When your tama is dying, lying on the floor, but not yet an angel thingy, you can save it. If you try to push buttons A, B or C, nothing happens, however if you press the download/reset button, it will be alive again, just in need of some medicine/attention!!!

If the tama is lying on the floor, with the skull above it, and all the buttons have locked up in preparation for the angel/egg to appear. YOU CAN reset/download and the tama will be back to the screen where it is very sick and is begging for medicine/food/etc.

You have to care for it IMMEDIATELY- or it will just die again. I tried and tested it with a debugged V2 tama once and took these photos.

I was doing a little experiment trying to take really bad care of my V4 tamagotchis in an attempt to get universal characters. This particular character had had a skull on the screen 3 times that day (from empty happy, from empty hungry and also empty happy and hungry hearts), numerous toothaches from lots of snacks (perhaps 10) etc. I pushed it a little far, heard my tama make a strange beeping noise, and saw him lying on the ground. I pushed the reset button, then B when I saw the egg, then selected download. It actually took me back to 9AM - this happened at about 1PM. All happy and hungry hearts were full again without any care. It still had the skill points I had earned from the teacher game that day - but seemed to lose all memory of the near death episode (and perhaps the other bad care episodes too).

Yes, although my tamagotchi wasn't anywhere close to dying, this morning I reset and downloaded it, and the time went back to 7:00am - but a few minutes before, it was 10:00pm.

I was just talking to spudi about this - she says that whenever she has reset and downloaded her V4s - they have always gone back to 9AM. Do you think yours was 9AM rather than 7AM?

It looks like perhaps with the V4s they are different to other versions -and perhaps you go back to having full happy and hungry hearts (or perhaps what they were like first thing in the morning) without having to nurse them back to health.

download/reset button as in...
the a + c buttons or
the reset button at the back?

They mean the actual reset button on the back - you can't actually reset with A+C - you can only hatch a new egg if your Tamagotchi has died - this is different from resetting.

How do you reset and download your tama? :?:

Press the reset button on the back of your Tamagotchi.

A menu will appear on the screen. It will say:

Download

Reset

Select Download.