My kid enjoys playing 6x6 Sudoku on my LinkedIn profile… and my other kid enjoys playing on the Game Boy Advance I own. So I thought: why not make a Sudoku game for it? I have an EverDrive card, which lets me load ROMs and homebrew games onto the console, so it seemed like a nice small project that should take 1-2 hours.

The Process

Of course, I could not do this on my own since my C/C++ days are far behind me. (In one of my classes I had to write a 6x6 Sudoku solver using OOP. The professor said he didn’t care about the algorithm, only the OOP part… so I just plugged in random numbers until it was solved. I hated recursion.)

1. Research - First, I did some quick research on how to do it. Turns out there are a couple of widely used libraries for GBA development: devkitARM and libtonc.
2. Instructions - I wrote an MD file with the sections Game Play and Controls describing how I wanted the game to work.
3. AI code it - Claude asked me a few questions, we set up the overall baseline, and then it wrote the code.
4. Compile and test - Like with the ESP32 Transport Monitor (Project 5), it was a very good idea to have Claude build and test on its own instead of relying on me to copy the ROM to my SD card, test it and prompt again with the issues. This was done using the mGBA emulator, which also let me run everything locally and make a few corrections.
5. Run on the real thing - Finally, I copied the ROM to the EverDrive and played it on the actual Game Boy.

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What I learned: I’d say a +1 on my Claude Code skills.

How to replicate: Just follow the steps above. You can also find the code and more details in the git repository.