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

babyloniantwins.com

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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doing something similar for DOS SDL ports. Repo isn't public yet, but idea is to have a repo with a knowledge base, skills and patches agents can use when porting to avoid having to bootstrap everything from scratch.

Porting to DOS sounds like a great plan for retro games, to only have to do the port once and know there are stable emulators to run it in, as opposed to porting to some modern OS and then have to port the game again and again to keep up with API changes.

I'm assuming they mean SDL ports of DOS games. SDL is actually one of the most stable libraries that a native game can use. They make breaking changes to the API once every 10-15 years, and they write a compatibility layer that implements the previous version's API using the current version's API as a backend. This has happened twice so far, so there's an SDL 1.2 implementation that uses SDL 2 and an SDL 2 implementation that uses SDL 3. These can be chained together, so for example you can run an SDL 1.2 game from the early 2000s on a modern Linux system and it'll have native Wayland and Pipewire support thanks to using SDL 3 behind the scenes.

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

#132
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…

ai slop port is not a port, re-creating the full game engine to run in natively a modern cpu architecture that is the challenge

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

#133
post #122

It's kind of a fun, albeit also kind of a pointless, thing to do, huh? This week I took a student project game I made with 3 others back in 2010 and made it live again. I'm cheap, I only have the $20 plan for this month (likely to pause again for next month) and used Opus 5, and I'm visibly hamstringing it by running claude code in a firejail and not using yolo mode on permissions. Still, without much effort/oversigh…

Why pointless?

Only kind of pointless. A few reasons come to mind. For one, they're games. (I say as an avid lifelong gamer.) For another, it's indulging nostalgia. (I say as an indulger.) To be clear, I think both things are fine, but of course to all things moderation, even moderation. When trying to rank things by pointlessness, many specific forms of entertainment and nostalgia are higher up than other activities or categories. Not as high as watching paint dry. And the more general category of, say, "having fun" is lower; some might even claim that to be the least pointless thing of all. I'd caution with "Amusing Ourselves to Death".

More reasons come from trying to predict where AIs and our interactions with them will be in 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years. Will we even be alive? Other reasons from wondering about alternative actions: is asking the magic box to do this particular thing, rather than some other particular thing, the thing that will actually bring you (or others) joy right now? Or money? Satisfaction? Fame? Upvotes? Some other things you want to feel or experience or do? (And in the OP's case, I think there's actually quite a good case of actions matching motivations, given the full history, and especially as earlier pre-AI-tooling ports were well-received enough to get a couple million downloads. Still, what about something new?) For my own small efforts this week, the main things I got out of it, besides the nostalgia (which is quite valuable to me), were similar to what I've been getting out of any AI-using projects this year, which is a strange mix of satisfaction, a bit of fun, a bit more awe at these magic boxes (even the dumber ones like Opus and Sonnet), anticipation of showing/telling a few people in person about this particular kind of pointless adventure, and a bit more melancholy about a few things, like the makeup of some of my online hangouts, or that my programming skills have been rapidly decreasing in their having a point to exist, or that my revealed preferences in this case are that I'm happier to let the AI do all the coding for this project and barely look at the code myself (there's a bit of disgust/gross feelings here too). I last thought of doing this work in 2019/2020, never got very far, now it's suddenly done, and even more than I thought of doing. (I still keep the AI out of some other projects, as programming the old fashioned way is in general still pretty fun to me at least.) Now it's on to the next project, when I decide that will be more fun than playing a game (I have such a backlog after all), and I'm sure it'll also be relatively pointless. More the honor to people doing bigger things impacting the world, with or without these tools.

This whole comment is also kind of pointless, I'd rank it as probably more so than the other mentioned things (except I guess watching paint dry), and yet it's here.

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

#134

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 have the Max subscription. I use mostly weekends and some evenings. I never hit a limit.

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

#135
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

I tried it with 16k roms. It does take less than 1 hour but if you want to tweak and make playable, you will need half day

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

#136

Must be incredibly rewarding seeing your game rebuilt. Fantastic bit of history too - I had no idea games were being made for the Amiga in Baghdad!

The game website link to some articles description the game dev scene back then.

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

#138

> 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.

It is already on itch. Check the babyloninantwins.com for all the links

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

#139
post #132
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…

ai slop port is not a port, re-creating the full game engine to run in natively a modern cpu architecture that is the challenge

Using a car is not a way to travel, the real way is to take a horse.
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