The Hobbit — a native Atari ST port (and an experiment in AI-assisted retro dev)
Posted: 04 Aug 2026 21:52
The Hobbit — native Atari ST port
Comes with an AI warning :hide:
I've quietly released a native Atari ST port of Melbourne House's 1982 classic The Hobbit — the full "Inglish" parser and its restless, living world, running as a real TOS .PRG. However I thought I would bring it out into the open as this was a big experiment on my side.
It has two looks you switch between in Options:
The real reason I built it: an experiment
This started as a test — could an AI (specifically Claude) actually help write a faithful port of a 44-year-old game, mirroring the original's behaviour, and then take it somewhere new into the 16-bit Atari ST realm? Not "generate some code that compiles", but reproduce the actual game: the parser, the autonomous characters, the puzzles, the deaths, the scoring.
To be clear up front: Claude assisted greatly, but the whole project was prompted and driven by developer knowledge. Deciding to reimplement the engine behind a single interface layer rather than emulate. The v1.2 tape was extracted and disassembled so it could be used as the base. The AI was fast, and a good pair of helping hands but working out the architecture, the build options, and how each task should be approached — those judgements were mine.
The approach:
Same location, two modes (the troll-footprint forest path):
Spectrum view: 16 bit view:
How long did it take?
About two weeks — 10 active days, ~219 commits. The faithful engine + Spectrum-accurate port came together in the first week; the 16-bit ST art mode, the title screen, and the packaging in the second. Honestly quicker than I expected given how faithful I wanted it to be, which was rather the point of the experiment.
ST-specific notes (for this crowd)
Drawing 79 rooms in authentic 16-colour ST art by hand would have taken far longer than the rest of the port. So part of the build was a pipeline that generates genuine ST Degas .PI1 images straight from a written scene description: Claude turns the room's description into a tuned pixel-art prompt, OpenAI's image model draws it, and a local converter quantises it to the 16-colour ST palette with ordered dithering and writes a real .PI1. I thought it was useful enough to spin off as its own standalone, open-source tool:
So anyone can generate ST-ready artwork from a description.
This is v0.1 — first public release, so expect a few rough edges and feedback welcome. It's an unofficial, non-commercial fan preservation project. Original game © 1982 Melbourne House / Beam Software, from the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien; written by Philip Mitchell & Veronika Megler. Much of the code and artwork was produced with AI assistance (Claude), but every architectural decision, correctness check and ST-specific fix was developer-driven — that steering was the whole experiment.
Comes with an AI warning :hide:
I've quietly released a native Atari ST port of Melbourne House's 1982 classic The Hobbit — the full "Inglish" parser and its restless, living world, running as a real TOS .PRG. However I thought I would bring it out into the open as this was a big experiment on my side.
It has two looks you switch between in Options:
- ZX Spectrum mode — the faithful 1982 presentation, rendered from the original vector display lists (attribute clash and all). An additional option for ZX spectrum based artwork for the full 79 locations.
- Atari ST mode — new full-colour 16-bit artwork for all 79 locations plus a title screen, with the room text in an ornate parchment window.
The real reason I built it: an experiment
This started as a test — could an AI (specifically Claude) actually help write a faithful port of a 44-year-old game, mirroring the original's behaviour, and then take it somewhere new into the 16-bit Atari ST realm? Not "generate some code that compiles", but reproduce the actual game: the parser, the autonomous characters, the puzzles, the deaths, the scoring.
To be clear up front: Claude assisted greatly, but the whole project was prompted and driven by developer knowledge. Deciding to reimplement the engine behind a single interface layer rather than emulate. The v1.2 tape was extracted and disassembled so it could be used as the base. The AI was fast, and a good pair of helping hands but working out the architecture, the build options, and how each task should be approached — those judgements were mine.
The approach:
- The original v1.2 world data (rooms, objects, vocabulary, messages) is extracted from the tape.
- The engine — the Inglish parser and the living-world character simulation — is reimplemented from scratch in portable C, cross-checked byte-for-byte against the disassembly so the behaviour matches (Gandalf wanders off, Thorin sings about gold, the trolls argue, characters act on their own turn after turn — the thing that made the game famous).
Same location, two modes (the troll-footprint forest path):
Spectrum view: 16 bit view:
How long did it take?
About two weeks — 10 active days, ~219 commits. The faithful engine + Spectrum-accurate port came together in the first week; the 16-bit ST art mode, the title screen, and the packaging in the second. Honestly quicker than I expected given how faithful I wanted it to be, which was rather the point of the experiment.
ST-specific notes (for this crowd)
- Built with vbcc + vasm/vlink (m68k-atari, GEM); tested under Hatari with real TOS 2.06 and EmuTOS.
- Runs in 320×200 low res on any ST/STE.
- Distribution as 4 Gotek floppy images or complete folder structure.
- Site + screenshots: https://ickybobicky.github.io/ST-Hobbit-Port/
- Downloads (hard-disk ZIP or Gotek floppy sets): https://github.com/IckyBoBicky/ST-Hobbi ... ses/latest
Drawing 79 rooms in authentic 16-colour ST art by hand would have taken far longer than the rest of the port. So part of the build was a pipeline that generates genuine ST Degas .PI1 images straight from a written scene description: Claude turns the room's description into a tuned pixel-art prompt, OpenAI's image model draws it, and a local converter quantises it to the 16-colour ST palette with ordered dithering and writes a real .PI1. I thought it was useful enough to spin off as its own standalone, open-source tool:
So anyone can generate ST-ready artwork from a description.
This is v0.1 — first public release, so expect a few rough edges and feedback welcome. It's an unofficial, non-commercial fan preservation project. Original game © 1982 Melbourne House / Beam Software, from the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien; written by Philip Mitchell & Veronika Megler. Much of the code and artwork was produced with AI assistance (Claude), but every architectural decision, correctness check and ST-specific fix was developer-driven — that steering was the whole experiment.