melonDS support for Learn with Pokémon: Typing Adventure

Why I made it

My daughters now have to use chromebooks at school, and they’re reaching an age where they will need to actually type out more than a word or two. Typing of the Dead is how I learned, but Pokémon is a bit more approachable for a 9 year old than a zombie shooter. There are hacks for an old DS emulator that work on Windows, but we have macs, and I wanted to see how far I could push AI here.

Adding bluetooth keyboard support to an emulator to play a 13 year old game would have been months of work in the before times. In the agentic world, I was able to steer Claude to build this in a weekend.

How it works

I setup Claude to loop until it connected with the existing keyboard, then let it cook. I tracked down PDF documentation for the Nintendo DS keyboard which saved Claude from falling apart at the load-bearing smoking-gun seams for a key that it could not map, and I made sure I had a Nintendo DS disassembler ready before Claude decided to build its own. The Fn key on the keyboard sold with the game is purely a modifier key, it turns out, and the game never receives it as input.

If you download this to try it for yourself, give the game ~30s to connect the first time. The initial pairing takes a second, and then every pairing after that is a bit faster.