YouTuber builds pocket Game Boy emulator using eink ereader

Hardware creator Wenting Zhang has shown a touch‑screen, e‑ink Game Boy emulator that achieves an "actually playable" refresh rate for Pokemon Blue, challenging the common view that e‑paper is too slow for gaming. Zhang spent four years developing an E Ink monitor capable of 60 fps by using far more memory than typical e‑paper displays and combining greyscaling with dithering to smooth refreshes.

That earlier project is open source, and a crowdfunding campaign remained active at the time of writing. The pocket build runs on an ESP32 SoC paired with an M5Stack PaperS3 ereader, with a high‑refresh driver adapted from Zhang’s monitor work. Game Boy Color emulation is still a work in progress, and the device’s tiny speaker required creative audio filtering that reduces music to a single crunchy tone.

It suits slower, visually simple games such as Pokemon Blue and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, though faster titles like Tetris benefit from a separate input device; Bluetooth integration is not great right now.

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