He Built a Game Boy Color Emulator in MicroPython on His Conference Badge
martinwoodward · x · 2026-10-28
After beating the first few Zelda dungeons on his conference badge's NES emulator, Steve Francia realized the badge's form factor resembled a Game Boy more than an NES — so he teamed up with Gemini to write a Game Boy Color emulator on the same Badger board (RP2350 + 8MB QSPI PSRAM) using MicroPython.
- Much harder than NES: the GB's Sharp SM83 is an 8080/Z80 hybrid with eight 8-bit registers and 512 opcodes (256 base + 256 CB-prefixed), nine times the 6502's count
- The 6502 core fit in one @micropython.viper loop over a flat memory map; the GB adds multi-layer banking across ROM/VRAM/WRAM/SRAM and dual-speed clocks (4.19/8.38 MHz)
- Bottom line: it was quite hard, but Zelda and Pokémon-class games now run on the badge
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