Compared with its huge cultural influence, Tamagotchi’s relatively simple technical complexity pales in comparison, with sales of more than 76 million. It gave birth to comics, stories, many toys, an anime and two movies. [JC] Looking through some of his old things, I found a Tamagotchi P1 (the original Tamagotchi) and Decided to create a portable emulator for itThe ROM of P1 has already been dumped and can be run in the MAME emulator. After all, it is just a 32MHZ E0C6S46 Epson MCU, a 32×16 LCD with 8 additional icons, three buttons, and a piezoelectric element. The MCU manual can even be found in Epson’s websiteIn Hackaday, we have seen Tamagotchis many times before, such as Tamagotchi Singularity’s infinite matrix and the latest generation of Tamagotchi’s ROM dump based on the 6502 kernel.
So what’s the difference [JC] Working hard to finish? First of all, tools. It is divided into two parts: TamaLIB and TamaTool. The first is the P1 simulation library that has nothing to do with the hardware. It relies on the HAL layer to communicate with the hardware. The second is the front end of the first, allowing debugging, RAM editing and ROM modification. In particular, it supports easy modification of images in ROM and allows custom eggs and Tamagotchis. It is a good thing to pay tribute to Jolly Wrencher.
Given that simulation is platform-independent and access to low-resolution timers is not guaranteed, loop counting becomes tricky.Quite clever solution [JC] Stumbled upon synchronization with input polling, screen update, and sound output. TamaLIb keeps track of how many CPU cycles have elapsed, and periodically checks whether the simulation speed is too fast or too slow. Slow down or speed up the simulation to make it look like it is running in real time.
Last goal [JC] Had to run it on embedded hardware. Using STM32F072 board and cheap OLED screen there is a portable emulation Tamagotchi called MCUGotchi.This Code is available on GitHub And it should be possible to make some small adjustments on most STM32 MCUs. Now that someone has worked hard to make it easy to run Tamagotchi anywhere, we may soon see coffee machines or smart lights acting as Tamagotchi. Maybe the new joke will be, can it run Tamagotchi?
Video after the break.
thanks [Jean-Christophe Rona] Send this!