Tiny E-Paper Show Delivers 30 FPS Of Game Boy Enjoyable

Slow refresh, ghosting and low-contrast — wait, are we speaking about passive matrix LCDs, or e-paper shows? That is likely to be why e-paper Game Boy emulators are a factor: the restrictions of the black-on-grey e-paper screens remind us of the grey-on-green LCDs Nintendo used within 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, common readers is likely to be considering, “So, we’ve seen the 60 FPS e-paper monitor, how is that this particular?” It’s a good query. The reply is that [Bo] is doing this on a randomly chosen dev board with a inbuilt wavetable e-paper controller, slightly than the naked inputs that allowed the [Wenting Zhang]’s mission to work. On the opposite hand, [Bo] does credit score [Wenting], significantly his e-ink PaperBoy project, with straight inspiring each the mission and his implementation.

Again, the large distinction goes by the blob of the controller, nevertheless it seems you possibly can nonetheless handle particular person pixels by it. [Bo] gave every pixel a ‘finances’ for as much as 8 pulses it relying on how a lot it wants to vary, rushing issues up immensely. Our favourite half is how he achieves the Game Boy’s 4-bit greyscale by, in impact, intentionally ghosting the show. Pixels aren’t pushed lengthy sufficient to completely flip them in the event that they’re going just one shade lighter or darker. This difficult issues, since going from black to ‘white’ now takes longer than ‘white’ to the subsequent darker gray, and the precise timing must be labored out for every shade transition. Getting that timing proper took quite a lot of calibration, and we like how he used video to assist automate the method.

That course of continues to be ongoing, so there’s no GitHub hyperlink but. [Bo] will open supply all the pieces when it’s prepared, and we sit up for it. We additionally sit up for the PDA-like gadget he’s going to be utilizing this show driver for. If this all sounds just like a recent 20 FPS e-paper hack, that’s as a result of it’s the identical underlying expertise.