Neural network digit recognition on a Game Boy

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Some weeks ago I had the silly idea of doing neural network inference on the Nintendo Game Boy. I chose the MNIST handwritten digit dataset, read up on int8 quantization and got to work. The result is a playable ROM that fits in a single ROM memory bank (16 KB) and contains both a trained NN and inference code. The NN running on the Game Boy achieves 93.86% accuracy on the MNIST test set; although not a good result for MNIST (since it is such an easy classification task), it's quite decent for a model running on a Game Boy. You can find the compiled ROM on the Releases page ( https://github.com/jongoiko/gb-nn/releases ), feel free to try it out!

Visit product View on Hacker NewsJun 28, 2025

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