This year the DEFCON badge featured Andrew “bunnie” Huang’s new Baochip-1x. It was attached to a carrier board featuring LEDs displaying light patterns that could be mixed with other badges to create new light gene combinations. When the con was over, the chip could be removed from the carrier board and reused as a security key.
I took one look at the badge, with its three front buttons and monochrome OLED panel, and immediately wanted to try running Tamagotchi on it. This is my version of “Can it run DOOM?” I’ve been a fan of Natalie Silvanovich, Jean-Christophe Rona, and others who have done work in the Tamagotchi hardware realm. I've never done very much with hardware before, so I was deeply intrigued by the prospect of running Tamagotchi on the badge. I set off to figure it out with the help of AI, the Baochip Discord, and write ups by Anthony Mattas, Franco Lazzarini, and Jonathan Howard.
This weekend I finished putting Tamagotchi on the DEFCON 34 badge. I ported Jean-Christophe Rona's TamaLIB with icons from MCUGotchi onto it. TamaLIB uses the ROM of the original Tamagotchi toy from 1996, which can be found online very easily by searching. I have used the LED lights on the badge carrier board in the place of the original Tamagotchi’s alert beeps because it doesn’t have sound. It is entirely possible to power it by USB-C without the carrier board and LEDs, but the lights are fun and make it easy to see the Tamagotchi's mood at a glance. They even flash rainbow while playing the guessing game with the Tamagotchi.
