YouTuber built a 30-frame-per-second grayscale Game Boy and open sourced a driver for e-paper displays

A Game Boy on E Ink

Bo’s InkBoy runs emulated Game Boy games at 30 frames per second on an E Ink screen. The display produces four gray shades, like the original Game Boy.

E-paper uses electrical pulses to move charged pigment particles within pixels. Because the screen can retain an image without continuous power, the technology is efficient, but changing the image is slow.

A custom display driver

The screen Bo used refreshes in about 300 milliseconds, a relatively fast rate for e-paper but one generally suited to static images. Standard black-and-white E Ink panels use positively charged black pigments and negatively charged white ones.

Bo created a driver that shortens the electrical waveform and controls pixels individually to reduce ghosting. He said he noticed the display producing gray during a transition and wondered whether stopping the process partway could create gray levels deliberately.

Code comes with risks

After a month of work, Bo published a working version of the driver on GitHub. He acknowledged using some vibe coding while developing it. Bo warns that custom waveforms and higher refresh rates can permanently damage E Ink screens. The experiment did not assess how the changes might affect a panel’s lifespan.