From my experience you need to match the AGS-101 screen to the AGB-001 motherboard. I originally tried a Type-A (white tabbed) AGS-101 screen with a 40 pin adapter and AGB-001 motherboard and got the same results as you, really washed out and faint with the potentiometer not doing anything...
this is awesome! I'm looking forward to trying this.
any reason for not using github for development? would be interesting to see the changes you make to fix certain bugs or to add features.