I'm about to make a dozen blind assumptions based on this old Tamagotchi device, the original Digimon Digital Monsters Fighting Virtual Pet. I know very little about electronics and don't currently own one of these devices to do any tests on, so please excuse my ignorance if I'm completely wrong.
Those two metal bits on top? They're GPIO pins, essentially. If you're lucky, it's likely even 3.3 volt and won't need to be converted up or down to utilize it.
Because they're oriented vertically, the top pin will always connect to the matching top pin of the partnered device. Therefore, instead of using one pin as an input and the other as an output and just hoping the clock speeds of both devices match (which would require a horizontal pin layout so that the input pin of one device connects with the output pin of the other and vice versa), they probably use an i2c method of communication. https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/i2c
Therefore, if you carefully inspect the transmissions between two of these devices (which should be simple, considering the pins are spring-loaded and would easily compensate for a wire being shoved between them), figure out which pin is the clock and which pin is the data, and what kind of data is being transmitted...
Theoretically, you should be able to develop a virtual pet on Pico-8 which can utilize the GPIO pins of a Pocket CHIP or Raspberry Pi device to fight a Digimon. And win. How cool is that? :3
Similarly, but unrelated:
It is perhaps better documented that the original GameBoy game link cable is actually a three wire 3.3v serial port connector, therefore you can probably hack together a connection that would allow a Pico-8 game to generate and trade Pokémon with a GameBoy or GameBoy Color.
But I feel like the two-pin Digimon tiny electronic toy is probably more straightforward to tackle first.
there's a lot of interesting applications for gpio that's really underutilized. things like a pico-8 printer, or extended displays...
Digimon thing sounds interesting -- good luck!
I actually owned 3 different generations of these things. It's fun to see this here.
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