TamaLIB is a hardware-agnostic original P1 Tamagotchi emulator.
It has been optimized and restructured to fit the Arduino Uno board. Arduino environment comes with an IDE designed for ease of use. However, the Arduino Uno board, powered by an ATmega328P chip, is not fast enough to follow up the real-time emulation.
From the Arduino fork, TamaLIB has been adapted to ESP8266 and ESP32, both chips being fast enough for a real-time emulation. These two ESP forks are set on a different IDE.
The goal of the present fork is to bring together the beginner-friendliness of the Arduino IDE and the performance of the ESP chips. It relies on the developments from all previously listed projects.
The game icons have been copied from MCUgotchi, a Tamalib implementation targetting STM32FO/STM32LO boards. This choice of aesthetics is motivated by there resemblance to the original toy ones.
An extra functionality is added to the original gameplay: the game state can be saved by a simultaneous click on both 3 buttons (right, middle, left). EEPROM can only be written a limited number of times, this functionality should be used with parcimony.
- An ESP8266 or ESP32 board
- 1K resistor x 3
- Push button x 3
- Buzzer 3V
- SSD1306 I2C OLED 128x64
- Breadboard and wire
The board PINs have to be connected to the components.
| ESP8266 | ESP32 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Component | GPIO | pinout | GPIO | pinout |
| Screen SCK | - | D1 | - | D22 |
| Screen SDA | - | D2 | - | D21 |
| Buzzer | 14 | D5 | 15 | D15 |
| Left button | 12 | D6 | 18 | D18 |
| Middle button | 13 | D7 | 19 | D19 |
| Right button | 15 | D8 | 23 | D23 |
| VDD | - | 3V3 | - | 3V3 |
| Ground | - | G | - | G |
More info on the PIN mapping is available for common ESP8266 and ESP32 boards.
VDD is distributed to the push buttons and to the screen. The resistors are used as pull-down.
Clone this repository:
git clone https://github.com/Almarch/Nanogotchi.git
Arduino IDE must be available.
The emulation requires a ROM converted to 12 bits. Two options are available:
- If you have a working Java environment, you can use the original program from ArduinoGotchi. Place the
rom.binfile in the project folder and execute:
cd Nanogotchi
java TamaRomConvert rom.bin
- If you have a working R environment and tamaR installed, you can export the 12 bits ROM into the project folder:
cd Nanogotchi
R -e "library(tamaR); o = Tama(); o\$GetROM() |> tamaR:::nb2hex(header = 'static const unsigned char g_program_b12[] PROGMEM = {') |> write('rom_12bit.h')"
Using tamaR it is possible to substitute P1 sprites by P2 ones adding p2(o);. Before switching sprites, you might have to erase the EEPROM. From the Arduino IDE, start a serial connection and type the command: 9 to erase a previously saved games state.
After the conversion step, a rom_12bit.h file should be available in the project folder.
The code contains conditionally compiled parts. Depending on the target chip, comment the appropriate line between #define ESP32 or #define ESP8266 at the beginning of Nanogotchi.ino.
Open the .ino file in Arduino IDE.
Add the lines into File/Preferences/Additional Boards Manager URLs:
https://dl.espressif.com/dl/package_esp32_index.json, http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json
Then look for esp8266 and/or esp32 in Tools/Board/Boards manager and install the library.
Install U8g2 library in Tool/Manage Libraries.
You might have to install the USB-to-serial drivers for the board chipset. For instance, for some ESP32 development boards:
Restart the computer after drivers installation.
When the environment is ready, select the appropriate board as for instance: Tools/Board/esp32/ESP32 Dev Module.
Select the port: Tools/port/, the port to which the board is connected should appear.
Finally, use the upload command: ➡️. Some ESP32 development boards require a reset from the board reset button during the "Connecting..." step.