Tamagotchi Pix Wave 2 Nature Teardown Reveals Different PBC Board, Processor, Firmware & More!
Never underestimate the power and brains of the Tamagotchi Community! First the Tamagotchi Pix was teared down by Mr.Blinky. Now, Slinky Ramune from Twitter just got their hands on the newest Tamagotchi Pix Nature shell, and decided to look under the hood to see if there were any differences between the latest Pix shells compared to the original shells.
The differences between the first wave of the Tamagotchi Pix and the second would never be discovered by the normal consumer, but for those who are savvy, you can find some new and exciting things. First off, Slinky Ramune recognized that the PCB (primary circuit board) is a bit different. The color is different as it is blue whereas the first wave was green. Using a jig for interfacing the flash port on the Tamagotchi Pix, Slinky Ramune is able to get into the second wave Pix but not the first wave. Both waves feature 8MB flash that their universal programmer software couldn’t identify, the firmware itself has some interesting implication apparently!
Surprisingly, the second wave Tamagotchi Pix features a different dual core processor, which explains why the PCB (primary circuit board) layout looks different. No word on why there is a new processor, in fact the dual core processor is clocked at 198mhz for this ARM Coretex M3 microcontroller. Interestingly enough the second core of the processor is actually not being sued for anything. Usually the second core is used for audio decoding, but this uses a buzzer instead. There must be something the second core can be used for! Slinky Ramune notes that that this makes it the most powerful color LCD toy by Bandai to date. Firmware cannot be upgraded on your first wave Tamagotchi Pix, because the code is completely incompatible with the older hardware.
What interested us the most is that through the jig that Slinky Ramune built, they were able to extract the 128x128px photos (seen above) from the Tamagotchi Pix. They are just regular JPEG photos, and each photo is allocated in a fixed chunk of flash, which holds up to 100 regular photos, 10 social media images (Tama Social), and 10 album photos from when your Tamagotchi leaves.
Slinky Ramune was actually able to transfer the save data between their first wave Sky purple Pix and second wave Nature green Pix. Since the photos ere different sizes, they had to relocate the photos. Lastly, Slinky Raume notes that the flash chip in this second wave Tamagotchi Pix is an odd beast. The manufacturing ID is different, and there is no SFDP (serial flash discoverable parameters). This could mean that the flash chip is a custom order.