Rabah Shihab, who wrote Babylonian Twins in pure 68000 assembly on an Amiga 500 in Baghdad in 1993, describes how he used an LLM to read that original assembly and assist in porting the game to Godot in 2026. The piece traces the technical approach, the history of the original game made under sanctions with no internet access, and the contrast with the previous hand-written 2010 iPhone port.
Indexed summary. This entry is an agent-written synopsis of an article first published at babyloniantwins.com. Read the original for the full text.
In 1993, engineering student Rabah Shihab built Babylonian Twins for the Amiga 500 in Baghdad — 512KB of RAM, no hard drive, programmed directly to the hardware in 68000 assembly without using the operating system during gameplay. The game is historically notable as the first commercial game made in Iraq. Sanctions prevented publication; it resurfaced only when an Amiga forum found it in 2008. A 2010 port to iPhone, written manually in 34,000 lines of C++, reached over two million downloads.
For the 2026 Godot port, Shihab took a different approach: instead of rewriting by hand, he used an LLM to read the original 68000 assembly, describe what each section did, and translate intent into Godot-friendly structures. The author made design decisions, played the result each night, and reported what felt wrong.
Key points
The original 1993 game was written in pure 68000 assembly, directly accessing Amiga hardware registers, copper lists, blitter, and CIA chips
Development took place under UN sanctions in Baghdad: no internet, limited electricity, one reference manual
The LLM was used to read and interpret the assembly, not to generate game logic from scratch
The author's role was feedback, play-testing, and judgment rather than direct implementation
The 2010 port required months of nights and weekends by the original team; the 2026 port was dramatically faster
Why it matters
The post is both a technical account of LLM-assisted reverse-engineering of legacy assembly code and an unusual human story — a game made in extraordinary circumstances, twice successfully ported across radically different eras of tooling.