[HN Gopher] Show HN: Pokemon Emerald Ported to Raspberry Pi Pico 2
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Show HN: Pokemon Emerald Ported to Raspberry Pi Pico 2
Pokemon Emerald ported to the RP2350 microcontroller. No emulator,
60 fps HDMI output. Recompiled from ARMv4T to Cortex-M33 and the
Game Boy Advance's video hardware is reimplemented in software on
the second core.
Author : mdeeds
Score : 48 points
Date : 2026-08-06 21:49 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| shellwizard wrote:
| Hasn't it received a C&D from Nintendo yet?
| Rohansi wrote:
| It likely will since it includes the game assets in the repo.
| Typically the way to avoid being taken down is you require
| people to extract them from a ROM as a prerequisite.
| mbsd wrote:
| How much of the codebase was vibe coded?
| PradeetPatel wrote:
| I feel like this question was not asked in good faith.
|
| We should be supportive of creative endeavours and exploratory
| coding in the spirit of learning.
| throwaway613746 wrote:
| What are you learning if you just let the AI do everything
| for you?
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| One'll learn what is possible, how things work, etc. you
| sound more like a bitter veteran than a curious child and
| this attitude is not helpful.
| starkparker wrote:
| One can do that without posting it to a public GitHub
| repository, and then posting it to HN and wasting
| everyone else's time with it.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| You could say this about 99% of articles posted here. One
| might even say VCs are in the business of wasting
| peoples' time.
|
| But, my time is not wasted, and my cortisol managed not
| to spike at the presence of a tool. I suggest therapy or
| meditation or some way to mediate the stress of
| interacting with reality.
| serf wrote:
| How to get things done with prompts, for one ; a skill
| that's looking increasingly useful as time goes on.
| throwatdem12311 wrote:
| That must be the difference between me and the "skilled"
| prompt-brained "junior developers" (allegedly) that I
| work with that revert to a pre-historic ape brain if they
| don't have copilot. They're just on another plane of
| "skills" that's so far beyond me my puny brain can't
| comprehend putting some text in a box and running a loop.
|
| I'll try to remember that the next time I ask one of them
| to explain something the agent vomited out and they just
| start drooling and stare blankly into space. Must be some
| new language I'm too dumb to comprehend.
| vrganj wrote:
| Burning fossil fuels to power the slop machine in times of
| climate catastrophe is neither creative nor in the spirit of
| learning.
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| The decompilation of Emerald itself is human-authored. Then
| somebody vibeslopped a buggy WASM port, and now this is a
| vibeslopped port of the WASM port.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| At some point "slop" stopped being actually indicative of
| quality and I miss those days dearly
| xinayder wrote:
| This. Project would look a lot more cooler if it was done by a
| human. It was vibecoded to hell and I can't find a note on the
| README that says it was vibecoded and/or assisted with LLM.
| unleaded wrote:
| any vids? also please have at least some writing that isnt claude
| stets wrote:
| Super cool!
|
| I'm an AI-assisted coder myself...but one thing I can't stand is
| the way Claude writes. It's so frustrating and cringe. Tells from
| the README:
|
| emdash, byte-exact, "The full engineering log", piggybacks, "none
| of this is possible without it", etc
|
| A remedy I've found for this is in my Claude.md to tell it: write
| like a mix of simple english wikipedia, mr. rogers and ernest
| hemingway.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| Of all of ai's crimes, the greatest is bringing down the em-
| dash, the king of punctuation. Commas, periods, even semicolons
| can never hold a candle to the flexibility of the em-dash. But
| we must fold in the eyes of inflexible, unloving philistines.
| NDlurker wrote:
| I'm a big fan of semicolons; they don't get used enough.
| rednalexa wrote:
| For me - I forgive an em-dash, but it does make me more
| skeptical of the other tells of AI-written text. If I start
| to see those other tells I do start to get a bit annoyed.
| Bratmon wrote:
| I think Em dash fans are quitters [?] there are much longer
| dashes in Unicode they can use.
| yesitcan wrote:
| I have a wild suggestion so bear with me: you could also write
| the readme prose yourself?
| Incipient wrote:
| It's not the readme that gets me. It's the damn "chasing loc"
| KPI in the industry that continuously drives Claude to spout
| entire essays of docstrings and comments that make code
| unreadable that infuriates me!
| raphlinus wrote:
| If you're interested in HDMI audio, I have code for that lying
| around. The current best Rust source is in [1], but I also have a
| local branch with hand-tuned asm for the terc4 encoding. It's
| maybe 25% faster, which might be significant, as the per-scanline
| CPU load does go up a fair amount.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/DusterTheFirst/pico-dvi-
| rs/blob/main/src/...
| linzhangrun wrote:
| Recently it seems these old game port posts show up on the HN
| front page quite often. Very cool, but I'm not sure about the
| copyright issues.
| razorbeamz wrote:
| Copyright isn't an issue because these ports never contain the
| actual assets from the games. You usually have to provide your
| own ROM "ripped from your own copy of the cartridge" (wink wink
| nudge nudge)
| soulofmischief wrote:
| No, the pret decompilations it's based on do include assets.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Since this is clearly coded with an LLM and the README has not
| been written by a human, I'm curious if it actually does play
| end-to-end.
|
| I have personally recently ported all of the mainline GBA Pokemon
| games to run on a modern PC. It took a lot of work, because there
| were many latent bugs left in by the developers which relied upon
| the quirks of the GBA hardware. Lots of null dereferences, things
| like that. These bugs were scattered throughout the game and so
| many features did not work until extensive testing was performed.
|
| I also rewrote the engine to support 3D and wrote a bunch of
| modding and editing tools and quality-of-life upgrade. I have an
| editor that runs realtime in the games and lets me modify tiles
| and terrain. Releasing first alpha version this week to
| playtesters.
| gammalost wrote:
| What is it about the code that suggests it is vibe-coded? Is it
| the commit messages? Is it the large comment blocks? I'm asking
| because I almost never read code written by SWEs.
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