Posted by rabahs 14 hours ago
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. The screenshots of my 1993 map editor is the first I have run it since then. The one thing I never verified myself is the 108-byte explanation.
"Before starting everything, the model assembled the code using vasm on my Mac, and kept going till the binary is byte-identical to the binaries I had in my original game. Even after that, the there was mismatch of about 108 bytes. I originally used AsmOne which assembles into memory, and the game saved into the disk by saving that memory after running the game. So the original shipped files are a snapshot of the game that had already been running, not clean asm-one output."
Please post any questions. I am also releasing the original game for free.
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.
move.l #$dff000,a0 ;Base for hardware registers
lea save(pc),a1 ;Get the system
move.w #$4000,intena(A0) ;from the AMIGA
Crude, although perfectly fine in practice. The system-friendly way is to call the function exec.library has for the purpose, Disable()[0].
0. http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Includes_and_Autodo...
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.