Developer t0mg built eenk, an MIT-licensed text adventure engine for the palm-sized Xteink e-ink reader, targeting both the ESP32-C3-based X3/X4 and the more capable ESP32-S3-based X4 Pro. The project runs ink-scripted interactive fiction on hardware with no PSRAM, leaving the C3 variant with less working memory than an 8-bit home computer from the 1980s.
That constraint is the core technical story here. t0mg had to make a functional parser and runtime fit inside the C3's onboard RAM alone, a problem worth understanding in detail for anyone doing embedded storytelling or scripting on microcontrollers. The X4 Pro's S3 chip opens more headroom, but the C3 target is the harder and more instructive case.
The full package includes eenky, a bundled IDE for writing and compiling your own choose-your-own-adventure titles to the device. Everything is on GitHub. The demo video shows it running. Read the original for the memory architecture details that make this more than a novelty project.
[READ ORIGINAL →]