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There are some surprisingly well maintained and restored Aibos on eBay from 1999 onward, lots of really neat upgrades.

Can anyone comment on the state of running your own code on these machines? I can’t remember if I ever found homebrew tools, or what sdk Sony provides

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I seem to recall there being some activity around creating certain 'dances' etc. for it to perform. Though I can't remember how "offical" or "open" it was. Knowing Sony's MO at the time, probably not that much.

Also, everything had to be stored on the Sony Memory Sticks. (And I seem to remember they too had to be a special type. Not 'Duo' though.)

Yep, the bots loaded your code from these (even more) overpriced Aibo-branded pink Memory Sticks

That's right. It only read from the pink ones.

They were conceived with homebrew software in mind. Back in 2006 I had a uni assignment that involved programming Aibos to play soccer and I vaguely remember there being a relatively high-level FOSS SDK for them - if you didn’t want to use Sony’s C++ libraries (OPEN-R).

Just remembered what the SDK was called - Tekkotsu. Here's a paper on it: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.39...

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