Capybara
Capybara
The real factory firmware of your Tamagotchi Paradise, on your computer. Not a reimplementation of the game: an ARMv7-M core written from scratch in Rust, with the undocumented SNC73410 peripherals modelled from measurement.
- MCU
- Sonix SNC73410dual core Cortex-M3
- Flash
- 16 Moquad SPI, encrypted
- Speed
- Faster than the consoleheld to real time
- License
- GPL v3open source
Download
Pick your system. The packages are built by the repository's own publishing pipeline, from code you can read.
- Unzip it wherever you like. Nothing is installed.
- Run
capybara.exe. Windows may warn that the publisher is unknown: the executable is not signed with a commercial certificate.
64-bit Windows. Your games go in %APPDATA%\Capybara\data, never next to the program.
- Open the archive and drag Capybara into Applications.
- The app is not signed with an Apple certificate, so macOS refuses the first launch. Clear the quarantine flag once:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Capybara.app - Open Capybara from Launchpad. macOS asks nothing after that.
Apple Silicon. On an Intel Mac, build from source. Your games go in ~/Library/Application Support/Capybara.
- For the AppImage, make the file executable and run it:
chmod +x capybara-*.AppImage && ./capybara-*.AppImage - For the Debian package:
sudo dpkg -i capybara-*.deb
x86_64. Your games go in ~/.local/share/capybara.
You need your own console.
Capybara ships no game data, and never will. You supply a flash dump of your own console, 16 MB, read from its memory chip. The dump is encrypted, but you have nothing else to find: Capybara works out its key from the dump itself, in about a minute, and nothing of that key is written into the software. That is the only honest and lawful way to use it: you emulate the machine you already own.
Tamagotchi Paradise is a product still on sale, not an abandoned one. Nothing here replaces buying it, and nothing here lets you play without it: you must physically own a console, open it, and read its own memory. What Capybara gives back is what you already paid for, on a screen that does not run on a coin cell. That is the honest line, and the project holds it even where it makes the software harder to start using.
What it does
Playing
Three buttons and a dial, from keyboard or mouse. Held keys combine, which is how you revive a character. Everything remaps, and the mapping is remembered.
Saves
One slot per game, kept per dump. A new game leaves the previous one untouched. The clock keeps running with the window closed, like a real device left in a drawer.
Recovery points
The whole machine frozen, core and peripherals included. One point every minute, kept twelve hours, rewinding to the second.
Appearance
The shell takes your own images, with a cut-out mask that replaces the silhouette. Colours, opacity, depth, shadows, layer rotation, button size and spacing.
Serial link
The console's UART is modelled, with a bridge to a port on your computer at 460800 baud. Pair it with a virtual serial port tool and the transfer software talks to your console as if it were plugged in.
Browser view
A local server publishes the screen and accepts the controls. The console can be watched and played from a phone on the same network.
Where it stands
What runs, and what is still open. The page says it rather than hiding it.
| Area | State |
|---|---|
| ARMv7-M core, Thumb-2 | complete |
| 128 × 128 RGB565 display | complete |
| Buttons, dial, sleep and wake | complete |
| Clock, calendar, ageing | complete |
| Saves and recovery points | complete |
| Sound | complete |
| Serial link | complete |
| Editions | Land, Water, Sky and Jade Forest tested; White Glacier and Orange Tropical untested |
Behind all of this: the pinout, the real memory map, the Sonix load table format, the AES key derivation, and the sixteen ARMv7-M decoding faults found by running real code. Everything was measured on the hardware, nothing was assumed.
Build it yourself
Nothing obliges you to trust a binary. The code is open and building takes one line.
git clone https://github.com/infinition/capybara && cd capybara && cargo build --releaseThe binary lands in target/release/capybara. The reverse engineering probes live in examples/ and stay in the repository, because the work continues.