Connecting the dots: The aesthetic similarities between E-ink screens and the original Game Boy aren't hard to spot, but no one had built a dedicated emulator for the paper-like display technology until now. Despite the Game Boy's age, porting its software to M5Stack's PaperS3 turned out to be surprisingly difficult.
M5Stack's PaperS3 was originally built for smart home controls, electronic labels, and educational tools. But YouTuber Wenting Channel recently detailed how he turned the old dev board into a 60Hz E-ink Game Boy, its paper-like display an unexpectedly good match for the handheld's graphical capabilities.
Wenting Channel used the PaperS3 display's unique configuration to hit the Game Boy's original 60Hz refresh rate, something he'd previously pulled off on other E-ink hardware. The gap between the PaperS3's 960x540-pixel resolution and the Game Boy's modest 160x144-pixel resolution actually worked in his favor.
The extra resolution also left room to emulate a control pad and buttons on the touchscreen. Wenting Channel even added quicksave and quickload buttons above the game window. Bluetooth controller support is included too, though its responsiveness and accuracy still need work.
To run Game Boy games, the modder forked CrankBoy, an emulator originally built for the Playdate. None of the emulators Wenting Channel tested could run every Game Boy game at full speed on the PaperS3, but CrankBoy came closest. The Playdate's black-and-white screen shares the same aesthetic as the original Game Boy, which made software built for it a natural fit for an E-ink display.
Emulating the Game Boy's audio proved tougher, since the PaperS3's modest buzzer is only built to output a single tone. Some clever PDM manipulation let Wenting Channel reproduce the Game Boy's four-channel sound accurately, but the volume came out too low. Fixing that meant falling back to the single-tone buzzer, which, while less faithful to the original handheld, still sounded recognizable.
Although the PapserS3 is out of print, owners interested in trying Wenting Channel's creation can still install it through M5Burner.
This isn't the first dedicated E-ink gaming device, either. Last year, Daniel Puchau used a 7.5-inch, 800x480-pixel E-ink screen to build the Ink Console. It has only two buttons and no directional pad, though, since it was built specifically for text adventures and digital choose-your-own-adventure books – a natural extension of the e-books E-ink displays are best known for.
Someone finally built a working Game Boy emulator for E-ink screens
