Alpex Project RAVEN - The Fairchild Channel-F | Computer History

this episode is supported by monster joysticks calm level up your Raspberry Pi with our all-in-one arcade kit using genuine San where arcade parts and one click print calm for your photos on canvas acrylic gifts and more local craftsman and global delivery hello cave dwellers the Fairchild channel F made a brief appearance on the channel recently and you said you wanted to see more of it as Leslie Nielsen might say it's not fair and there are no children in it but it does deserve its place in the history of the development of video games consoles it does deserve to have a spotlight shown on it particularly as it was so often obscured by the shadow of competitor the atari 2600 or VCS so let's take a moment today to find out what makes this second-generation 1976 games console stand out how it came to be and if the F in channel F really does stand for fun [Music] our consult today goes by a number of names originally released in North America in August 1976 for 149 dollars 95 this was known as the video entertainment system or ves by Fairchild Semiconductor that makes it the first console to be released of the second generation the most prominent of that generation being the Atari video computer system which reached retailers over a year later following production problems in getting it to the market any sooner it was the VCS branding of the Atari console which prompted Fairchild to rename their console the channel F to differentiate the product from its rival the channel F was also licensed and sold in other markets including Japan in Europe here in the UK it was sold by admin grandstand who retailed it as the video entertainment computer and that's the example we've got here today grandstander name which would become well known in the UK for peddling handhelds tabletop games and low-cost edutainment computers the channel f appeared in two guises the system 1 and the later system to the grandstand VEC variant I have here is a rebranded Channel F system to the differences of which we'll come back to later but from a hardware perspective it's no more capable than the original system one runs the same programs and is essentially the same thing and a fine example of the system we have here - this is pure 70s in its design we've got wood grain we've got chunky satisfying buttons and we've got a font straight out of a 70s sci-fi movie [Music] on the front there's this front loading cartridge slot which looks and feels like you're slamming and Elvis 8-track into your t-bird or in the case of a spritz your Morris marina it's these big yellow cartridges which are part of the reason the system deserves to be remembered and preserved the first generation of games consoles was occupied by the likes of the Magnavox Odyssey Ataris home pong Coleco Telstar and others all of which had their games held natively within the hardware the discrete transistor based game logic was hardwired into these devices even in those which tried to disguise the fact like the Odyssey which had interchangeable game cards in reality these cards simply reroute the circuitry in the console and there were no games stored on the cards so they did nothing more than the switch on a pong console which you'd slide to change the game from tennis to squash the race to cash in on the video games market was on and it was spearheaded by the little-known ALP X computer Corporation a company whose endeavors in the electronic cash register market were hampered by competition from the likes of IBM and NCR unable to compete with rivals with such a huge bankroll they looked for a new market piecing together an appetite for more complex games with emergency pu technologies such as the intel 8008 in 1972 and the 88 in 1974 laurence Haskell and Wallace Kirchner set about creating out Lex's own console codenamed Raven or remote access video entertainment in Intel 8008 CPU based games machine but they created was a working prototype measuring roughly sixteen by sixteen by five inches it was stuffed full of circuit boards and had a keyboard for input with a selection of interchangeable game modules and in doing so they filed patent 402 six five five five let's take a look at the abstract and then we'll go into some more detail of what actually means keyboard controlled apparatus for producing video signals for standard television receivers includes a random access memory having a multiplicity of storage positions each of which corresponds to a pre-selected discrete portion of the TV raster data stored in the random access memory is sequentially read from memory in synchronism with the scanning of the television receiver so that a desired video signal is generated at each discrete position of the cathode ray beam data is read into the random access memory at pre-selected storage positions depending upon a particular image to be displayed the data writing process is under the control of a microprocessor which is programmed to cause the stored image data to be varied in accordance with the condition of the user controlled keyboard wow there's a lot going on in that paragraph but in essence our pecks had filed the process of drawing an image in memory and flipping it on to the display through the use of a CPU and a stored-program raster graphics which used stored images to rapidly display images on screen the patent also states in its detail the invention can be used to play more games than it is possible with known systems of this type and it does not require overlay screens to establish boundaries or other constraints for different games it's also more flexible in its capacity to accommodate individual skills and can be used to play games substantially more challenging than games available on known systems it goes on to say the intelligence of the system is provided by a microprocessor which operates in conjunction with a memory comprising a read-only memory or ROM so the patent also covers artificial intelligence achieved by the presence of a CPU and instructions stored on ROM this is starting to sound very familiar it then goes on to read an advantage of the invention is that the apparatus purchased can be used to play games other than those for which it was perfectly designed this can be done by the use of appropriate programs which have the instructions for new games stored in roms which can be added as modular plug-in units to the