E-ink Game Boy emulator achieves 'actually playable' refresh rate for Pokémon Blue

Full text

Listen, I do love the vibrant colours and deep blacks of my OLED. What I don't love is the price tag (though, in the grand scheme of RAMpocalypse knock-on effects, the cost of gaming monitors has remained relatively stable). As such, I'm always intrigued by more affordable low-fi tech options, like epaper displays. It's just a shame about that refresh rate…

Well, I've just stumbled across an epaper emulation project that challenges everything I thought I knew about epaper. Hardware creator Wenting Zhang has just shown off their touch screen, e-Ink Game Boy emulator with an "actually playable" refresh rate for Pokemon Blue.

If you've ever used an ereader, you'll know that epaper displays typically refresh very slowly with noticeable ghosting, making them best suited to turning pages in a book, but not really gaming (unless we're talking about this delightfully chonky e-ink 'console '). Wenting Channel apparently saw that as a challenge, spending four years prior to the Game Boy project to create an E Ink monitor with a 60 fps refresh rate .

Long story short, Zhang's device uses way more memory than a traditional epaper display, plus a blend of greyscaling and dithering techniques to achieve a much smoother refresh rate. This older project is open source too, should you fancy pushing the limits of epaper displays yourself (alternatively, you could fling some cash towards the crowd funding campaign still active at time of writing).

Zhang leveraged that earlier experience for this smaller emulation device. Using a ESP32 SoC and a pocket-sized M5Stack PaperS3 ereader, the high refresh rate driver makes this device pretty perfect for a Pokemon Blue replay, or any other original Game Boy release. Game Boy Color emulation remains a work in progress, though, for various hardware and emulator software reasons.

Sound also required some creative problem solving as the M5Stack PaperS3 comes with a very limited speaker. It required audio engineering that's way over my head, but Zhang breezes through an in-depth technical breakdown in their build video.

The initial result is detailed, but underpowered and quiet. So, Zhang cuts the device's onboard buzzer some slack by filtering iconic Nintendo soundtracks through a single, crunchy tone. The result is…well, I don't hate it—it's got character .

Overall, this e-Ink emulator is a characterful little device. Yes, it's fine for slower-paced, visually simplistic games like Pokemon Blue and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. However, more fast-paced classic games like Tetris benefit from an input device separate from the M5Stack PaperS3's touchscreen—though Zhang admits Bluetooth integration isn't great right now.

Between you and me though, I'm most interested in diving into the open source repository in order to turn Zhang's 'Paperboy' into a pocket-sized machine for visual novels.