I'm double posting here, but there's one other especially rare version I want to talk about - I've been searching for this one for quite a while now and I figure with how rare and mysterious this version is, it'll only get found if I start reaching out to people to help me out.
For a little while now I've been wanting to own as many variants of the V1 as possible - so what are those variants?
Things get a little bit more complicated if we look at hardware variants - they're an interesting topic too, and I'll probably make a thread about them at some point, but for this post I'll gloss over them. Instead I'll be focusing on each of the firmware versions:
0.0 and 0.1 correspond to Japanese versions - 0.1 is exceptionally rare, being the GLAY Expo Edition. Things get a bit more complicated from this point onwards, so strap in:
2.0 and 2.1 are standard European versions of the V1, and most of the European V1s are one of these two versions. After this point, US and European versions became paired in a sense, in that a US version and a European version would both be included on the same circuit board and could be switched between depending on the way in which jumpers on the board were shorted. The default state - an unshorted jumper - gives the US version, whereas a shorted jumper gives the European one. This is often called "Region Changing", and is generally thought to only be possible to do using the US hardware, as the jumper in question can be shorted on those devices. However, on European boards it's possible to locate the exact jumper which causes the region changing, and I believe with a bit of soldering you can undo the effects of this change (and in fact some rare devices seem to have never had this jumper shorted due to a factory error, resulting in US firmware being used on European devices). I expect deep down these ROM pairs are essentially the same version with some functions and sprites switched out between each of the versions, but the differences between the European and US devices are so broad for the V1 it's hard to be sure.
The first of these pairs are version 2.2 and version 4.0 - oddly, no European device seems to have
ever used version 2.2 by default, and so we've only ever seen this version by region changing a 4.0:
The next pair is 2.3 and 4.1 - again, 2.3 has never been seen by itself on a European device:
The final pair for the V1 is 2.4 and 4.2 - we actually didn't know these were paired until relatively recently, as 4.2 had previously been observed to region change into a different version (which I'll explain below). Unlike 2.2 and 2.3, the 2.4 has been observed to have been used on European (and Australian / Asia-Pacific) devices. Funnily enough, 2.4 was basically just a rumour amongst some of the Tamagotchi researchers for a while, due to an old thread that mentioned the version - it wasn't until much later that we actually found a device using this version though, since they're a bit less common. Certainly not as rare as once thought, though:
A few years ago we found out that region changing a 4.2 would result in the device changing to an unused Deka version called 3.0 - except, that's what we
thought. Somehow - possibly just due to some of our attempts at shorting the jumpers not working - this actually isn't correct; the device will change to 3.0 if the JP2 jumper is shorted (or, on the rare devices using slightly different hardware with jumpers J1 - J8, any of J2 - J8 will activate it, with each combination revealing a different character), but will
not if JP1 is shorted. If only JP1 is shorted, the device will become version 2.4, and if both JP1 and JP2 are shorted, it becomes another unused Deka version, 5.0:
It turns out these versions can also be activated similarly on version 4.1, but supposedly not on 4.0.
The final V1 version is 4.3, the Spanish language version. What happens if we attempt to region change this version? Nobody knows yet because they're quite rare, but maybe it could reveal yet more unused V1 versions:
So where am I going with this, and how is it relevant? At some point it was noted in an Instagram post that European devices use different close-up animations - the ones used on the V2:
This is... not completely true. Certainly the European versions use different animations, but this one? All the devices we'd encountered so far always used the V1 animations, rather than the ones from the V2. So what's happening here? Is it just a gutswap?
This, combined with the fact that there was some overlap in production between the V1 and V2, does seem to make it possible that they botched an updated version of the device in early 2005. This is further supported by the manufacture date on the shell - every device has a string of numbers printed into the plastic somewhere on the battery door (usually on the inside for the V1). Speaking with the owner, this V1 seems to have been produced in April 2005, the latest I've ever seen for a V1. She's not had time to check what specific version this is yet, though.
So it's simple, just find devices from ~April 2005, right? Problem is, they seem to be
very uncommon. I've been reaching out to
a lot of different V1 owners in the hope of learning more about this version, with very little success. A rough estimate suggests that fewer than 3% of European V1 devices seem to use this version, with the true number likely being a fair bit lower than that figure.
Maybe not Conan iD levels of rare! But extremely difficult to identify nonetheless. If you've got one of these versions, treasuring it is probably a good idea. This is actually the version I briefly touched upon in one of my posts above:
Most notably, the V1 seems to have at least one more European version that’s not been identified yet - a particularly late release that wouldn’t have seen many sales due to the V2’s release happening at the same time. If you’ve got a European V1 which was purchased at any point from 2005 onwards, it could very well be this rare version, and you could certainly help us understand this version further.
The latter bit is quite important - if you do have a European V1, and you want to join in in this search, shoot me a message with the number written inside the battery door on the back of the shell - from that I should be able to tell how likely it is to be this elusive version.
As ever, there's so much obscure Tamagotchi knowledge left to learn
Or is it best to avoid stuff like that and just stick with devices that actually reached retail?
(I will note that I don't know anything about Bandai and it's shares and all that, but for instance if they handed out shareholder exclusives to people who had at least 1k shares and attended meetings regularly and there were only 50 people who had at least 1k shares around that time, we can reasonably guess that number would be around there, but again that's purely speculation and hypothetical). 
I'm more interested in stuff with different characters and animations(like the tester osu/mesus).
It's hard to find ones where they have the package AND that label! They didn't have any special colorways or anything like that.
Also, now that I think about it, I think I've seen you around in the discord! Thanks for helping me get back up to speed with tamas and such in there!
