LLM Reads 1993 Amiga Assembly to Port Classic Iraqi Game to Godot
Original: Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly
Why This Matters
Demonstrates LLMs autonomously interpreting undocumented legacy assembly code — a significant benchmark for AI-assisted software preservation.
Developer Rabah Shihab used Claude Fable 5 to port Babylonian Twins — a 1993 game written in 72,758 lines of 68000 assembly on an Amiga 500 in Baghdad — to Godot 4, with the AI autonomously reading undocumented binary formats and machine code over a single July 4th weekend in 2026.
Rabah Shihab, who created Babylonian Twins in 1993 as an engineering student in Baghdad under UN sanctions, documented how he used Claude Fable 5 to port the game to Godot 4 in 2026. The original game was written entirely in 68000 assembly — 72,758 lines — directly controlling Amiga 500 hardware including the copper coprocessor, blitter, CIA chips, and hardware interrupt vectors, with no OS involvement during gameplay. The game is historically notable as the first commercial game made in Iraq. After sitting unreleased due to Commodore's collapse and sanctions, it was rediscovered in 2008 via YouTube and manually ported to iOS in 2010 (34,000 lines of C++), reaching over two million downloads. For the 2026 port, Shihab gave Claude Fable 5 the original binary level maps and raw assembly source. He ran a deliberate comparison against an earlier model that had struggled with the same files. The AI was tasked in three stages: port the 2010 C++ engine to Godot, reconstruct the original Amiga logic from assembly at native 50 Hz, then merge both. Shihab reports the AI handled file format decoding and assembly interpretation autonomously, though he notes some errors went undetected for weeks. He describes his own role as playing the result nightly and flagging what felt wrong.