If you’ve played any of the versions of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing over the years, you’ll know that eventually you get to the point where you’ve maxed out your virtual house and filled it with all the furniture you could possibly want — which is arguably as close to “winning” the game as you can get.

But now thanks to the work of [decrazyo] there’s a piece of furniture that you can add to your Animal Crossing house that will never get old: an x86 emulator that boots Linux. As explained in the video below, this trick leverages the fact that Nintendo had already built a highly accurate Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator into Animal Crossing on the GameCube, which could be used to run a handful of classic games from within the player’s virtual living room. But it turns out that you can get that emulator to load a user-provided ROM from the GameCube’s memory card, which opens the doors to all sorts of mischief.

In this case, all [decrazyo] had to do was prepare an NES ROM that booted into Linux. That might seem like a tall order, but considering he had already worked on a port of Unix to the classic console, it’s not like he was going in blind. He identified the minimal Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset (ELKS) as his target operating system, but wanted to avoid the hassle of re-writing the whole thing for the 8-bit CPU in the NES. That meant adding another emulator to the mix.

If porting Linux to the NES sounded tough, running an x86 emulator on the console must be pure madness. But in reality, it’s not far off from several projects we’ve seen in the past. If you can boot Linux on an ATmega328 via an emulated RISC-V processor, why not x86 on the NES? In both cases, the only problem is performance: the emulated system ends up running at only a tiny fraction of real-speed, meaning booting a full OS could take hours.

As if things couldn’t get complicated enough, when [decrazyo] tried to boot the x86 emulator ROM, Animal Crossing choked. It turned out (perhaps unsurprisingly) that his ROM was using some features the emulator didn’t support, and was using twice as much RAM as normal. Some re-writes to the emulator sorted out the unsupported features, but there was no getting around the RAM limitation. Ultimately, [decrazyo] had to create a patch for Animal Crossing that doubled the memory of the in-game emulator.

Still with us? So the final setup is a patched Animal Crossing, which is running an in-game NES emulator, which is running a ROM that contains an x86 emulator, which is finally booting a minimal Linux environment at something like 1/64th normal speed. Are we having fun yet?

Despite its age and cutesy appearance, the original Animal Crossing has turned out to be a surprisingly fertile playground for hackers.

With today’s technology, emulating video game consoles from the 90s or before is trivial. A Raspberry Pi and a controller of some sort is perhaps the easiest and simplest way to go to get this job done, but to really impress the masses some extra effort is required. This handheld from [Eli] called the Game Bub not only nails the appearance and feel of the first three generations of Nintendo handhelds but, thanks to its FPGA, can play not only ROMs but the original game cartridges as well.

As [Eli] notes, the FPGA is not strictly necessary for emulation, but does seem to be better at interfacing with physical hardware like controllers and game cartridges. For this task an Xilinx XC7A100T with integrated memory was chosen, with a custom PCB supporting the built-in controller, speaker, a rechargeable lithium battery, and a 480×320 display (that had to be rotated out of portrait mode). An SD Card reader is included for any ROM files, and there’s also a ESP32-S3 included to give the handheld WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities, with future plans to support the communications protocol used by the Game Boy Advance Wireless Adapter.

There are a few other features with the Game Bub as well, including the ability to use an authentic link cable to communicate with the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color, and a Switch-like dock that allows the Game Bub to be connected to an external monitor. It’s also open source, which makes it an even more impressive build. Presumably it doesn’t include the native ability to dump cartridges to ROM files but you don’t need much more than a link cable to do that if you need to build your ROM library.

Thanks to [Charles] for the tip!

[Chad Burrow] decided to take on a noble task—building a “retro” style computer and video game console. Only, this one is built using somewhat modern hardware—relying on the grunt of the PIC32MZ2048EFH144 to get the job done. Meet the Acolyte Hand PIC’d 32.

It’s name might be a mouthful, but that chip can pull off some great feats! With a clock speed of 200 MHz, it’s not  short on processing power, though RAM and flash storage are somewhat limited at just 512 KB and 2MB respectively. [Chad] was able to leverage those constraints to get a VGA output working at a resolutions up to 800 x 600, with up to 65,000 colors—though 256 colors is more practical due to memory concerns. The Acolyte Hand also rocks two 8-bit audio channels. It has a pair of Genesis-compatible controller ports as well as PS/2 and USB for keyboards and mice, along with more modern Xbox 360 controllers.

[Chad] cooked up some software to put it through its paces, too. It’s got a Tetris clone on board, and can also run Game Boy games at full speed via the Peanut-GB emulator. That provides for a pretty rich game library, though [Chad] notes he plans to develop more native video games for his system to demo at his local college. Design files are on Github for the curious.

This project is a great example of just how powerful modern microcontrollers have become. Once upon a time, just driving a simple black-and-white graphical LCD might have taken some real effort, but today, there are pixels and clock cycles to spare in projects like these. Truly a wonderous world we live in!