If you’ve played any of the versions of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing over the years, you’ll know that eventually you get to the point where you’ve maxed out your virtual house and filled it with all the furniture you could possibly want — which is arguably as close to “winning” the game as you can get.

But now thanks to the work of [decrazyo] there’s a piece of furniture that you can add to your Animal Crossing house that will never get old: an x86 emulator that boots Linux. As explained in the video below, this trick leverages the fact that Nintendo had already built a highly accurate Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator into Animal Crossing on the GameCube, which could be used to run a handful of classic games from within the player’s virtual living room. But it turns out that you can get that emulator to load a user-provided ROM from the GameCube’s memory card, which opens the doors to all sorts of mischief.

In this case, all [decrazyo] had to do was prepare an NES ROM that booted into Linux. That might seem like a tall order, but considering he had already worked on a port of Unix to the classic console, it’s not like he was going in blind. He identified the minimal Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset (ELKS) as his target operating system, but wanted to avoid the hassle of re-writing the whole thing for the 8-bit CPU in the NES. That meant adding another emulator to the mix.

If porting Linux to the NES sounded tough, running an x86 emulator on the console must be pure madness. But in reality, it’s not far off from several projects we’ve seen in the past. If you can boot Linux on an ATmega328 via an emulated RISC-V processor, why not x86 on the NES? In both cases, the only problem is performance: the emulated system ends up running at only a tiny fraction of real-speed, meaning booting a full OS could take hours.

As if things couldn’t get complicated enough, when [decrazyo] tried to boot the x86 emulator ROM, Animal Crossing choked. It turned out (perhaps unsurprisingly) that his ROM was using some features the emulator didn’t support, and was using twice as much RAM as normal. Some re-writes to the emulator sorted out the unsupported features, but there was no getting around the RAM limitation. Ultimately, [decrazyo] had to create a patch for Animal Crossing that doubled the memory of the in-game emulator.

Still with us? So the final setup is a patched Animal Crossing, which is running an in-game NES emulator, which is running a ROM that contains an x86 emulator, which is finally booting a minimal Linux environment at something like 1/64th normal speed. Are we having fun yet?

Despite its age and cutesy appearance, the original Animal Crossing has turned out to be a surprisingly fertile playground for hackers.