The Tamagotchi was launched by Bandai in November 1996 in Japan. It is not a games console but a virtual pet: an egg-shaped keychain, a monochrome liquid-crystal display a few dozen pixels across, three buttons, and a creature that is born, asks for food, makes a mess, falls ill, grows and eventually dies if neglected. You have to look after it in real time, several times a day.
The concept came from Aki Maita and Akihiro Yokoi. The toy became a worldwide phenomenon in 1997: tens of millions sold, empty shelves, and schools eventually banning it because pupils were getting up in class to feed their creature. Bandai has released dozens of models since.
Recalbox does not simulate the toy's behaviour: it emulates the hardware. The TamaLIBretro core, distributed under the GPL-2.0 licence, replays the 4-bit microcontroller of the first-generation Tamagotchi and executes the original rom instruction by instruction — it is the toy itself that runs, with its LCD faithfully reproduced and its three buttons mapped to the controller.
| Manufacturer | Bandai |
| Year of release | 1996 (November) |
| Creators | Aki Maita and Akihiro Yokoi |
| Type | Virtual pet, microcontroller emulation |
| Port licence | GPL-2.0 |
| Controller | Mandatory |
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro tamalibretro | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
TamaLIBretro is the only emulator for this system and is therefore used by default on every machine, including the Raspberry Pi Zero 2: emulating a 4-bit microcontroller costs practically nothing. Netplay is not available on this system and RetroAchievements are not supported. This core declares no CRT output support.
Place your roms in:
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Tamagotchi/
Supported extensions: .b .zip
Recalbox ships no rom for this system: the folder only holds an empty
tamagotchi.txtfile. As with any console, you have to provide the contents of the toy's chip yourself — a.bfile, that is, the binary image of the microcontroller's rom.
The file goes straight into the root of the folder, optionally inside a .zip archive containing a single file. Then run a game list update from the menu to see the entry appear.
Since the Tamagotchi only has three buttons — Select, Confirm, Cancel — a controller is more than enough. The original LCD being tiny, the picture is scaled up to your screen size by the core.