Welcome to the new version of my Don't Bother Buying a Tamagotchi web site. I hope that this new layout is an improvement; the navigation bar at the top is something I've never tried on web pages before so there might be a couple of hiccups with it. The actual content in the site is much the same as it was; it's only the layout that's changed. To see the next page, click the right arrow in the navigation bar or choose it by name. This is not a framed page; I hate the damned things.
19/11/03: Well, nearly five years after I stopped updating this site, what should happen but I get a mail telling me my site is the subject of an example text in a book called Improve Your Writing 1, for Swedish high-school students learning English. Made my day.
18/1/99: As you may have gathered, I am no longer updating these pages. I am now approaching 850 e-mails about this subject and I've become more involved with maintaining my English-to-American Dictionary. I'm not a fan of deleting pages (just because I'm onto another topic doesn't mean that this doesn't interest somebody) so this site will be here for the foreseeable future.
11/11/97: Someone called Kenna has mailed me saying that she is an artist and would much appreciate any broken Tamagotchi that people may have lying around so that she can repaint the shells. If you have a virtual pet that's gone phut, I'm sure she'd like to hear from you.
20/10/97: I've lately been talking to Adam Colley, a fellow Brit who has impressively built the greater part of a virtual pet from scratch using programmable chips. He is looking for an LCD display with resolution betwee n 16x16 and 64x64 with its own controller that is drivable by a PIC 16c84 (if it can be driven with serial data, a PIC can drive it). He says that it is desirable but not required for it to be possible to switch it to standby from software and it should either run from 5v or have a driver circuit with it. I don't understand half of that lot but not to worry. If you do, and you know where he can get what he's looking for, please mail him!
2/10/97: I'm interested to see how far word has spread about this site. So far I've been interviewed for Radio Sachsen-Anhalt, a newspaper in the Netherlands, and Associated Press (who told me I'd had a mention in the Wall Street Journal). I w as also interviewed for and mentioned in a Wired article about Tamagotchi abuse (read it at http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/6229.html) a nd I've been mailed by a French television station. Someone e-mailed me a while ago telling me that I was in The Age, a national Australian newspaper, and I got mail today saying I was in a Danish magazine called DATATID (http://www.datatid.dk/1997/10/t6.htm). I have even been interviewed over e-mail by seven students at Roskilde University Centre in Denmark writing a paper on the Tamagotchi craze. If you heard about this page fr om any other publication I'd love to add it to my list - pleeeeease mail me saying what it was!
23/8/97: I got mail the other day from a bloke called Yann Cluchey, who is interested in writing a Windows 95 version of Tamagotchi. The only problem was that he asked me some info which I didn't have, so if you want to help him feel free to read the mail he sent me and write to him.
22/8/97: These pages have moved. I was planning on mirroring the two sites for longer but there's not much point (because nobody will change their links!). The address of this site is http://www.tardis.ed.ac. uk/~clr/tamagotchi.html so update your bookmarks; the link from the St. Andrews pages will go soonish. I've told Yahoo and hopefully they'll change it in time.
20/8/97: My sister broke my Tamagotchi! She left it out in the sun for ages and the screen has half disappeared. I obviously wasn't altogether distressed by the occasion but I had been secretly hoping that one day it might be worth something. Not now...