A Journey Through Time: From Amiga to Godot
In 1993, in a Baghdad under sanctions, Rabah Shihab and his team created Babylonian Twins on an Amiga 500. With only 512KB of RAM and no hard drive, development was done directly in 68000 assembly, each sprite and scanline handcrafted. The game made no requests to the Amiga's OS, using the blitter's registers directly to move tiles and reading joysticks from the hardware port.
Babylonian Twins was the first commercial game produced in Iraq, but circumstances prevented its distribution. It wasn't until 2008 that the game resurfaced thanks to an Amiga forum, and in 2010, it was manually ported to the iPhone, reaching over two million downloads.
AI: A Crucial Ally in Porting
When Rabah decided to port the game to Godot, he enlisted a large language model (LLM) to read the original 68000 assembly. This type of model uses machine learning to understand and interpret complex programming languages. The LLM not only simplified the conversion of files but also made decisions on how to transpose thirty-year-old code.
Using AI drastically sped up the process. Where a manual port would have taken months, the model allowed these steps to be completed in weeks. Rabah was surprised by the model's speed and efficiency, though some errors slipped by unnoticed at first.
Challenges of Porting
Porting a game from the '90s to a modern platform like Godot is not without challenges. It's not just about translating code; it's also about updating graphics and audio to meet modern expectations. Godot, with its scene system and GDScript language, offers flexibility that wasn't available on the Amiga.
The language model helped interpret the Amiga's low-level commands and adapt them to Godot's APIs. For example, the Amiga's blitter registers and video coprocessor were replaced by Godot's shaders and nodes.
A Digital Renaissance
The result is a version of Babylonian Twins that retains the spirit of the original game while bringing it to a new generation. The graphics have been improved, the music remastered, and the gameplay refined for modern screens. Rabah was able to focus on what mattered most: preserving the gaming experience while adapting it to contemporary technologies.
The porting of Babylonian Twins to Godot demonstrates how modern tools like LLMs can transform old projects into today's successes. Rabah was able to revisit his work with tools that would have seemed like science fiction in 1993.
Conclusion
Porting a 1993 Amiga game to Godot with the help of AI is a fascinating adventure that showcases the power of today's technologies. For developers looking to modernize their old projects, AI offers new opportunities to bring the past to life.
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