I've been getting back into detective games recently, and musing about potentially reinstalling Return of the Obra Dinn, a game with a dithered art style that would look fantastic on an e-paper panel. Trouble is, those e-reader-style displays are notoriously slow to refresh, right?
Wrong, according to the makers of the Modos Paper Monitor and Dev Kit, a crowdfunded, open-source solution that allows users to crank certain types of e-paper display all the way up to 75 Hz. You get an e-paper panel included with the kit, but Modos cofounder Alexander Soto reckons you could use the included display controller to significantly boost the refresh rate of many other models, too.
"I would say instead of our secret sauce, we have open sauce,” said Soto, speaking to IEEE Spectrum. "You don't even need to use the panel we're offering. You could use a different panel and still get 75 Hz."
Commonly referred to as e-paper, electrophoretic displays manipulate electric fields in order to move differently-coloured charged particles suspended within a clear fluid, resulting in a series of ink-on-paper-like images displayed onscreen. The primary advantage of this method is readability, given that the image created is high contrast, with wide viewing angles and clear text legible even in bright sunlight.
Unfortunately, most e-paper displays are much slower to refresh than traditional monitors, with many topping out at around 10 Hz. As such, they're not really considered useable for displaying much other than text or still images, hence why you'll find them in e-readers the world over. The Dev Kit, however, provides a custom driver board and display adapter that makes use of Caster, an open-source display controller that's been custom engineered for low-latency, high refresh rate performance.
Several different modes also help to optimise the output for different purposes, like the Hybrid Greyscale Mode that allows switching between a fast binary mode for quick display updates and a slower greyscale mode for more refined rendering. Essentially, the display can update an image quickly with the former, then refine it with the greyscale mode as it stabilises, resulting in a faster perceived refresh.
Modos says the kit is compatible with a wide range of e-paper screens, from 6-inch up to 13.3-inch, in both monochrome and colour, with a full list of potentially supported displays provided at the company's GitHub page.
All of which makes me wonder: what's it like to game on a 75 Hz e-paper panel? While Return of the Obra Dinn's greyscale art style seems like an obvious fit, I reckon many point-and-click adventures would be interesting to see rendered in greyscale, although obviously it'd be good fun to give it a real challenge, like Doom: The Dark Ages running at full pelt.
Ah I know, call me an agent of chaos. The experience probably wouldn't be all that great. Still, if you're keen on finding out, the Crowd Supply page has already reached $128,000+ of its $110,000 target, and preorders start at $199 for the 6-inch dev kit. Do send us videos of your results, too. I want to see a Hell Knight rendered in all its 75 fps inky glory.
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