YouTuber Bo Made It has open-sourced a custom E Ink driver that runs Game Boy games at 30 frames per second on a stock Waveshare 1.54-inch ESP32-S3 e-paper board. The project, called InkBoy, produces four shades of gray, matching the look of the original Game Boy's display.
Stock E Ink screens typically refresh in about 300 milliseconds, which is fine for static images but too slow for video. Bo's driver shortens the waveform and drives pixels individually to cut ghosting. He also found that stopping the pigment transition partway produces intermediate gray levels, enabling the four-shade palette without dithering.
The custom driver improves the refresh rate from 3.33 fps to 30 fps. Bo says the idea came from another YouTuber's E Ink Game Boy, but that version used custom hardware; his works on unmodified parts. The GitHub release includes a warning that forcing custom waveforms can permanently damage e-paper, and long-term panel life was not tested.