Make A DIY E-ink Faceplate For Valve’s Steam Machine

July 4, 2026 by Donald Papp 15 Comments

Valve has always designed hacker-friendly hardware, and in that spirit, [NaKyle Wright] released Inkterface, a design for an E-ink faceplate to fit the recently released Steam Machine. As far as projects go, this one is meticulously documented, so give it a peek.

The system uses a selection of components that include a 5.83″ E-ink panel and driver board, a small lithium-polymer battery, and an ESP32-based controller board. A cleverly-designed 3D printed frame and bezel hold everything just so, creating a snug assembly with minimal wiring hassles.

A small service can be easily configured to control how the display updates.

The faceplate is wireless and self-contained, attaching with the help of four magnets. On the software side, the host machine communicates over Bluetooth, and a service takes care of pushing updates. An app for configuring and talking to the display will be available on Steam eventually, but in the meantime one can install that part manually.

[NaKyle]’s bill of materials calls for specific components, but the underlying design is very modular. Should one wish to make hardware or component changes, alterations to the 3D printed parts might be needed as well. Fortunately, [NaKyle] includes the .step files alongside the .stl models. We love to see that, because it makes tweaking or customizing so much more accessible. A homebrewed version of this E-ink panel might be just the thing to complement a homebrewed Steam machine.

Be sure to also check out the repository of Steam hardware, which contains drawings and 3D models of the Steam Deck and Steam Controller, useful for designing holders or custom brackets or whatever else one may need.

Warp Point: A Web Ring For Gaming Sites Built For 2026

July 4, 2026 by Maya Posch 6 Comments

At one point in time web rings were one of the best ways to find content on the World Wide Web — involving not just a directory of participating sites, but also each site linking to each other in a ring-like fashion. With search results these days becoming increasingly less useful, having such a focused resource sounds better and better, with the Warp Point directory and web ring now doing just that for video game websites. Topics range from reviews to retro gaming and game development, so there’s probably something for everyone here.

For the reasoning behind this effort take a look at this article by [Wes Fenlon] and [Matt Sayer]. The inspiration was part nostalgia and part longing for the return of a simple system that Just Works™ without algorithms, advertising, ‘AI’ and corporate overlords involved at any point in time. Everything is just focused on helping you find the content and community you were looking for as quickly as possible, though spending a few hours just clicking through the ring is also perfectly fine.

Everyone is free to submit their own awesome site to Warp Point, after which it’ll be manually reviewed. Even if not strictly curated, it would seem to be a refreshing return to a more simpler time, using an approach that should still hold up just as well as it did in 1999.

Although the big commercial web directories like those on Yahoo! quickly became unwieldy and unusable, there’s a lot to be said for having these small, focused web directories and rings to regain that sense of community and humanity that’s become so scarce on the WWW in 2026.

Porting The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess To The 3DS

July 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

After the Nintendo 3DS saw various Nintendo 64-era titles like Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask ported to it, there was a lot of speculation that the GameCube/Wii title of Twilight Princess might soon make its way to this handheld gaming system too. Unfortunately no official release happened, but with the recently decompiled source code of the game in hand, [Tobi] set out to see whether such a port was realistic.

Compared to the somewhat scruffy Nintendo DS and DSi handhelds, the 3DS hardware is decidedly more beefy, both in the processor department as well as in terms of RAM with 128 MB of FCRAM (Fast Cycle DRAM). This puts it within batting distance of the game’s original two consoles.

In the video the current status of the porting effort is demonstrated, with the game actually running surprisingly well despite the early state of the porting project. Even with the rather impressive graphical glitches and overall instability that one would expect at this early stage, the game is essentially already playable.

As noted by [Tobi], the next steps will involve fixing these bugs and above all actually optimizing the so far quick-and-sloppy port. Along with the possibility of actually having Twilight Princess rendered in 3D, this is a rather exciting development that demonstrates that an official version of the game for the 3DS would have been easily possible.

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An EInk, ESP32-based Game Boy

July 2, 2026 by Tyler August 7 Comments

This is one of those projects that was both inspired and made possible by the absolute embarrassment of dev boards available to the modern hacker. In this case, the dev board was the M5Stack PaperS3, which as the name implies combines an ESP32-S3 with an e-ink panel. [Wenting Zhang] picked one up and was immediately inspired to try and make an e-ink Game Boy.

The M5Stack PaperS3 made this project possible by exposing the display with row/column control — parallel, some would call it, as opposed to the usual serial interface of SPI. That allowed [Wenting] to work some of the same e-ink magic he perfected on his Modos monitors to allow partial refresh at up to 60 Hz. That the ESP32-S3 is capable of emulating a Game Boy while driving the screen should surprise no one, since it can emulate an MSX while outputting VGA or even Windows 95 on a 386. In this case, he’s basing the actual Game Boy emulation on Crank Boy.

