Quote:
Originally Posted by paulroberthill
This is pretty cool!
Action games are a bit too blurry (Contra is painful!) but Zelda isn't too bad.
Sound would be awesome :-)
I wonder what other emulators would be usable? ZX81?
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Games with Moving objects are fine, but side-scrollers change too many pixels between updates, causing the eink device drivers to smear the display by using deferred erases. The "multiple-exposure" blurring effect is a software artifact caused by the drivers being optimized for fast page turns on ebooks, and not for video game animation.
Games with a fixed background and not too many moving objects should work fine (breakout, bubble-bobble, and many board games). Some games also have problems with buttons not working in this gameboy emulator. This program may need a little extra work in button support, but we have the source code so we can fix that ourselves.
Technically, now that we can load a custom linux kernel with kexec (see other thread), we *could* use a custom kernel with eink device drivers tuned for video games instead of ebooks. We just need our game loader to launch the custom kernel.
And remember, the kindles consume most of their battery energy while updating the display, so video animation that updates the display multiple times per second will consume your battery charge faster than reading ebooks that only update the display for page turns.