Tama-Go Microcontroller

Found it! Found it! Found it! Or at least I hope I did The Tama-Go microcontroller appears to be a Generalplus GPLB5X series LCD controller.

Thanks to binary for the tip! He found several Japanese language sources stating that Sunplus and Epson do buisiness with Bandai. Generalplus is a subsiduary of Sunplus. And yes, I did compare the pad layout of every single reasonable Epson and Sunplus MCU with the Tamagotchi die before moving onto the Generalplus ones :S.

But this does seem a way better fit than any other microcontroller I’ve looked at. A layover is below for dramatic effect .

I’m not exactly sure what member of the series it is (there are four possibilities), but I can probably figure out by measuring the pad positions (they are very slightly different for each version), and it’s probably not particularily relevant because they use the same instruction set.

The specifications are as follows:

• 8 bit RISC microprocessor
• 1536 bytes RAM
• 320 or 640 Kbytes mask ROM (depending on model), baked to perfection for each customer
• 512 bytes LCD RAM
• 4 color grayscale LCD controller
• SPI (probably used for the EEPROM)
• Audio DAC

See the datasheet for more details.

So this means that code is in ROM. I guess the next step is figuring out how to dump the ROM .

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