That is a kind of initiatives that was each impressed and made doable by absolutely the embarrassment of dev boards out there to the trendy hacker. On this case, the dev board was the M5Stack PaperS3, which because the title implies combines an ESP32-S3 with an e-ink panel. [Wenting Zhang] picked one up and was instantly impressed to try to make an e-ink Sport Boy.
The M5Stack PaperS3 made this challenge doable by exposing the show with row/column management — parallel, some would name it, versus the same old serial interface of SPI. That allowed [Wenting] to work a number of the identical e-ink magic he perfected on his Modos screens to permit partial refresh at as much as 60 Hz. That the ESP32-S3 is able to emulating a Sport Boy whereas driving the display ought to shock nobody, since it could emulate an MSX whereas outputting VGA and even Home windows 95 on a 386. On this case, he’s basing the precise Sport Boy emulation on Crank Boy.
In fact the e-ink display on the M5Stack is way bigger and has a a lot increased decision than what the Sport Boy shipped with, which lets him implement contact controls and scale the picture up 3X so he can pretend a few shades of grayscale whereas truly outputting black and white. Even higher, if he was truly taking part in this factor on the common, as soon as the high-refresh portion of the display begins to wear down, he can flip the orientation and maintain gaming on the virtually-unrefreshed management portion of the display — doubling the lifetime of the system, one thing a lot of you raised as a priority after we final checked out a his e-ink monitor challenge.
The one actual shortcoming of this hack is the sound. With one-bit beeps popping out of the M5Stack buzzer, it’s bought nothing on Nintendo’s {hardware}. In fact, that’s partially all the way down to utilizing the {hardware} as-is. With the addition of an I2S sound chip just like the one used within the MOD participant challenge we featured lately, you’d simply have to squeeze out sufficient processor cycles to make this sound nearly as good because it seems.
