XTRON PROUDLY PRESENTS

THE ULTIMATE PC TAMAGOTCHI SIMULATOR

Introduction to ElectroPet

ElectroPet 1.0 was born out of Bandai's incredible success with its electronic keychain, the "Tamagotchi". The Tamagotchi craze swept the United States in the summer of 1996. The Tamagotchi was great, except for a few, glaring problems. First of all, the pet was crammed in a little monochrome LCD display, producing less than idealistic graphics. Also, the Tamagotchi's main control surface, three tiny, cramped buttons, was not the most efficient around. Analyzing these flaws, I set out to produce a Windows based version of the Tamagotchi keychain. In September of 1997, I released ElectroPet 1.0 for Microsoft Windows 3.1 to my friends and family. Unfortunately, the Tamagotchi craze had already pretty much evaporated, and only about four copies of ElectroPet 1.0 were ever made. Now, I am making new variations of ElectroPet 1.0 and the Tamagotchi. However, these versions will more closely simulate the realities of caring for real pets, not the fake blobs present in EP1 and the Tamagotchi.

ElectroPet 1.0 vs Bandai's Tamagotchi

ElectroPet 1.0 is a Windows based version of the popular Tamagotchi keychain, developed by Bandai. The Tamagotchi is a formerly popular pet simulator, small enough to carry around as a keychain.

Here is a small comparison of the two products:

In-Game Screen Captures

For a look at ElectroPet 1.0, my first Tamagotchi simulator for Windows 3.1x (and better), check out these new shots! Click to enlarge...

ElectroPet's intuitive environment (49.2 KB 24 bit JPEG)

Had fate not had it, ElectroPet 1.0 may look different than you see it today. Because of a system registry error and a inconvienient forced hard drive format, the original build of ElectroPet 1.0 was lost. The only part of it saved were the 167 hand drawn (pixel by pixel in MS-Paint) frames of animation. After the loss of the initial program, I decided to spruce up the interface a bit, and make it more colorful and appealing. The result is what you see in ElectroPet 1.0 today.

ElectroPet's detailed, informative information sheet (68.1 KB 24 bit JPEG)

ElectroPet 1.0 has all of the pet's statistics located on one "sheet". In ElectroPet 1.0, as you may have noticed, the interface is based upon a tabbed sheet design, using "tabs" (as called in Win95 terminology) instead of individual forms (windows).

A shrunken view of Food Rescue!, one of ElectroPet's two games (30.1 KB 24 bit JPEG)

ElectroPet 1.0 was meant to be an improvement over the original Tamagotchi, so I took time to make the games better than the ones in the keychain. The results are Food Rescue! (shown) and Egger. Both games are interactive, and usually fun.

The discipline animation, one of ElectroPet 1.0's many hand drawn videos (52 KB 24 bit JPEG)

ElectroPet 1.0's graphics, though however inefficient, were based fully on seperate frames. The drawing of the images themselves took me over a month (there are 167 - thank you Microsoft Paint). The delay between the switching of frames was not based on a timer control as would have been better, instead, EP1 used a more primitive CPU slowdown routine. However, this slowdown routine would pause the computer longer on an old 386/25 than on a Pentium/200. The game was designed on a Pentium 90 for the most part. Therefore, delays are pretty much realistic (not too long; short) running on computers at clock speeds between 100 MHz and 166 MHz (best tested so far is 133 MHz or 150 MHz). Unfortunately, this makes the animations literally to fast to see on today's brand new Pentium II/400's.

ElectroPet 1.0 includes several 3D scenes rendered in Caligari trueSpace 2 (45.5 KB)

During the coding stages of ElectroPet 1.0, I started enjoying 3D modelling. Though it was too late to make all of ElectroPet 1.0's pet graphics 3D, I decided to add a few rendered scenes to the game to improve the atmosphere. The lack of detail in the scenes reflects my then-low knowledge of 3D design. However, the images served their purpose. (Behind the image, if you noticed, is an open window...but what operating system is that? Some of you may know - it is good old Windows 95 with the new Internet Explorer 4.0 desktop enhancements installed...looks kind of like Windows 98, doesn't it?)