Bo Made It demonstrated InkBoy in a video published last week. The project runs emulated Game Boy games at 30 frames per second with four shades of gray on a small e-paper board built around an ESP32-S3. The hardware uses a stock 1.54-inch Waveshare display, whose appearance recalls the olive-green screen of the original Game Boy.

E Ink panels preserve an image by moving charged pigment with electrical pulses, so they consume little power after an image appears. Their weakness is slow pixel movement. The Waveshare display refreshes in about 300 milliseconds, which is near the faster end of e-paper performance but normally suits static images. Its standard black-and-white panel uses positively charged black pigment and negatively charged white pigment. A waveform gradually moves the particles through each pixel and clears unwanted pigment.

Bo replaced the native driver with one that shortens the waveform and controls pixels individually to reduce ghosting. He first tried dithering to create gray images, but the result looked poor. While investigating ghosting, he noticed that pigment passing between black and white naturally produced intermediate shades. Stopping the electrical drive during that transition made those shades controllable.

The modified driver reached 30 frames per second with four gray levels. The original driver managed about 3.33 frames per second. The approach is not the first E Ink Game Boy project. Another YouTuber used custom hardware to bypass normal E Ink display limitations, while Bo achieved his result with a driver for stock hardware.

After a month of work, including some vibe coding, Bo published a working version at https://github.com/kuslota/InkBoy. He warns that custom waveforms and high refresh rates can permanently damage E Ink panels. The experiment did not assess long-term panel life. Anyone testing the driver accepts the risk, and a cheap spare display is safer than a modified Kindle.