Fascinating talk about hardware hacking Tamagotchis. Thanks for the tip from Malcolm Tredinnick, who noted: “A nice combination of low-and high-level hardware and software reverse-engineering. Many techniques and tools that will be familiar to regular Adafruit readers in isolation and here they’re all pulled together into a fun story.” I totally agree.

From the YouTube video description from the conference:

Many Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation

You might remember Tamagotchi virtual pets from the 1990′s. These toys are still around and just as demanding as ever! This talk covers my attempts to hack the latest Tamagotchis. Starting with the IR interface, and moving down into the hardware, this presentation will discuss techniques for reverse engineering a device with limited inputs, computing power and debugging capabilities.

Recent Tamagotchis are more than just pets. They can talk to their friends over IR, support games on external ROMs and store generations worth of information about their ancestors. This talk goes through the different ways Tamagotchis can be tampered with through these channels, including making Tamagotchis rich and happy over IR, altering their states in persistent memory and writing custom games. It also goes through attempts to dump the Tamagotchi’s code from ROM.

Speaker: Natalie Silvanovich

Event: 29th Chaos Communication Congress [29c3] by the Chaos Computer Club [CCC]

Location: Congress Centrum Hamburg (CCH); Am Dammtor; Marseiller Straße; 20355 Hamburg; Germany

Read more.

She definitely deserves one of these: