The Democarts, (both of them) and #19 are very hard to find. From talking
with other collectors, the democarts appear to be slightly more common.
Personally, I have a Channel F, Boxed Channel F II, and 23 of the 28 carts;
but I don't have #19, or either of the Democarts.
There was also a picture of a keyboard controller (K-1) on the box for
Channel F II. Perhaps a prototype exists for it.
As I recall the F8 was a microcontroller in the same vein as the 8048; but
that it multiplexed it's address and data lines; allowing for fewer
connectors on the cartridges. I think it also had 64 bytes of internal RAM;
organized as set of registers (sorta) which probably means that there was no
ram in the system.
I suspect the Channel F R&D effort was a rather small one; I had a chance to
learn about the R&D effort behind the Magnavox Odyssey^2, and discovered
that there was only a handful of people behind it doing the actual
development (one guy wrote half the game library) and that it had very poor
support from management at magnavox. All throughout the history of it, from
1978 to 1983, they were always told "this will be the last stuff you do for
the O^2, then we pull the plug" and each time they'll sell out the latest
run of carts/systems and be given a reprieve. management finally became
serious about it in 1983 just in time for the video game crash.
The Odyssey^2 had an Intel 8048 with a 512 byte BIOS, 128 bytes of RAM
(don't recall the chip) and the video (& sound) was driven by the Intel 8244
chip - the only application the chip was ever used in; (trivia - multiple
8244's could be hooked together with the output of one (slave/master mode)
being fed into the next one. Intel shows no reference to the chip or any
mention of it in their archives, but I have the story on it from the horse's
mouth (and the data sheets :) )
Somewhere, way way back in my archives, I have a copy of a post from someone
who claimed to work at Farichild way back when (and knew about the channel
F). I should try and dig it up someday to see if he could be tracked down.
-Matt Pritchard
Graphics Engine and Optimization Specialist
MS Age of Empires & Age of Empires ][
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Francois [SMTP:fauradon_at_pclink.com]
> Sent: Monday, October 12, 1998 9:11 PM
> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
> Subject: Re: Fairchild Channel F units
>
> >#19 is the hardest to find.
>
>
> How about the demo cart #2? Is that a har to find Item?
>
> Francois
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> Visit the desperately in need of update
> Sanctuary at: http://www.pclink.com/fauradon
Received on Tue Oct 13 1998 - 10:21:04 BST