I turned my TV into a Game Boy Color with a Pokemon town as my home screen | Hacker News Reader

I turned my TV into a Game Boy Color with a Pokemon town as my home screen

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71 pointsscrambled38 comments

If you haven't seen the trend on X of people hacking their TVs to remove the bloat and spyware then add in better UI it's been pretty awesome to watch.

There a good user or post to look at? X is barely accessible for anything.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/19/people-are-using-ai-to-mak...

I ended up finding some projects for samsung tvs. Not sure if they can help clean them up, but they do seem to allow installing your own apps and controlling the tv.

* https://github.com/reisxd/TizenBrew

* https://github.com/Apps2Samsung/Apps2Samsung

* https://github.com/SushyDev/tizen-homebrew

* https://github.com/xchwarze/samsung-tv-ws-api

* https://github.com/hugoh/samsung-tizen-tv-control

When I read the top-level comment, I was almost certain it was going to be AI-assisted. Before, your only chance at something like that was either having the skills to RE and mod everything yourself, or finding someone equally motivated and skilled to do it. Now you can pay AI to do your bidding, and while vibecoding is definitely not perfect, it has definitely lowered the bar. What an interesting era we live in.

I'm waiting for someone to do this for Roku devices, I would love clean up the Roku OS (though to be fair it is one of the cleanest visually)

So the disappointed sellers of ads and surveillance will buy legislation that makes this kind of LLM use illegal.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI have started banning people who use their models to do this. People have started homebrewing with DeepSeek.

Has a long way to go. Many errors here, and any true fan or historian of Nintendo would see them immediately.

The startup screen is the Game Boy Advance, not Color.

The Pokemon center building is completely messed up.

The sprites are a bizarre and somewhat inaccurate mishmash of the RBY and GSC games. Only GSC were coded with GBC colors (Yellow was a bit of a middle ground, Red and Blue were only GB coded)

At least he's saying Game Boy and not the incorrect "Gameboy" that most people type wrong.

The GB color had a similar intro right? I can't remember, I gave my GBC to a friend over 25 years ago.

> GSC were coded with GBC colors

Crystal had a much wider palette for the GBC because it was a GBC-exclusive game while GS had to be retrocompatible with the GB.

Gold and Silver had access to all the same colors as Crystal when played on a Game Boy Color. Where Crystal did improve the graphics was increasing the variety of tiles used on the overworld/dungeon maps, and adding animations to individual Pokémon in battle, both of which relied on the Game Boy Color’s increased VRAM.

Please, compare them again :)

You can also add that the back sprites during the battle aren't positioned correctly: the cut-off at the bottom is supposed to be aligned with the UI and go unnoticed. ;)

You can play GBC games on the GBA.

You can but when you do you get the GBC boot-up animation, not the GBA.

Brb burning my nerd card.

That's the gameboy advance intro though

Well, it's vibe coded so temper your expectations of intelligence.

How long would it have taken you to root, debloat, and code a new UI for your TV?

Is this rooted? Isn’t this just be a side-loaded app over adb?

https://github.com/humblemuzzu/dumbtv

If only that was the only thing... Don't expect the average clout chaser to have any care for what they're making.

Reminds me of when we set up an outdated Sega Dreamcast for emulation. We had rolled home a trash picked badly out of alignment rear projection TV on our skateboards and parked it in the garage - mom wasn't letting it in the house. My youngest brother, still in diapers, thought it completely normal to sit on the garage floor and play the Gameboy "Green" Pokemon English translated rom. The individual emulated pixels were huge on that thing (and three different colors around the edges).

the settings was very funny. could just be playing a video as far as i know

im going to say this here just to vent it out once:

some part of me sinks into depression when vibe coders say "I" turned/did/made something. why does this bother me? smart managers i work with who actually build things as hobbies and used to build apps say this all the time so its not like it indicates someone is phony, it just really catches on my brain when i hear it

> some part of me sinks into depression when vibe coders say "I" turned/did/made something. why does this bother me?

My guess? It's like claiming credit for something someone else did.

It would be like me commissioning a painting and then claiming I painted it.

its pretty much exactly that, but also a painter somewhere didnt get paid because its ai

I believe that being able to claim the credit is a large part of the motivation for vibe coding for a lot of people.

Being able to claim the credit can be a lot of the motivation for any project, vibe coded or not. The Princess Crown translation is a great example. The two OG devs sat on it for a decade and largely abandoned it, a guy forked their open source code and had it finished to 1.0 in a few months. The OG devs crashed out that someone else used their open source code, abandoning their translation and saying they could “no longer find joy” in it.

They sat on a project since 2012 and, in my cynical view, didn’t want to finish it because then they’d stop being “the guys translating Princess Crown”, and this section of the hacker scene seem to have some asinine unspoken “claim” courtesy, where you don’t make competing projects, so they could own the claim and not actually put the effort into finishing. To my knowledge the new dev didn’t use LLMs either, so that wasn’t even a force multiplier in this respect.

Isn't it just kind of how we speak about these sort of things? Like, say your partner asked you if you washed the dishes, would you tell them "No, the dishwasher did" or just "Yes"?

totally. youre right and i agree. something specifically about it being with vibe coding that really bothers me. my rational mind knows its stupid and tells myself its just someone saying something that happened, but i spiritually wince every time

Claude didn't prompt itself

The title made my mind jump to these great peripherals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Game_Boy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Player

Beat lvl 100 Mewtwo with lvl 5 Pikachu to change settings? Still easier than using a Samsung smart TV.

I like this idea

this is awesome!

Cool demo, horrid UX

The bad UX seems to be the joke here. Making you beat a gym leader just to change a setting is the whole point, I think. Would anyone really keep this as their home screen for a month?

Not to mention you have a level 5 pikachu and are expected to defeat a level 100 mewtwo that one-shots you.

Then the point stands.

Not even talking about settings. I mean pressing 6 times across 2 buttons to open youtube. Times 2 for the next all. Times 3 for the next.

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