Paper Boy S3 turns E Ink touchscreen into playable Game Boy

E Ink displays have gotten better and better over the past few years, especially in terms of speed and color reproduction. However, these panels are still mainly found in e-readers, as their speed is barely sufficient for videos and games. The Paper Boy S3 now demonstrates that E Ink is definitely a viable option for simple handheld gaming devices.

This modding project by developer Wenting Zhang is based on the M5Stack M5PaperS3, a development kit that uses a 4.7-inch E Ink touchscreen with a resolution of 960 x 540 pixels and an ESP32-S3 microcontroller. The software is based on CrankBoy, an open-source emulator originally developed for the Playdate. The project wasn’t without its challenges. That’s because updating the entire screen content of an E Ink display takes too long to provide a usable gaming experience. However, if only the pixels that actually change are updated, E Ink can achieve a surprisingly high refresh rate.

For many Game Boy games, such as Tetris or Pokémon, this makes a playable experience possible. The bottom half of the display simulates the Game Boy’s buttons, though a Bluetooth gamepad can also be connected as an alternative to control games more precisely; however, compatibility is currently still very limited. While Paper Boy S3 is not commercially available, all the necessary data can be found on GitLab, so owners of the M5Paper S3 can turn the developer kit into a Game Boy themselves.