He had just fixed a bug in the way the emulator handled the GPU's command buffer. On a whim, he loaded a decrypted, legally dumped ROM of A Link Between Worlds . He'd owned the cartridge. He had the receipt somewhere. That was legal. Sort of. He'd worry about the ethics later.

"I'm trying to understand the GPU," Leo said, not looking up. "The PICA200. It's a weird, proprietary thing. Does tile-based deferred rendering. And the dual screens? The ARM11 MPCore for the main CPU, an ARM9 for the old DS backwards compatibility, and a weird little microcontroller just for the security chip."

The smell of old plastic and faint ozone clung to the cardboard box. Leo pulled back the flap, revealing a tangle of charging cables, dusty game cartridges, and at the very bottom, a single, scratched Nintendo 3DS. The casing was a faded "Cosmic Black," and the top screen had a hairline crack across the right corner.

"You look like you're reverse-engineering the Rosetta Stone," she said, tossing a granola bar onto his desk.

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