Tiny e-Paper Display Delivers 30 FPS of Game Boy Fun

Slow refresh, ghosting and low-contrast — wait, are we talking about passive matrix LCDs, or e-paper displays. That might be why e-paper Game Boy emulators are a thing: the limitations …. Tiny e-Paper Display Delivers 30 FPS of Game Boy Fun.

That might be why e-paper Game Boy emulators are a thing: the limitations of the black-on-grey e-paper screens remind us of the grey-on-green LCDs Nintendo used in the 80s. In this case [Bo Made It] made it out of a Waveshare ESP32-S3-ePaper-1.54, and got 30 FPS from it. Now, regular readers might be thinking, “So, we’ve seen the 60 FPS e-paper monitor, how is this special?” It’s a fair question.

The answer is that [Bo] is doing this on a randomly chosen dev board with a built in wavetable e-paper controller, rather than the bare inputs that allowed the [Wenting Zhang]’s project to work. On the other hand, [Bo] does credit [Wenting], particularly his e-ink PaperBoy project, with directly inspiring both the project and his implementation. Again, the big difference is going through the blob of the controller, but it turns out you can still address individual pixels through it.

[Bo] gave each pixel a ‘budget’ for up to 8 pulses it depending on how much it needs to change, speeding things up immensely.