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

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

#111

Post by cesaref »

I noticed he mentioned that his game was running at 50hz - that's true if an Amiga is running on PAL, but if it's a US machine it'll be 60hz when running with NTSC.

Back in the day, most Amiga games were made in Europe, so were tuned for 50Hz refresh, and played 'normally' over here. At 60hz, they would feel wrong, and likewise, US games could feel sluggish and unsatisfying.

Locking the machine to the monitor refresh rate in this way was a curse but also a blessing. It allowed the machines to drive a standard television in various regions, although the image was somewhat blurry, but also the use of dedicated monitors once you started taking it seriously. This reduced the price point and allowed lots of kids to convince their parents to get one :) The higher resolution modes just didn't work out though, so lots of stuff targeted the 320x256 resolution.

The surprise benefit was also that the amiga could genlock to a TV signal and used to overlay onto a video feed, leading to many interesting cheap graphics overlay capabilities which were otherwise totally unobtainable by small TV channels or enthusiasts.

Those were happy days.

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

#112

Post by gmerc »

appstorelottery wrote: post #99

Anyone that uses "Claude Fable 5 running in Claude Code"? Can you speculate that plan or cost might have been involved in doing this (given that it seems approximately 5 hours or so of continuous operation for both C++ and Assembly ports, along with the shipping / marketing functions where it's not clear how much compute was used". Thanks in advance (I'm thinking of trying US based models, however I'm penny pinching…

I just did a one shot port of Dragon Strike (1990) and it got to about 85% playable from zero. Cost: About half a Claude Max 200 Weekly Limit, whatever that means. Details: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/georgzoeller_fable-51-is-a-si...

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

#113

Post by khazhoux »

sitkack wrote: post #22
khazhoux wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tics, tropes are worn out predictable plot devices

Too late

https://tropes.fyi/

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

#114

Post by s-macke »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #104
s-macke wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to see all of them :-) One of the most difficult reverse-engineering projects from that era for me was Stunt Car Racer on the C64 (also ported to DOS). It features a highly optimized 8-bit 3D graphics and physics engine. Fable was the first one that was able to generate a complete port of the game. Now I am trying of Flight Simulator 4 and Wing Commander 1. Then maybe Frontier Elite 2. So much fun ....

Please do not hesitate to share stunts, if you can

Stunt Car Racer from Geoff Crammond published by MicroProse, not Stunts from Distinctive Software.

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

#115

Post by glimshe »

saulpw wrote: post #63
glimshe wrote: post #45

Great work! I'm planning to do that to another forgotten game (not mine) and it's great to see that this is now quite possible.

Which game are you planning to do? We all should coordinate so we're not doing the same games repeatedly.

Ah, it's not going to be Amiga. The shortlist has two PC and two C64 games.

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

#117

Post by Steve16384 »

gmerc wrote: post #87

It's a completely new world. Random retro games I ported to modern webgl/webgpu in the last few months: - The Adventures of Robin Hood - Opus 4.7/Sonnet https://robin.tooclever.org - Syndicate - Sol/Luna 5.6/Opus ( https://this.os.isfine.org/blog/posts/modern-game-port-syndi... ) - Kaiser 2 - Populous Plus - Sol/Luna 5.6/Opus - Dragon Strike - (Fable 5.1 almost one shot) - War of the Lance - Qwnen-3.7-27B-dense (got…

This is amazing. I'm trying to get a handle on how you're doing this, but I can't seem to find anything specific. e.g., is it a case of prompting "Please recreate Populous for the web"?

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

#118

Post by Steve16384 »

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!

This is amazing. How long did that process take? Was it almost just a case of giving Claude the binary files and then prompting "please recreate this in Godot"?

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

#119

Post by muro »

gmerc wrote: post #87

It's a completely new world. Random retro games I ported to modern webgl/webgpu in the last few months: - The Adventures of Robin Hood - Opus 4.7/Sonnet https://robin.tooclever.org - Syndicate - Sol/Luna 5.6/Opus ( https://this.os.isfine.org/blog/posts/modern-game-port-syndi... ) - Kaiser 2 - Populous Plus - Sol/Luna 5.6/Opus - Dragon Strike - (Fable 5.1 almost one shot) - War of the Lance - Qwnen-3.7-27B-dense (got…

you are awesome. I'm doing one such port and it's not that simple :)

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

#120

Post by rererereferred »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #46

> 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. Sooooo cool! I did something similar a few months ago: had the old source code (and executable files) of a game I wrote in 1991 (PC DOS) and a few notes in source code and, well, my old memories of…

You can pout it on itch.io and write a devlog there.
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