Gbdev inside jokes

The gbdev Discord server has built up a number of inside jokes.

:accurate1:, :accurate2:, :inaccurate1:, :inaccurate2:

Used in pairs, they represent the title screen of Pinball Deluxe, a Game Boy game that has built up a reputation of being notoriously hard to emulate, drawn in both normal and corrupt ways.

🧱 :bricks:

Relates in some way to user evie. Alludes to Internet memes speculating the use of a brick as an evolution stone to turn the Pokémon Eevee into a ghost-type.

:duck:

Originally the spirit animal of SameBoy developer LIJI, this came to be used similarly to :kappa:. It took on a double meaning once the Mega Duck system on chip was discovered to be a Game Boy with no boot ROM and a rearranged register ($FF00-$FF7F) map, with most of the same quirks. As of mid-2021, the server icon depicts a mallard duck on the screen of an atomic purple Game Boy Color system.

🐴️ :horse:

Used to refer to RGBASM's EQUS macro facility and the problems that it causes for parser implementation, based on the similarity to equus, the Latin word for "horse". Occasionally, jokes are made about pairing EQUS with UNION, an RGBLINK facility to create overlapping RAM data structures, to allude to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a labor union in North America whose logo depicts two horse heads.

, :Kappa:

Usually represents sarcasm. This may appear as the face of Twitch.tv web developer Josh DeSeno or as a male kappa (anthropomorphic sea turtle) from the game Scribblenauts.

:impostor_kappa:

Similar to :Kappa: but with 100% more DMG LCD shade of green.

Librul

A developer who prioritizes development time efficiency at the expense of runtime or space efficiency or interface stability. After an article "Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus" by Steve Yegge that defines the concepts of "software liberal" and "software conservative" (archived on archive.today; archived on Wayback Machine).

:maxd:

Emoji representing a user having "ninja'd" someone else. Resembles :gun: 🔫️

:morphon:

Variant of :smirk: 😏️

:ohboy: and :noboy:

Variant of :accurate1: family taken from the Game Boy Color demo Demotronic by 1MB. It begins by testing wave RAM read blocking behavior, showing :ohboy: and "OH BOY!" on success or :noboy: and "NO BOY! NO DEMO!" on failure.

Pumpernickel

Pumpernickel is a kind of hard rye bread. It's also a nickname introduced by LIJI for the long mnemonics of x86 vector instructions. Believed to be inspired by VPUNPCKLBW and other AVX instructions in the PUNPCKL (unpack low data) family.

:punapple:

A :pineapple: 🍍️ over user PinoBatch's avatar, used as a symbol of wordplay. Pino is a staff member on that server known for his love of puns. Some people find his puns a bit weird; sometimes attributed to the fact that he is openly autistic. He's always willing to explain a joke that a user doesn't get.

Room heater

A program that routinely waits for vertical blanking by busy waiting, which draws more current (and thereby heats the room through Joule heating) more than using the halt instruction to wait for an interrupt.

:SMOrc:

"ironic anger/disappointment" according to one member

Super Mario 83

Nickname introduced by Videogamer555 for the Sharp CPU core in the Game Boy system on chip, which is thought to be identical to the SM83 CPU core in a Sharp air conditioner microcontroller. Built up a bunch of lore about there being undocumented functionality to accelerate games.

Telling LYs, 🤥️ :lying_face:

Gathering entropy for a random number generator by waiting for a joypad interrupt and then reading the LY register at the exact moment of a button press. (After a test ROM by Pino that displays the lyrics of the song "Johny, Johny" while gathering entropy in this way.)

:thinkgb:

Variant of :thinking: 🤔️ with the face replaced with a Game Boy.

WXzardry

Apparent parallax scrolling of a large image with an irregular left side by changing register WX between scanlines.