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

37 pointsposted 4 hours ago
by rabahs

7 Comments

robviren

4 minutes ago

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.

ericd

a minute ago

[delayed]

hedgehog

3 hours ago

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.

rabahs

3 hours ago

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!

mattbruv

11 minutes ago

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.

aenis

7 minutes ago

That was well written and informative. Why would I need this to be hand written? I've read the whole thing with interest despite recognizing the claudish prose.

khazhoux

7 minutes ago

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.