Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly(babyloniantwins.com)
365 points by rabahs 7 days ago | 129 comments
tl;dr: The developer of Babylonian Twins, a 1993 Amiga game written in 68000 assembly, used Claude Fable 5 in Claude Code to port both his 2010 C++ engine and the original 72,758 lines of undocumented assembly into Godot 4 over a weekend. The LLM reverse-engineered proprietary file formats, rebuilt the original binaries byte-identically with vasm, recovered a lost map editor, and even handled store listings and localized screenshots—though it introduced subtle bugs like a guard AI missing an upper-bound check. The Definitive Edition ships on iOS/Android now with the original 1993 game bundled inside, and the original ADF is free on itch.io.
HN Discussion:
  • Sharing similar successful experiences porting retro games with LLMs
  • Reflecting on the poetic significance of AI treating early computing as archaeology
  • Admiration for the original 1993 assembly achievement and curiosity about the development story
  • ~Appreciation that the LLM stumbled, hoping obscure retro code remains challenging for agents
  • Practical questions about cost, tooling, and requests for reusable porting guides