January 5, 2026
Press Start to Nostalgia
GBC Boot Animation 88×31 Web Button
Game Boy boot button brings back 90s; the crowd cheers, Nintendo jokes fly
TLDR: A fan turned the Game Boy Color boot animation into a tiny 88×31 web button using emulator frames and a GIF tool. The community is split between joyous ’90s nostalgia and playful worries that Nintendo’s lawyers might crash the party, making this a fun flashpoint in the retro web revival.
Retro internet fashion alert: 88×31 web buttons are back, and one fan just turned the Game Boy Color’s boot screen into a tiny, looping badge of joy. The post walks through grabbing each frame from an emulator, stitching them into a GIF with ImageMagick, then cropping and shrinking the logo to fit the teeny 88×31 size. Translation for non-nerds: they paused the startup animation, took a zillion screenshots, and turned it into a bite-sized nostalgia snack.
The comments are basically a ’90s reunion: mysterydip beams “I love the comeback,” catskull subscribes to the creator’s RSS (yes, RSS—peak retro energy), and K2h praises the painstaking step-by-step. But the room splits when it comes to legality vibes. austinallegro drops the meme of the day: “Nintendo lawsuit incoming in 3...2...” triggering a mini-wave of DMCA ninja jokes. Meanwhile, roskelld brings history class, remembering mid‑’90s web button movements, boycotts, and the old “hand‑coded in Notepad” flex versus bloated site generators.
So the strongest opinions? Passionate nostalgia and DIY love, with a side of playful fear that Nintendo’s legal team might press Start. The disagreement isn’t about the craft—it’s about whether this is harmless fan art or IP poking the bear. The memes? Legal countdowns, Notepad pride, and everyone spamming the Subscribe via RSS button like it’s 1997.
Key Points
- •The author captured the Game Boy Color boot animation by using emulator breakpoints and stepping through the boot ROM.
- •175 frames at 160×144 were saved as PNG and combined into a GIF using ImageMagick with a ~0.0167s delay.
- •The vblank wait routine (Wait_for_next_VBLANK) was identified and used to time frame captures, with addresses like $0211 and $0291 noted.
- •The “Game Boy” logo region was measured (127×22 at position x:16, y:48) and cropped via ImageMagick.
- •The cropped GIF was resized to 82×14 (width 82 to maintain aspect ratio) to fit within an 88×31 button.