Game Boy Color on My Conference Badge
- ID
- 40108
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 28 Oct 2026, 3:34 AM
- Fetched
- 28 Oct 2026, 4:02 AM
- Provider
- Simon Willison
- Category
- developer-ai
- Original URL
- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/27/game-boy-color-on-my-conference-badge/
- Source URL
- https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/
Summary
- Score
- 3.5
- Created
- 28 Oct 2026, 4:02 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coders
What happened
Simon Willison, attending GitHub Universe, reports that this year's conference badge is again a full color-screen computer, and that Steve Francia worked with Gemini to get a full NES emulator running on it, then went further with emulators for both Game Boy and Game Boy Color. The post notes that with a ROM you could run The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on the badge, and that flipping the badge upside down exposes game-controller touch buttons built into its body.
Why it matters
There is little here a working builder must act on: it's a link post with no code, no badge specs, no ROM-handling detail, and no account of how much of the emulator work Gemini actually did versus Steve Francia. The one concrete thing worth noting is that an LLM-assisted port of an emulator to a constrained, unfamiliar embedded target is being reported as done — but treat it as an anecdote, not evidence, until you see the code or a write-up.
Discussion angle
If you were handed a badge-sized color-screen computer and an LLM, what would you actually try to port — and how would you tell whether the model did the hard part or just the boilerplate?