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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

#81

Post by Sharlin »

rabahs wrote: post #59
Sharlin wrote: post #34

What I'm interested in is performance and memory use. How many times less efficient is the 2010 port compared to the original? What about this new one?

Are you interested in comparing the 2010 remake (C++) to the original (Assembly)? They are quite different games, so hard to compare, but both run at peak frame rate for their respective platforms (60fps vs 50fps). I have not compared the 2010 port to the current Godot port. However, I felt the Godot port was smoother. I think that was because Godot uses the latest graphics frameworks (e.g Metal) vs old Opengl ES 1.…

> They are quite different games, so hard to compare

Yeah, that's fair. I was just wondering what the performance of a modern version as close to the original would be, if written with Godot or another vastly higher-level framework than handwritten assembly. Given the 3+ orders of magnitude difference in processing power and memory.

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

#82

Post by rabahs »

Sharlin wrote: post #81
rabahs wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you interested in comparing the 2010 remake (C++) to the original (Assembly)? They are quite different games, so hard to compare, but both run at peak frame rate for their respective platforms (60fps vs 50fps). I have not compared the 2010 port to the current Godot port. However, I felt the Godot port was smoother. I think that was because Godot uses the latest graphics frameworks (e.g Metal) vs old Opengl ES 1.…

> They are quite different games, so hard to compare Yeah, that's fair. I was just wondering what the performance of a modern version as close to the original would be, if written with Godot or another vastly higher-level framework than handwritten assembly. Given the 3+ orders of magnitude difference in processing power and memory.

The fair comparison is between the assembly version and its godot port. I didn't actually notice any performance difference since th game is capped by its 50 frame per second.

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

#83

Post by mickeyp »

rabahs wrote: post #26
lstodd wrote: post #19

What's the point though? If you got the stuff it's better run in UAE. If you have none I don't trust you and therefore think the Amiga name is misleading. To gain trust here show some code running in UAE. There is no point in "porting to Godot" because either you port Amiga stuff to UAE-likes or FPGAs or you in fact advertise "AN AI REWROTE MY CRAP GWBASIC GAME FROM 93 LOL". Lol. Which is riduculous. and people will…

Thanks for the feedback. If you have read the article, I also mentioned that I have released the Amiga version for free to the Amiga community. AI actually helped addressing a few bugs and get it ready. You can download the ADF and play the full Amiga game for the first time since 33 years ago. This post was more about my experience using AI and interacting with assembly code from the 90s.

You don't have to apologise for anything. Your blog post, post-mortem, and detailed walked through is fantastic. This is a great use for AI.

I miss my Amiga 500 and all those days spent playing wonderful games so much. Thank you for the hit of nostalgia.

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

#84

Post by Sharlin »

rabahs wrote: post #82
Sharlin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are quite different games, so hard to compare Yeah, that's fair. I was just wondering what the performance of a modern version as close to the original would be, if written with Godot or another vastly higher-level framework than handwritten assembly. Given the 3+ orders of magnitude difference in processing power and memory.

The fair comparison is between the assembly version and its godot port. I didn't actually notice any performance difference since th game is capped by its 50 frame per second.

Yep, at equal resolution the game should presumably run at at least 10000fps uncapped on a modern machine. Of course that's not how it works in practice due to bottlenecks in the input stack and elsewhere.

I also doubt the Godot version fits in 512kB of RAM ;)

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

#86

Post by larodi »

btbuildem wrote: post #18

> one copy of the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual aka The Book... my, this brings back dusty memories Babylonian Twins has such strong "Gods: Into the Wonderful" vibes, I wonder if that game was an inspiration for you https://www.lemonamiga.com/game/gods-into-the-wonderful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kAXGjUwHyA

"Gods: Into the Wonderful" is perhaps the most amazing and inspiring game of the early 90s that literally blew my mind the first time I played it. Been playing it on and off for more than 15 years afterwards. It is a shame that publisher went down, they also released some other good games, but GODs is the legend among them.

Besides, if it wasn't for BBSs and pirated software, we'd never be ever able to put hands on it, as my country was going through regime change in 1989 and in 1992 the economy was completely mashed down and the game's price was half my mother's salary at the time. What a time to be alive. Of course it was not dad, but a friend who dug it from some BBS or perhaps the eraly tucows archive.

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

#87

Post by gmerc »

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 stuck, finished with) Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next https://this.os.isfine.org/blog/posts/what-reverse-engineeri...

- Dungeon Keeper - Various

- Red Baron - Opus 4.8, DeepSeek 4

- Test Drive 3 (Qwen-3.8-Flash Next, DeepSeek-4-Flash-exp, GLM-5.3-Flash)

- In progress Ultima 6 ... to 3d (Fable, GLM-5.3) ( https://this.os.isfine.org/#ultima6-atlas )

Some straight source ports (Kaiser), some full RE jobs (Dragon Strike, Test Drive, WOTL)

Some a mix of available sources (Syndicate, Populous)

Some of the findings are documented here: https://this.os.isfine.org/blog/

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

#89

Post by EagnaIonat »

mattjoyce wrote: post #44

A few weeks ago I downloaded a memory dump of a zx81 game, and ask Claude to build it in Go. It nailed it. Converted the binary back to basic and then to go. My idea was that the game would be unknown to llm training and perhaps a nice bench. What a crazy thing it is to be first at the advent of personal computing, and then in the inflection point where AI treats that first experience as archeology.

I tried this as an experiment with the hobbit tape file to Godot. Worked, and I was quite impressed in how it deconstructed the binary. At one point it did cheat by looking up the zx81 Hobbit online to find pieces that were missing.
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