Jun
10
Tamagotchi Talk (Part VI, The Gender Bit or ‘Is There Pre-Determination Among Tamagotchis?’)
Lately, I’ve been trying to figure out how a Tamagotchi’s gender is determined. There appear to be two indicators.
The first is byte 10, which appears to be set to 4 for female gotchis and 3 for male gotchis, but this doesn’t appear to influence the gender that the gotchi is recorded as under the friends menu.
After much fiddling, it turns out recorded gender is determined by bit 5 of the second byte of the UID (yes, really). If it is not set, the gotchi is male. If it is set, the gotchi is female. Note that appearance is not related to gender (there are ‘girl’ and ‘guy’ appearances, but they each have their own identifier in the appearance section of the request, and the gender bit does not affect how they are displayed.)
An update protocol diagram is as follows:
The UID seems like a rather strange place to indicate the gotchi’s gender. There are a couple of possible explanations. Perhaps it is more efficient (a device does not have to store an extra gender marker alongside each friend’s UID). Or perhaps gender is so deeply linked to a Tamagotchi’s identity that it is inextricable from it’s UID. Or perhaps a Tamagotchi’s UID is more than just a random identifier, maybe it has a role in detemining its future growth (this is consistent with observations on other communities that Tamagotchi’s tend to follow a number of set growth patterns). Maybe there is predetermination among Tamagotchis.
Deep and complicated are the questions of Tamagotchi life…
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Undocumented protocols are such delicious puzzles.
DW
I’m not sure about V4, but some previous versions have a lucky rating, generated at each character’s birth, based on the lucky ratings of her/his parents. When two Tamagotchis play a connection game, the lucky ratings of both are taken into consideration when determining who’ll win the game.
It seems likely that some of the bits in the stream are used to identify the version of the Tamagotchi toy (e.g. Connection V1, Connection V2, … Connection V5, Music Star, etc.)
Some characters (such as Mametchi) exist in almost all versions of the Tamagotchi toys. When you connect two different version Tamagotchi toys, if one contains a character not defined on the other, that character will appear as Nazotchi (the mailman) on the other.
The latest Japanese model (Tamagotchi-iD Nov.2009) seems to have done away with the problem of undefined characters. When two Tamagotchi-iDs are connected, instead of exchanging character id codes, an entire bitmap image of each character is exchanged.