Games

The Game screen runs BornPets — a virtual pet inspired by the 90’s Tamagotchi — plus a set of mini-games you launch from the pet’s Play menu.

BornPets

Hatch a snail or a cat, then keep it fed, healthy, rested and entertained.

Hatching

The first time you open the Game screen you see the hatchery. Push Execute / Fire to start, pick a pet from the roster (the built-ins are Bartholomeus, Cat and Slug), then wait about a minute for the egg to hatch. After hatching you name your pet — up to 12 characters via the on-screen keyboard. The save persists across reboots. You can rename the roster or add your own pets — see Custom pet roster below.

Stats

Your pet has decaying stats — the higher they get, the worse off the pet is. Watch out for:

Stat	Fix with	Notes
Hunger	Feed	The pet gets hungry and other stats worsen
Tired	Rest / sleep	Or Hibernate for long sleeps
Drained	Play or a mini-game	Lack of inspiration — also resets “miserable”
Sick	Heal	Use when the sick icon appears
Miserable	Play	Makes the other stats decay faster, so treat it early

Stats interact: when several stats are bad the pet becomes miserable faster, and miserable makes everything else worse. Stay ahead of the spiral.

Controls

Key	Action
Up / Down	Switch between the top (actions) and bottom icon rows
Left / Right	Move along the current row
Execute / Fire	Activate the highlighted icon
Cancel	Back out

Hibernate

Putting the badge away for more than a few hours? Open the action menu and choose Hibernate — stats freeze until you wake the pet. Forget to hibernate before storing the badge and the pet keeps decaying, so it may have starved by the time you find it again.

Game modes

Two difficulty presets, picked via Main → Bornagotchi → Mode:

Classic — the original balance the badge ships with.
Casual — roughly half the decay speed and more relief per action, for people who don’t want to baby-sit.

The setting persists in flash. A * next to the mode name means the change is queued — reboot the badge for it to take effect.

Mini-games

Open the bottom-row Play menu in BornPets and pick a game. Each win reduces the drained stat without raising hunger, so they are free entertainment. Cancel always exits a mini-game.

Game	Goal
Tic-Tac-Toe	Draw or beat the computer (Normal or Impossible difficulty)
Lights Out	Toggle a 5×5 grid until every light is off
Nim	Force the computer to take the last stick
Maze	Reach any border exit of an 18×18 maze
Black Hole	Beat the AI’s adjacent-sum on a 21-cell pyramid
Triple Born	A Triple Town style merge game on a 6×6 board
BornJeweled	Accessible match-3 with a 30-move limit

Inside a game: the joystick moves the cursor, Execute / Fire places or selects, and Cancel quits back to the Play menu.

Make your own pet

Want a companion that isn’t a snail or a cat? The CyberÆgg Pet Maker is a browser-based sprite and animation editor for BornPets:

scene.rs/pets/

With it you can:

Start from a preset (Bartholomeus, Cat, Slug) or a Blank canvas.
Draw each animation frame with the badge’s palette — black, red, white and transparent (white is the e-paper background; transparent means “not drawn”).
Preview animation states (e.g. Idle) with speed and onion-skin controls.
Optionally tune the game balance (BORNPETS.CFG) — how fast stats decay and recover.
Download ZIP to get everything packaged for the badge.

Installing a custom pet

The badge exposes a USB drive when plugged in over USB-C (see Getting started). Unzip the export from the Pet Maker and copy the sprite files — plus PETS.CFG, and BORNPETS.CFG if you made one — into the root of the CYBR<4 hex> drive, then reboot the badge.

Custom pet roster: `PETS.CFG`

PETS.CFG is the pet roster shown in “Choose your Pet”. It is a plain-text file with one PREFIX=NAME per line, editable without reflashing the firmware:

# --- current pets (rename if you like) ---
0=Bartholomeus
1=Cat
2=Slug

# --- add your own (needs 05xxxx.PCX / 06xxxx.PCX sprites) ---
5=Dragon
6=Ghost

PREFIX is the pet’s sprite-prefix byte (decimal):
- 0, 1, 2 — the built-in pets (listing them just renames them)
- 3, 4 — reserved (sponsors, menu icons) and ignored
- 5–7 — your own custom pets
NAME is up to 16 ASCII characters.

A pet’s sprites are the matching PPAAFF.PCX files on the badge — PP is the prefix, AA the animation part, FF the frame. The firmware just counts the PCX files present (for example 050100…050104 = five idle frames), so there is no fixed frame count or header to maintain. Export sprites at the pet’s prefix from the Pet Maker and drop them next to PETS.CFG on the drive. Lines beginning with #, and reserved or malformed rows, are ignored.

Custom balance: `BORNPETS.CFG`

If you only want to change the difficulty (not the sprites), drop a plain-text BORNPETS.CFG in the root of the badge’s USB drive with one KEY=VALUE per line:

# speed up hunger decay, slow down the drained stat
HUNGER_RATE=4
DRAINED_INTERVAL=180

Eject the drive and reboot. When a config is active a small * appears after the pet’s name. Delete the file and reboot to return to a preset. The Pet Maker can generate this file for you, and the firmware’s USER_GAMES.md documents every supported key and its range.