First Glimpse into the Soul of a Tamagotchi | Hacker News Reader

First Glimpse into the Soul of a Tamagotchi

kwartzlab.ca

76 pointsaustengary10 comments

It was discovered with the original Tamagotchi that never disciplining it led to the pseudo-human incarnation. And a Tamagotchi's death was often a bit traumatic to small kids. I wonder how many nihilists it created?

Her talk at the Chaos Communication Congress is a great introduction to the executable environment of the Tamagotchi, and a fun story to boot! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOJfUcCOhJ0

Oh no!

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For the time being, here is Google's cached version of the page, sadly missing the images.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.kwa...

> I dumped the ROM of a Tamagotchi using the code execution ability...

I don't understand this. She could execute arbitrary code but couldn't just rip the ROM directly?

The ROM is mask ROM inside the microcontroller and not directly accessible. At first she was only able to modify the content of an external EEPROM for keeping game state connected via I2C and emulate another external (mask) ROM - something like a game cartridge for extending the game - containing mostly images and a single byte triggering additional game logic connected via SPI. Then she found a way to trigger a jump into the LCD RAM by messing with the later ROM and she had already control over the LCD RAM content by modifying the images on that ROM. So finally she used this code execution ability to dump the mask ROM in the microcontroller. I hope I got it right.

Thank you; that was an extremely informative yet concise reply.

There's a presentation of hers from what looks like last year that describes the hoops she's jumped through to try to get ROM dumps

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/Fahrplan/attachments/2097...

There are videos of it around, it seems, from various conferences.

I wonder how long until this gets taken down by a DMCA request. IANAL, I don't think dumping the ROM and uploading it to Github is legal.

And to think my first "real" computer had a 6502 inside it...

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