Show HN: Play Pokémon to unlock your Wayland session

2 days ago (github.com)

Hello everyone!

I've created a gameboy emulator to unlock my Wayland session and wanted to share this project to everyone here!

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!

Technically, the locker code and the wayland protocol have been implemented from scratch ( using EGL and wl_keyboard_listeners ). My locker runs a version of the gbcc emulator modded by myself. This emulator waits for one precise value to be set in a given memory address.

I have modded the Pokémon game to my needs: when the password is good, I put the good value in the good memory address so the emulator knows it needs to unlock the session.

Hope you will appreciate this project!

43 comments

anajimi

Reply
OsrsNeedsf2P  11 hours ago

Heavy customization is important to me on the Linux desktop. This project has given me a lot more faith in Wayland than 5 years of hearing debates about it.

  • yjftsjthsd-h  9 hours ago

    FWIW, as a ... Wayland skeptic/pessimist¹, screen locking does seem to be one place where things actually work and seem more sensible than under X.

    ¹ It always seems to be just around the next corner. Sixteen years on, it would be nice if we could have feature parity.

    • jasonjayr  7 hours ago

      From my understanding, the security decisions around things like screen locking are the source of many of the pain points holding back X11 users from wayland.. Things like xtest(send input events from random sources), screen grabbing/video recording(allowing another app to see the contents of another window from a potentially different security domain), focus grabbing, input sniffing, are all difficult on wayland, specifically because they are serious security issues on X11, especially in light of a modern understanding of the risk profile.

      1 reply →

skerit  12 hours ago

Incredible that we're getting something like this before a plain good old screensaver

  • anajimi  11 hours ago

    Thanks for your idea! I think it is totally possible to implement a screensaver with the ext-session-lock protocol. I will try to explore this idea when I have time in the next few months :)

  • derefr  11 hours ago

    For use with vintage computers that use CRTs? If not, what kind of oddball display / use-case do you have, where it would be better to play a screensaver than to follow the usual modern flow of display dim -> display black -> display sleep -> computer lock -> [maybe] computer sleep?

    • KetoManx64  10 hours ago

      One of the great strengths of Linux, and one of the things that draws new people in, is the custizability and making the system your own to whatever degree you want. That a "modern" display manager doesn't let you have a screensaver and people try to cover up for it with "you're just trying to use your system wrong. Be normal and use your system like we say is normal" is embarassing.

      3 replies →

    • throitallaway  10 hours ago

      If there's one thing I never tire of, it's someone telling me that I don't need something or how I'm doing it wrong. I would love a screensaver that scrubs my OLED pixels.

    • whatevaa  3 hours ago

      OLED. KDE has kinda a workaround with lock delay.

      I use steam deck with TV as a media PC and it's OLED, I don't want to lock a media PC nor want to display a static picture on it.

d3Xt3r  2 days ago

Ah, goody. Looks like I found the only other Wayland user on HN. ;)

You should also post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44837981

  • alex-moon  1 hour ago

    I use Wayland! I like it a lot and I think that it's a sensible way to take window management in the 21st century. However, it's clearly not _mature_ yet (which is understandable - it's very new!). My use case specifically is a bit unusual:

    1. I'm on an NVIDIA graphics card - this struggles a lot, I won't lie, and it's really odd issues which are difficult to track down. 2. I'm running Deskflow for virtual KVM - this is using literally someone's hand-rolled attempt to hack Wayland to make it work - it manages the most important element: my keyboard and mouse are shared between my Linux desktop and my MacBook - but much of the incidental functionality, most notably copy-pasting and repeating held keys, doesn't work at all. Mod keys seem a bit fucky as well.

    That said, I'm committed - am excited to see the tech honed in the coming years.

  • jchw  11 hours ago

    On the KDE side, Wayland has been going pretty well. Wayland sessions make up 82% of all sessions with telemetry enabled.

    https://blogs.kde.org/2025/03/15/this-week-in-plasma-file-tr...

    For me the real conundrum was SwayWM vs KDE Wayland rather than any X.org session; I really felt like SwayWM was a good upgrade from i3wm and gave me a better desktop session with much less hacks. Hope to see wlroots push forward and support some of the newer Wayland protocols, it has started to fall behind a little bit, but I think it's good for alternative desktops.

rtsang1  11 hours ago

For a moment, I thought the punchline was that users needed to play through the game and clear the elite four to unlock their session.