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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

Playdate's screen isn't e-ink, it's a 1-bit LCD

You probably wouldn't want the refresh rate of e-ink for a gaming device.

You're right. I literally have one sitting on my bookshelf I just haven't touched it like, since about a week after it came out.

What made you give up on it? Lack of time, or did you just not find it fun? “Season 2” of games came out last year.

I’d really like the chance to play with one and maybe even try to develop for it. Unfortunately, the price is a bit steep, even more so when considering shipping and taxes to the EU. I kept checking for years (and still do from time to time) to see if they’d sell through a retailer in the EU or if I could get one second-hand here, but it’s looking like that’ll never happen.

Not who you responded to but I haven’t really found many games I actually enjoy.

Wouldn't be impossible. I'm old enough to remember the original B+W game boy, and my B+W e-reader refreshes faster.

I've seen some very recent niche tech demoing fast-refresh e-ink screens but pretty much everything until now has required a noticeable flash to clear the entire screen on update. Which is fine for reading books but not for quick animating in an action game.

Most e-ink displays do not refresh faster than the original GameBoy which was 60fps.

Would probably be great for like, text adventures, visual novels, turn based strategy games, etc.

But lcd screens are so cheap I don't even know what the advantage of an e-ink screen would be for this. I was just misremembering what the niche part of the playdate screen was.

Edit: And just to continue the nerdier part of the conversation, the dmg-01's refresh rate was indeed ~60, but it's pixel response time was so bad it really made it feel way slower. I remember when the GBC came out how amazed I was at how clear the games looked. dmg-01 felt like a tiger handheld a lot of the time.

60fps is the speed the PPU pushes pixels to the LCD, not the speed the LCD physically refreshes itself. That part was slow enough you could toggle pixels at 30Hz to simulate more than 4 levels of gray.

I have a Boox e-reader. You can run Firefox on it, you can drag-to-scroll like a phone, there's a lot of ghosting (like the game boy) but it works fine. Now I wish I still had a game boy to compare it to.

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