Gameboy locker for Wayland This project replaces the usual password screen with a Gameboy emulator running a patched Pokémon game! To unlock your session, you have to solve a little challenge, kind of like a mini escape room built into your OS. Unlock your session with fun! I've been a Linux enthusiast since I was a kid. What always captivated me was the freedom to customize my system exactly the way I wanted. With Wayland, we've reached an incredible level of performance. It's like turning your operating system into a video game! I've always been fascinated by the blend of fun and the serious, technical nature of an OS. That’s what inspired me to create this project. I started by studying Wayland, its protocol and how to build a compositor. Then I became particularly intrigued by the concept of a locker, which reminded me a bit of an escape game. That’s when I thought: how cool would it be to solve a puzzle to unlock your session, instead of just typing a password? Since I’ve worked with emulators in the past and I’m a huge Pokémon fan, the idea of building the puzzle around that game came to me instantly! I've got plenty more ideas, see you around! Solve this puzzle ⚠️ Spoilter alert ⚠️ As this is a puzzle game: the Pokémon party in the menu is hidden, you need to click on the radio to activate it. Then you can set the good password to unlock your session! Readme This project uses ext-session-lock-v1 protocol, you need a compositor which implements this protocol to use this project (sway is fine). Warning! This project is very experimental! Even if I use it regularly, it is only a proof of concept. Use it at your own risk! You need to have a compatible game, I provide a little patch to patch the project from https://github.com/pret/pokecrystal. Edit this patch to set your own password! You need to be on this commit: 961fad9e1, then you can apply the patch provided on this repo patch -p1 < crlock.patch It will apply the patch that provide a way for the emulator to know when it can unlock your session (in addition to some nice mods made by myself: skip intro, no popup menu in pokémon party). After applying this patch, you need to compile the game. Then, you can run this project by using nix to enter into a shell which builds this project nix develop Now, you are free to run this locker! ./build/wlgblock patched-game.gbc How it works? I have implemented a low level window in Wayland ( EGL + keyboard listeners ), this is the kind of job SDL or GTK usually do for you. I've been stucked with SDL3 for a long time, trying to use a raw wl_surface object without success, so I decided to implement my own window without any help of a higher level GUI. It has given me the freedom of doing what I wanted with the Wayland objects I needed. Once the window was done: I have added the ext-session-lock protocol to support locking and unlocking my session securely: even if the locker crashes, you can't unlock your session, thank you Wayland. Then, I needed to hack an emulator to merge my window system into this emulator, I choose gbcc because it already supported multiple GUI backends ( SDL, GTK ). I just added my wayland window as a new GUI backend and that's it, the Gameboy locker was done! I'm not sure if it was necessary but I also converted the shaders to OpenGLES2 as Wayland seems to be compatible with GLES2 only. Lastly, I've hacked the Pokémon Cristal game assembly to put my password logic into the game. Once a password has been entered correctly, I put an arbitrary value into a specific RAM address ( one that should not be used at this stage of the game ). My locker listens to this address, waiting for the value to be the exact same one. Once it recognizes the good value from the good RAM address, it knows it's time to unlock the session! Thanks Many thanks to License This project has a double license. The original project is under the MIT license but all modifications made to the code to transform this project into a locker are under the GPLv3 license.