A Tiny 24 FPS E-Ink Game Boy Emulator

This is really impressive: a software engineer got a Game Boy emulator running at 30 fps on a tiny e-ink screen.

If you’re familiar with e-paper, you know that they normally refresh much slower (2-3 times a second), not nearly quick enough to play even a simple video game. This guy wrote his own display driver that got the refresh rate up to 30 times per second. From the transcript of the video explaining how e-paper works and how he hacked the display to make it play games:

Unlike conventional displays like LCD or OLED, ePaper stores its image physically using charged black and white pigment particles. By changing the electric field, the display moves the pigments towards or away from the surface, which in the end gives us black- or white-looking pixel. And usually a sequence of several electrical pulses called a waveform is needed to move the pigment back and forth, before finally driving it towards the new image. This helps produce a clean result without leaving too much of the previous image behind. But this takes a lot of time.

The project is open source — you can get the plans and code on GitHub. This engineer was inspired by Wenting Zhang’s e-paper Game Boy emulator:

Zhang has also made a color e-ink display that runs at 60 fps. Very cool. (via yanko design)

• Game Boy
• video
• video games
• Wenting Zhang