existing device thus as new games are developed the programs can be purchased by owners of the basic system to increase its capacity virtually without limits so their patent also covers modular plug-in roms or what we can commonly call video game cartridges raster graphics CPUs ai and removable ROM cards it's very much the blueprint for the second generation of games consoles the patent was awarded on May the 31st 1977 haven't been filed in 1975 our pecks had the blueprint and indeed the working prototype but they didn't have the finances to bring project Raven to market for that they called on their old point of sales connections namely Shawn Fogarty who was the rep of a semiconductor company called Fairchild and he'd supplied them with components in the past Fogerty got a demonstration of Raven and relayed his experience to Greg Ray's fetch odds vice-president of consumer products enter now Jerry Lawson an engineer at Fairchild who was sent to see Raven and assist in a feasibility report in the devices suitability and ultimately if Fairchild should buy it Lawson incidentally was also a member of the famous homebrew Computer Club frequented by the likes of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of them he said I was not impressed with them either one of them actually and he said he once interviewed Wozniak for a position at Fairchild but he didn't hire him Jerry assessed the Raven and the team concluded that if the input method which was currently a keyboard was simplified and the CPU changed to Fairchild own creation he offered good potential for the company they projected 5.5 million sales by 1978 and that's what the execs wanted to hear so with that Raven which had somehow picked up the new codename Stratos was purchased and Fairchild set about bringing the console to market that console would finally be named the Fairchild video entertainment system which made its debut at the Chicago Consumer Electronics Show in 1976 and it would finally be renamed the Fairchild channel F or channel fun [Music] it was then the first ever home games console to offer games as roms unplugging cartridges paired with the CPU and it wouldn't be the last not by around two more decades when the cd-rom format became the norm for consoles these then are the world's first home video game cartridges with roms on to make it to stores let's take a closer look at those cartridges and the system itself two cartridges are bundled with my channel F they're all numbered with 27 official releases you can hold out guests from the size of the game's library but the system wasn't exactly a roaring success but we'll come to that later of those 2721 were released by Fairchild and the remainder Weiser comm who will come on - surely the games retailed at $19 95 and some cards contained multiple games so were these the first cartridge based video games compilations I think they must be video cart one which was bundled with my system has on it tic-tac-toe shooting gallery doodle and Quattro doodle all on one cart in addition to the bundled cartridges two games were built right into the console and these are hockey and tennis so out of the box we have a pretty good selection of cartridges and boat in games certainly more than Nintendo 64 was American launch title selection of two cartridges okay that's not really a hard stat to beat at the time of launch two other companies were developing consoles RCA with the studio two also designed with removable cartridges an Atari who had employed a man named Doug Hardy an engineer who had helped design the cartridge mechanism on Fairchild zone system before leaving and being picked up by Atari Fairchild Semiconductor started out life as a division of Fairchild camera and instrument they were at the forefront of transistor and integrated circuit development and so were very well placed to produce their own CPU for the system Jerry Lawson replaced the prototype Intel CPU with the Fairchild f8 CBU it would later be used in the video brain computer system in 1977 and according to the CPU museum it was the world's leading processor in terms of sales in 1977 he now is the board from a channel f system one remember mine is the later system too so it looks a bit different I don't think the system one was ever officially available here in the UK the 8-bit CPU is clocked at one point seven nine megahertz on an NTSC system on my pal system that's two megahertz the system has 64 bytes of RAM and two kilobytes for the frame buffer not a great deal but enough to implement basic AI in games and to draw the screen in memory before flipping it onto the TV until this time all games on home consoles had been player versus player or player versus themselves hey I was now appearing in arcade games such as tato speed race and Ataris quack in 1974 but it had yet to reach the home now even if it was in the form of a basic decision tree used by the computer opponent in tic-tac-toe ai was plotting against owners in their very beige living rooms and I can tell you in the case of tic-tac-toe it's utterly relentless how about a nice game of chess on the graphics front the fair child could produce software sprites of one color from a palette of eight at a resolution of 128 by 64 with 102 by 58 pixel was visible on the screen in 1979 Fairchild Semiconductor were bought out by Schlumberger that same year the rights for the channel F would be sold to zircon international who repackaged the whole thing as the channel F system to an exercise in mostly cosmetic changes the joysticks were made to be removable and audio was fed through RF into the TV instead of using a speaker in the console the whole package was shrunk down and you can see how much more refined it is here inside my console but it was essentially the same console in the three years it been on the market just 21 cartridges had been released and six more would appear under zircons ownership [Music] let's pop the lid back on and see what it can do aside from the buttons on the console itself interacting with the console comes in the form of these joy things looking like something from the mind of HR Giger you grip the stick in one hand and the cap on top is manipulated in eight directions it can also be twisted like a paddle controller pushed down for a fire button and pulled up it's really quite a versatile controller a later iteration named the jet stick would add a trigger fire button to the