exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

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:

• 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).

Then the fun part — pushing it past the Spectrum into the ST's own presentation: 16-colour artwork drawn for the ST palette, converted to Degas .PI1 to show as full-width with a parchment description window.

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.

Download / play

• 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

A tool that came out of it

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:

• https://github.com/IckyBoBicky/st-pixel-art-gen

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.

Wow @Icky - that sounds fantastic!

It's not anything that I've tried on any platform before (don't remember it appearing on the BBC before I'd made the jump to the ST family) but I look forward to trying it on something in the near future...

Kudos for the effort & guidance re the human part of the port! :thumbup: :cheers:

Did you use AI to create the AI icon ? :hide:

:AI:

Otherwise cool stuff !! :yay:


Imagine all the remakes which can be done now...

TLDR , Well done @Icky , I'll read the rest of it when I'm not half asleep.

What's next? Twin kingdom valley on the Beeb?

PhilC wrote: 04 Aug 2026 22:34 TLDR , Well done @Icky , I'll read the rest of it when I'm not half asleep.

What's next? Twin kingdom valley on the Beeb?

Now that one is a blast from the past....can't even remember if I managed to complete that one BITD!

Very nice work 👍

Thanks. I forgot to say it’s best played from a HDD instead of floppies. It only works off of one floppy and you don’t get all the 16 bit art work if running that way. The original spectrum views work though from the floppy version.

Fantastic :) Can't wait to try it :)

Terrific work Icky, I completed it once with the book on how to complete it!
Looking forward to taking a look.