Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
Tags

channel f port

A topic by RT-55J created Jun 26, 2018 Views: 423 Replies: 3
Viewing posts 1 to 4

I am working on making a port of the game to 1976's hottest home video game system, the Fairchild Channel F. The plan is for a fairly literal port based off the original BASIC code.

So far I have a working print(string) function... here's hoping I at least have something interactive by the end of the week.

For information on making Channel F homebrew, check out this wiki: http://channelf.se/veswiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

This is rad! I've never heard of the Channel F. Looking at game screens, I dig the color palette and especially the light-gray background and hot pink sprites/text that you're also using! It's kind of surprising there hasn't been Fairchild Wumpus before, but I'm glad it's being corrected four decades later!

If you get the "fairly literal port" done, any chance you might mess around with it a bit from there?

oh wow its cool that there's a homebrew scene for this in 2018! also i like the color combination

The 'homebrew scene' for the Channel F is quite small, all things considered. The 2600's scene feels like it's 50-100 times bigger, and even RCA's less successful (and inferior) contemporary system has more homebrew software, from the looks of it.

The system itself is quite the opposite of the 2600. That thing has a weird as heck video chip that you have to carefully coax data through with precisely timed/synchronized code. The Channel F has a dumb, write-only framebuffer with no video-program synchronization whatsoever. Atari games are limited by processing time during vblank (and all of the TIA's weird quirks). Channel F games in contrast are fill-rate limited.

Anyhow, I'm making steady progress on this project. Converting code line-by-line to assembly is occasionally tedious, but not too hard. I still don't have anything playable quite yet, and certainly won't by the jam's deadline, but I'll still try finishing it. My limiting factor here (besides starting so late) is my hectic personal life.

My plan after finishing this version is to make a properly console-ized version, much like how Atari's Adventure is an adaptation of the earlier Colossal Cave Adventure. (Still figuring out the details.)