(author) thanks so much for the comments. i vaguely knew about this but i serendipitously didn't run into it. how does lack of vram access manifest? do vram writes silently fail?
this is precisely the sort of quirk i wanted to cover in this template so i appreciate hearing about it.
my intent in working on this project was (for my personal education) to start engaging with computers involving the fewest layers of abstraction possible, and the gameboy seemed like a fun way to do that.
my hope was to try to stand these up on systems that i actually use on a day-to-day basis, so it's kinda disheartening that that may be overly ambitious, but i'll write about it if i have any success :)
this is precisely the sort of quirk i wanted to cover in this template so i appreciate hearing about it.