Porting a 1993 Amiga game to Godot with an LLM reading 68000 assembly
Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly
Babylonian Twins, the first commercial game made in Iraq, was built in 1993 on an Amiga 500 in pure 68000 assembly. Now, its creator has ported it to Godot 4, using an LLM to translate the original 72,758 lines of assembly code. The process involved three steps: porting the 2010 C++ engine, rebuilding the original from assembly, and integrating both. The LLM succeeded in a single pass where previous models struggled, even reproducing the original binaries byte-identically. The result is a modern game that includes the original as a playable bonus, running at its native 50 Hz.
I went to bed confused.
- btbuildem
> 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
- 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.
- Sharlin
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?
- ericd
Wow, that's gorgeous for something written in assembly, running in 512k, nice work!
- coder-pm
Hmm did you ever run the game port against the original one in UAE? With the same inputs? Or is it just "it plays right when I play it"? That 108 byte delta is puzzling...