(babyloniantwins.com)
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.
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
Since then I've done static/native ecosystems for the Super NES, GBA. Nintendo DS, Playstation (most popular) and even Sega Genesis, such also uses the 68k.
https://github.com/mstan/segagenesisrecomp
I even extracted the 68k decoder to its own repo because I wanted to reuse it for the Phillips CDI.
Sega does Sonic 1 2 and 3&K. Also Rocket Knight adventures. Still early yet though. CD-I does the BIOS. Didn't get a game running end to end yet though.
https://1379.tech/building-enhancing-recomps-ecosystem-updat... https://1379.tech/recomp-ai-5-months-later/
Ultimately, Sega Genesis has been low priority. I've been focusing mostly on community feedback for my existing ones. Playstation is by far the most popular and the one I get the most PRs on. SNES is second. And right now Nintendo DS is newer, but has a very popular Metroid Prime Hunters I've been working a ton on.
NES and Sega Genesis get little attention. CDI and VirtualBoy [understandably] get no real attention.
I have an early original Xbox LLE prototype. Hoping to do more with it soon, but I'm all tapped out of usage at the moment. I got a lot done during all the crazy resets with OpenAI there for a while.
Oh wow...I hadn't even thought of trying something like this. There are soooo many games from that era that I'd love to play again without the hackery of emulation.
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.
The proof of the pudding would be to have a look at what the differing bytes were encoding.
Their approach to replicating the behaviour is to run the original game logic. The display has to be totally rewritten but they had the advantage of 68k for both machines.
I don't know of any games that used the blitter for calculation like some programs did for MFM decoding, that might have presented quite the porting challenge.
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. It would also be interesting to compare the godot port of the original game vs the original in assembly. Curious how I can achieve that. A good question to ask Claude.
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 how things worked. I didn't know how to compile it anymore but with the help of LLMs I managed to get it compiling again.
Since then I found about 8 pages of handwritten notes I took back in the days and I did immediately scan them and I added them to the repo.
Now my PC DOS from 1991/1992 does compile again and, well, I really should blog post about it one of these days (if only I had a blog...).
Since Claude did the port, wrote the article, and apparently understands it better than you do at this point, can we ask Claude? Is there a git repo we can point Claude at to interrogate it on the way things were done? Maybe you can share the transcripts you used to port it?
It's marvelous that software can be written with minimal human input, but I guess I'm confused about why I would talk to the human that prompted the AI, rather than the AI that did the work.
One reason is because you can't talk to the AI that did the work, not unless the human who prompted it is able to hand you a file with the complete session and/or context data. (And I'm not at all certain whether Anthropic would allow users to obtain that kind of thing, since it would probably be extremely useful to people trying to distill their models. It's possible they might allow user A to say "Hey, allow user B" (or anyone with the link) "to access my session with GUID ba5eba11-1234-5678-abcd-0decafc0ffee", but I doubt they'd ever allow context data to be downloaded and passed around).
Without the context, you're talking to a different instance of the AI that doesn't have the memory of the instance that ported the code, so the answers you get won't be nearly as useful.
While doing the analysis, I came to know about this 108 byte delta. I didn't quite understand the explanation Claude gave me. I added more details about this in the post above. It could be the difference in the assembler used, the environment used (Amiga 500 vs M5 Macbook), or how the binary was saved from memory 33 years ago
We understand that our non-native English speaking users are in a special position with all of this, and we sympathize - but we don't have an easy way to treat posts differently on that basis. What we're telling such users is to please write in your own voice and don't worry about any mistakes, because those are rapidly becoming signs of authenticity at this point (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
To judge by how the AI classifiers react, translation tools are leaving a ton of LLM imprints on text which are not strictly about translation. As many of us have been learning, it's hard to restrict what these systems do. They are overeager on every level.
> The test was deliberate.
> Step one, the safe ask
> Step two, the unfair ask
My guess "AI write a blog post about this" and then he edited it, but didn't quite eliminate the stench. Pretty close though to be fair.
Though I'd admit that using claude for a few hours every day this year desensitivized me to its prose :-)
Think of it as: this is a story that quite possibly would not be told without AI to help with the writeup.
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 just laugh.
also 68k asm is actually human-readable compared to x86.
Why complain about the outcome? The old game remains available, and you can play it for free. This isn’t some zero sum situation where the existence of the remastered game sets the world back in some way. I could see being more interested (or only interested) in playing the original, but I don’t see what motivates the negativity.