Of course the e-ink screen on the M5Stack is far larger and has a much higher resolution than what the Game Boy shipped with, which lets him implement touch controls and scale the image up 3X so he can fake a couple of shades of grayscale while actually outputting black and white. Even better, if he was actually playing this thing on the regular, once the high-refresh portion of the screen starts to wear out, he can flip the orientation and keep gaming on the virtually-unrefreshed control portion of the screen — doubling the lifetime of the system, something many of you raised as a concern when we last looked at a his e-ink monitor project.

The only real shortcoming of this hack is the sound. With one-bit beeps coming out of the M5Stack buzzer, it’s got nothing on Nintendo’s hardware. Of course, that’s partially down to using the hardware as-is. With the addition of an I2S sound chip like the one used in the MOD player project we featured recently, you’d just need to squeeze out enough processor cycles to make this sound as good as it looks.

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Sony To End Physical PlayStation Disc Production In 2028

July 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 47 Comments

Sony has just announced on their PlayStation blog that they will stop the production of game discs starting January 2028. This effectively means a shift away from physical media to one that fully relies on downloading content from the PlayStation online store.

Although not technically confirmed, this announcement would strongly indicate that the PlayStation 6 will do away with its optical drive altogether as previously speculated. Of course, physical media has long since been on the ropes, particularly when it comes to gaming. Valve’s recently released Steam Machine doesn’t feature an optical drive, and for that matter, neither does the average gaming PC these days. But it’s still disappointing to see in many ways.

Although digital downloads have their advantages, a major problem here is that due to Digital Rights Management (DRM) you only ever get a license to lease a game. This means losing the ability to lend or borrow a game, and will likely mark the end of second hand sales. With narrow exceptions such as Good Old Games (GoG) and its DRM-free installers that you can e.g. burn onto a CD or copy to a USB drive as a static instance of the software, this shift by Sony effectively ends game ownership for PlayStation owners.

Watch A Steam Controller Skitter Itself To Its Charge Puck

July 1, 2026 by Donald Papp 12 Comments

Hacks don’t have to be practical but it helps if they are educational or clever or amusing, as [Ray Foss] demonstrates with his auto-docking Steam Controller.

It’s an open-source web application that combines a camera, a Steam Controller, and some clever software for the sole purpose of saving the user from the tyranny of having to manually set the controller onto its magnetic charging puck. Instead, one can simply lay the controller down nearby and let the computer do the rest of the work.

First one fires up the web interface, ensures a webcam has a good top-down view of both the charging puck and the controller, connects wirelessly to the controller, then clicks a few points on the camera view to tell the system where things are.

After that, the system buzzes the controller’s haptic feedback motors to make it skitter across the desktop until — guided by the camera and implementing obstacle avoidance — it docks successfully with its magnetic charging puck.

It may not be super practical and may even seem a bit Rube Goldberg-esque, but it’s fun and demonstrates a few interesting things. One is moving a controller via slip-stick friction by asymmetrically pulsing the feedback motors. Another is automatically reducing the pulse frequency to make smaller movements when it gets close to the charging puck, for finer control.

The computer vision part also ignores anything in expected cable locations, removing the need to deal with them algorithmically. WebHID via the browser takes care of talking to the controller, and confirming a successful docking by watching messages to detect when charging has begun.

If this seems a bit familiar, it’s because this project was inspired by the work of [Very Lazy Pixels] which we covered previously.

Web Tool Lets You Take Steam Controller For A Drive

June 30, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

One of the simplest robots to make is a bristlebot — a motor with an offset weight is attached to the head of a toothbrush, and the resulting vibrations will move the contraption across a flat surface. [Very Lazy Pixels] recently took this idea a bit further by turning the Steam Controller into a steerable, bristlebot-like robot.

To drive one’s Steam Controller across a desk, all that is needed is for a computer with a paired controller and a Chromium-based browser. From there, using the WASD buttons, the web interface converts traditional video game inputs into controller motion by spinning the controller’s rumble motors at a specific frequency. With precise control of these motors, the controller can move forwards and backwards and even turn, which is a great deal more advanced than the traditional bristlebots generally manage.

Part of what makes this possible is Valve’s willingness to release information about many of their products to the general public, enabling anyone to modify or upgrade those products to their liking. While not completely open source, it’s a step in the right direction and enables fun projects like these. We’ve seen other Valve products turned into surprisingly barebones single-board computers as well as custom portable workstations thanks to this philosophy.

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