Fairchild Channel F

mediamogul

Can you confirm that it's an actual ROM and boots normally. From what I've seen, the individual game file tends to be the system BIOS file renamed, which won't launch as a cartridge. If you have a working ROM of it, I'll try to dig it up myself.

edmaul69

It is not a bios file. The bios files are 1kb. This one is 2kb like most of the roms. It isnt just a modified txt file either as it has garble in it when viewed in a word program and it was modified on december 24, 1996. And i have played it hundreds of times

mediamogul

@edmaul69

The Channel F bios file I have is actually 2kb. However, based on my previous post, I got the idea to rename it from .bin to .chf. This act alone does just about as much as the lengthier method above, as it will fail to load the file as a cart and end up at the bios screen by default, allowing you to start 'Hockey & Tennis'. It's kind of a cheat, but to the end user, it will work all the same.

edmaul69

@mediamogul that is the correct file. It boots as a cart if you keep it named .bin and stick it in the roms folder. The bios files i have in the rom folder are:

sl31253.rom
sl31254.rom
sl90025.rom

edmaul69

@edmaul69 is your bios named [BIOS] Fairchild Channel F (USA) (SL90025).bin? I tested putting that in the game folder and it works.

edmaul69

@edmaul69 i even took my sl90025.rom and renamed it .bin and stuck it in the game folder and it booted the hockey and tennis.

mediamogul

@edmaul69 said in Fairchild Channel F:

i even took my sl90025.rom and renamed it .bin and stuck it in the game folder and it booted the hockey and tennis.

Yeah, I even had it load a .mpg file. It loads the bios as a fallback every time it doesn't find a usable cart. The only real requirement from a RetroPie point of view is that the file have the .chf extension so that it shows up in Emulation Station. For anyone who might download a set that didn't include the renamed bios, they could simply add a text file named Hockey & Tennis.chf and it would work all the same.

edmaul69

@mediamogul i dont have a single .chf file. All mine are .bin. I never used the .chf files as i couldnt get any of them to work. I wish i could because the full pacman rom is only a .chf.

Edit: i may have the completed one. It is the version with the high score saved in it

mediamogul

@edmaul69

It's weird how much mileage varies in these things. Mine will boot either .chf or .bin. I actually added .bin to the es_systems.cfg because I didn't like the idea of renaming the bios file and forgetting what it was down the road.

edmaul69

Deleted

mediamogul

@edmaul69

Do you have any video settings you recommend for MESS? The picture I'm getting is decent, but it seems to be blurring pretty heavily and the aspect ratio seems a bit wide.

edmaul69

@mediamogul are you setting the video setting inside of mess? I have to look and see what setting i set for channel f because it was really huge and blurry at first

mediamogul

@edmaul69

Yeah, I'm setting them inside of mess. I tried a few things, but none of the results were much of an improvement.

edmaul69

@mediamogul i cant tell you what setting i used inside of mess for channel f because i am now on a smaller tv and it reverted back to auto. So set video mode, set magnify to 3, set resize to mixed, color bgr16 to auto, set resize effect to no, and set rgb effect to scan2horz. Setting scan2horz give you good scanlines and it helps to have all settings set before video mode. Scan2horz also lets you see how good the video setting you set is because the scanlines will look bad on a bad video mode.

mediamogul

@edmaul69

Thanks! I'll try those out later today. Are you still testing out which systems work through advmess? Is so, what have you found so far? Sometime this coming week I might make an Astrocade theme addition for Carbon.

edmaul69

@mediamogul i would love a pixeled astrocade theme. 😊 So i know that atari 7800, astrocade and channel f work. Apple ii systems do not. I am going to be trying several more systems to see what will work. I probably wont try out systems that work good in a libretro core

mediamogul

@edmaul69 said in Fairchild Channel F:

I probably wont try out systems that work good in a libretro core

I don't blame you. Colecovision might be worth a try. As much as I love CoolCV, it's closed source and always a twist of fate away from being non-functional.

edmaul69

@mediamogul coleco does not work. It acts like there is no cart in the system. I

mediamogul

@edmaul69

Ah, oh well.

herb_fargus

When I did my initial tests a while ago with AdvMESS colecovision worked for me:

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/issues/210