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- 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.by hedgehog
- I noticed he mentioned that his game was running at 50hz - that's true if an Amiga is running on PAL, but if it's a US machine it'll be 60hz when running with NTSC.
Back in the day, most Amiga games were made in Europe, so were tuned for 50Hz refresh, and played 'normally' over here. At 60hz, they would feel wrong, and likewise, US games could feel sluggish and unsatisfying.
Locking the machine to the monitor refresh rate in this way was a curse but also a blessing. It allowed the machines to drive a standard television in various regions, although the image was somewhat blurry, but also the use of dedicated monitors once you started taking it seriously. This reduced the price point and allowed lots of kids to convince their parents to get one :) The higher resolution modes just didn't work out though, so lots of stuff targeted the 320x256 resolution.
The surprise benefit was also that the amiga could genlock to a TV signal and used to overlay onto a video feed, leading to many interesting cheap graphics overlay capabilities which were otherwise totally unobtainable by small TV channels or enthusiasts.
Those were happy days.
by cesaref - Neat project.I've been experimenting with making reusable console porting frameworks since last October. Opus 4.6 was my first success with the NES 6502.
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.
- > I spent the last few weeks analyzing what Claude did, feeding it my 33 years of memory of how I built the game, my notes and the git repos. It wrote the first draft of the article, and I edited line by line over a week.
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...).
- I just wanted to add how much in awe I am at you creating this game in '93 in assembly. Around the same time I was trying to write a game on the Atari ST, and the dedication to the project -- especially when documentation was so thin on the ground, pre-Internet -- is extraordinary. Do you have any stories from debugging the game? I always found that the most dispiriting part, after the endless hope of handcrafting the code that I was sure would work first time...by dannyobrien
- > 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
by btbuildem - 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.
by mattjoyce - 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/
by gmerc