Enterprising enthusiast Wenting has turned an M5Stack PaperS3 dev kit with an e-ink screen into a more-or-less fully functional Game Boy. If you're not a hardware hacker yourself, there's a fair chance you've never heard of Wenting Zhang or Modos Labs. The engineer's "Wenting Channel" on YouTube has been a favorite of niche tech nerds for a long time, showcasing all kinds of hardware hacking expertise. Zhang spent the last several years turning that expertise into Modos Labs, a company whose high-refresh e-Ink displays we've covered before.
Okay, it won't play real cartridges, the sound is kind of jank, and the performance isn't always full speed. Still, this is quite an achievement for a few reasons. The PaperS3 is an e-Ink dev kit, not really a commercial product. It's intended for prototyping and, well, exactly this sort of hardware hacking. A key detail to understand is that this device isn't powered by some multi-core Rockchip or Allwinner SoC, but rather by an ultra-low-cost ESP32-S3 microcontroller with just two cores running at clock rates measured in hundreds of MHz, not GHz. Moreover, its e-Ink display is not really intended for the kind of smooth refresh normally required for playing video games, yet Zhang pulled it off.