front of the stick and the joystick proved to be so popular it was later released as the video command joystick for the Atari 2600 so we've got our joysticks we've got our fancy CPU powered console and we've got a stack of games kangi loaned to me by James and Colleen over a little retro the question is what should we play well I noticed someone else had been streaming the fair child recently and putting a lot of hours into exploring the library so I asked her what her experiences were and what we should try and here's what Aaron Aaron plays had to say hey guys I'm Erin from Erin plays and I wanted to share with you my top three choices for the Fairchild channel F so my first pick is video kart 21 bowling this one really surprised me I had no idea that I would ever find a bowling game this fun it took me a little bit to get a hang of the controls that's because the little knob on the controller you have to like twist and pull it in a certain way but once you get the hang of that you can totally aim the ball and knock down pins and it's really fun and I actually didn't want to stop playing so I totally recommend this one my second pick is video cart number 18 hangman I mean there's really not much to say it's the classic children's game hangman you know that you would draw on notebook paper in elementary school and they just did a really good job at making this into a video game it's another one that's great to play with to players and you'll find yourself actually playing it for a while like it's just a simple but fun game and my third pick would be slot machine video cart number two 22 basically I wanted to bring this up because I think the graphics on this are pretty impressive for the time and for the system you know it's just like a little slot machine where you see if you get you know three in a row or whatever it's fun to play for a few minutes it's just definitely worth checking out because I think they did a really good job with it and lastly I would like to recommend checking out the pong type game that comes built onto the system because it's really fun to play it with the Fairchild controllers and I just wanted to throw that last recommendation in there okay so those are my top three well I guess for game picks for the Fairchild thank you to wearing and there's a link to her channel in the description to this video so do please check her out so to get a good feel for the system I set about playing the games Aaron recommended with a live stream on Twitch and I have to stay the standout game for me was drag racing a simple race against each other or the clock which makes full use of the quite unique controller twisting to the right is the accelerator and whether it twisted you then use the stick to engage gears in an H shift pattern shifting gears before blowing the engine and trying not to stall it made for a very involved and enjoyable experience that I felt got the most out of this unique controller having recently covered the Commodore TV game pong system on the channel it gave me some great context in which to enjoy this system what we're seeing is not up to the standards of pit full Space Invaders or pole position on the Atari 2600 but you do get the sense that a whole world of possibilities has opened up compared to the variations of baton bull offered to us on those pong consoles and here's another interesting aside about the channel F games it's a common misconception that Warren Robinett sad venture from 1979 on the Atari 2600 is the first cartridge with an Easter egg in it well the channel F has some Easter eggs of its own and one in particular interest is from whisper in 1978 by following a very specific set of commands it has this Easter eggs we're ruled away in it earlier still is the channel left demo cart I'm struggling to find an exact date on this but it was released in 1977 and some sources point to September of that year holding down buttons one three and four at the end of the demo shows the programmers name on the screen and that's two years earlier than adventure could this be the first Easter egg on a games console cartridge there are earlier examples in arcade cabinets such as 1977 starship one by Ron Milner I'm not aware of any earlier examples on a home cartridge so why did the Fairchild channel F fail let's start with something positive it was the best-selling the second generation games console of 1976 okay it may have been the only one but you still get your 25 meter swimming badge if you're the only one in the pool right the channel F sold 250,000 units before production ceased in 1983 in a league table of second generation consoles well it's truly a minnow especially in contrast to the 30 million sales of the Atari 2600 from a technical standpoint it was largely outgunned by the Atari 2600 which had twice the RAM and a larger color palette and Atari had the backing of Warner to bankroll the launch and Mark in the system and so it can be concluded that the Fairchild channel F was indeed a commercial failure its library of games is limited and its rivals gave gamers everything it had to offer and a lot more besides but what can never be taken away from this system is its place as the very first the first console with ROM based cartridges and a CPU the first offer AI in a home games console the first to break out of the pong mode and to tease gamers with the possibilities of a limitless games library but like my 25 meter swimming badge even if I like the channel F round when competition entered the pool you still can't take that badge away from me and you can't take away from the channel F that it was there first it proved that it was possible and technically it did it quite well with the resources they had available it just didn't quite manage to capture the public's imagination in the same way that Atari did as always thank you for watching I hope you enjoyed our look at the Fairchild channel F today and take care [Music] if you enjoy my content and would like to toss a coin into the hat to support the cave then check out patreon.com/crashcourse you can see on the screen now thank you for your support [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 94,988

Keywords: fairchild, retro, nostalgia, gaming, games console, worlds first, first, atari, sega, nintendo, retro man cave, erin plays

Id: z95vBZ-uMAo

Length: 20min 11sec (1211 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 07 2019