one output."

Please post any questions. I am also releasing the original game for free.

Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly
babyloniantwins.com

Re: Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly

#3

Post by hedgehog »

This is fantastic. It would be interesting to have Claude Code export an engineering guide for doing similar ports, including descriptions of the tooling it built to do it. I've done some reversing from binary but never with results this good.

Re: Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly

#4

Post by rabahs »

hedgehog wrote: post #3

This is fantastic. It would be interesting to have Claude Code export an engineering guide for doing similar ports, including descriptions of the tooling it built to do it. I've done some reversing from binary but never with results this good.

This is a great idea. It could be a generic game porting skill to make the porting experience smoother. After my experience above. I have actually tried giving Claude binary files of games and it was able to reverse engineer to GoDot!

Re: Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly

#5

Post by mattbruv »

I really tried to start reading this because I am interested in the idea, but the obvious AI writing prose is just so off-putting that I can't force myself to continue reading it without my eyes rolling into the back of my head. I'm not against using AI to code, but if you're actually passionate about the project and want to share it with others, you should use your own words.

Re: Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly

#6

Post by [deleted] »

mattbruv wrote: post #5

I really tried to start reading this because I am interested in the idea, but the obvious AI writing prose is just so off-putting that I can't force myself to continue reading it without my eyes rolling into the back of my head. I'm not against using AI to code, but if you're actually passionate about the project and want to share it with others, you should use your own words.

[deleted]

Re: Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly

#7

Post by khazhoux »

mattbruv wrote: post #5

I really tried to start reading this because I am interested in the idea, but the obvious AI writing prose is just so off-putting that I can't force myself to continue reading it without my eyes rolling into the back of my head. I'm not against using AI to code, but if you're actually passionate about the project and want to share it with others, you should use your own words.

There were a couple of AI tropes but not overly so. This is a great story, especially if you’ve programmed the Amiga before.

Think of it as: this is a story that quite possibly would not be told without AI to help with the writeup.

Re: Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly

#8

Post by robviren »

I'm actually glad to see it stumbled in a few areas. Always surprised to see how much it gets right though. I had always hoped the rather obscure parts of computer history and games would be this incredibly difficult area for Agents to mine.

The amount of non standard hackish and obtuse things that had to be done to implement things in the past feel impossibly complicated to touch today. Lots of people made it up as they went along and used the hardware in ways no one expected. Reminds me of Tim Follin doing the audio for Plock on SNES and Miamoto being shocked the audio was real. It would be so interesting to see what we could learn about development of the past from agentic insights into how code was constructed. I love stuff like this an appreciate the in depth post.

Re: Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly

#10

Post by sedawkgrep »

rabahs wrote: post #4
hedgehog wrote: post #3

This is fantastic. It would be interesting to have Claude Code export an engineering guide for doing similar ports, including descriptions of the tooling it built to do it. I've done some reversing from binary but never with results this good.

This is a great idea. It could be a generic game porting skill to make the porting experience smoother. After my experience above. I have actually tried giving Claude binary files of games and it was able to reverse engineer to GoDot!

> I have actually tried giving Claude binary files of games and it was able to reverse engineer to GoDot!

Oh wow...I hadn't even thought of trying something like this. There are soooo many games from that era that I'd love to play again without the hackery of emulation.

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