the official Channel F thread!

[e5frog]

Seen it before, it's a boring but perhaps uncommon box, worth collecting.

[Machine]

Anyone interested?

Set of 2 decals and 2 buttons: $6.75 plus shipping

[Mikebloke]

Really gutted I didn't get to necro this topic in time, on Monday I started work on a new game, Ball, based on the Game and Watch series. Was due to finish it yesterday but had other stuff to do.

 

https://mikebloke.itch.io/game-no-watch-ball-channel-f

 

Gameplay is done, I just need to tidy up the graphics but essentially it is done. Hoping to finish it tomorrow. Check the page above for instructions on how to play and more details on what I need to finish.

 

Game and watch series is a nice one to work on as placement of objects can nicely go into a look up table rather than worrying about how it moves on the screen to player or other input. The screens also came with red green and blue overlays at times on the LCD panel which means it's a great way of adding to the Fairchild channel F. I'm likely to do a few more of these, open to requests or I might just go in release order.

 

Nintendo please don't cancel me.

[Mikebloke]

Check out https://mikebloke.itch.io/game-no-watch-ball-channel-f for the latest release.

 

I've done most of the intended changes, attract mode now works, 3 ball points work as intended (10 each catch compared to 2 ball 1 point).

 

I've tidied the arm graphics up.

 

This is something of an accomplishment for me, although it's taken me across 5 days instead of my usual 3 to get to the place I usually do with these ports it's the first time I haven't had to reference the F8 assembly manual.

 

I usually have to make constant references to the manual to work out how exactly some assembly opcodes work, whereas this time I've just gone for it and thankfully it has worked.

 

However the code is an absolute mess, I know for sure there is code duplication and I can probably knock out a few hundred lines of code (currently sits at 2037 lines) if I wanted. Branching is an absolute pain and optimising where procedures is could probably help avoid having to branch to a third label just to jmp back so often. I'm a programmer, a games developer, but not an efficient one!

 

Hope people have fun with this one, it's very playable I think. Let me know if there is any other games I should port over, game and watch or not.

[+fdr4prez]

3 hours ago, Mikebloke said:

Hope people have fun with this one, it's very playable I think. Let me know if there is any other games I should port over, game and watch or not.

Thanks.

 

I am not at all familiar with the Game and Watch series.  There's quite a few games in that series.  BITD these never tickled my fancy, so I never played any.

 

 

[Mikebloke]

9 minutes ago, fdr4prez said:

Thanks.

 

I am not at all familiar with the Game and Watch series.  There's quite a few games in that series.  BITD these never tickled my fancy, so I never played any.

 

 

I only ever had chef personally, which is from a technical gameplay perspective a variation of ball with an easier difficulty in the sense that the "balls" in terms of food items only ever went up and down which was easier to manage mentally with one potentially being "held in place" by a cat with a fork to upset your rhythm.

 

After the game and watch series sega did jump on it a bit with their own variation of games which felt like it had a higher pace, things like after burner, sonic the hedgehog and shinobi is the ones I had, but of course doesn't compare to a true hand held like a game boy or game gear. I would probably struggle to capture the pace of after burner on the channel F but might have a go one day!

 

I had a number of pinball games like this as well, and the Tetris style lots-of games-in-one was very common at the time too.

 

Game and watch gallery was a thing that ran from game boy to gba (with a ds version too on limited release) with a number of game and watch games converted over and most with a "modern" graphical variant with mario characters and sometimes new rules (fire for example had different characters that fell at different speeds). If quick and simple games on handheld is your thing, then it's worth checking those out.

[e5frog]

@MikeblokeGreat work!
I have thought about making "Fire Attack!" since it was my first handheld. 

 

 

Will you continue and finish it as well as you can or do you leave it as it currently is?

Edited February 24 by e5frog

[Ashevent]

On 2/23/2024 at 4:42 AM, Mikebloke said:

Check out https://mikebloke.itch.io/game-no-watch-ball-channel-f for the latest release.

 

I've done most of the intended changes, attract mode now works, 3 ball points work as intended (10 each catch compared to 2 ball 1 point).

 

I've tidied the arm graphics up.

 

This is something of an accomplishment for me, although it's taken me across 5 days instead of my usual 3 to get to the place I usually do with these ports it's the first time I haven't had to reference the F8 assembly manual.

 

I usually have to make constant references to the manual to work out how exactly some assembly opcodes work, whereas this time I've just gone for it and thankfully it has worked.

 

However the code is an absolute mess, I know for sure there is code duplication and I can probably knock out a few hundred lines of code (currently sits at 2037 lines) if I wanted. Branching is an absolute pain and optimising where procedures is could probably help avoid having to branch to a third label just to jmp back so often. I'm a programmer, a games developer, but not an efficient one!

 

Hope people have fun with this one, it's very playable I think. Let me know if there is any other games I should port over, game and watch or not.

what a great feat!

[Ashevent]

Congrats to whoever won the Ebay bid on the CIB Checkers cart. I had to bow out around $650, but I knew it was a total long shot to begin with. If the winner wasn't from this group,  then we need to collectively hunt hum/her down and retrieve it..lol. 

[e5frog]

It's a difficult one to get by, no wonder the price tag.

[Mikebloke]

On 3/14/2024 at 3:35 PM, Ashevent said:

what a great feat!

Thanks! E5frog has given me some ideas to expand on it, I'll look to do that before I start anything else new. Maybe 🙃.

2 hours ago, Ashevent said:

Congrats to whoever won the Ebay bid on the CIB Checkers cart. I had to bow out around $650, but I knew it was a total long shot to begin with. If the winner wasn't from this group,  then we need to collectively hunt hum/her down and retrieve it..lol. 

Oh man I would have potentially jumped on that price a few years ago. Hope the person who ended up with my collection is still enjoying it, it's the one game I didn't have (though I only had cart / cart + instructions for the US only games).

 

Still looking for a new console as it's more likely to happen than fixing mine with my capabilities. Shame there is no similar controllers available for pc. Might have to get into hardware after all and create an adapter.

[Mikebloke]

Hi all, managed to spend 3 hours on doing some updates to the Ball game, e5frog suggested some changes to graphics including the number display, feet and some colour ideas. I've done nearly all his suggested changes, and you can now play in either black and white or colour with the new features.

 

There is leg movement, and ball crashing graphics now included. I might still make some minor graphical changes, but it should be largely superficial and this should be the final major change (no gameplay changes in this one, just graphics).

 

https://mikebloke.itch.io/game-no-watch-ball-channel-f

[Ashevent]

59 minutes ago, Mikebloke said:

Hi all, managed to spend 3 hours on doing some updates to the Ball game, e5frog suggested some changes to graphics including the number display, feet and some colour ideas. I've done nearly all his suggested changes, and you can now play in either black and white or colour with the new features.

 

There is leg movement, and ball crashing graphics now included. I might still make some minor graphical changes, but it should be largely superficial and this should be the final major change (no gameplay changes in this one, just graphics).

 

https://mikebloke.itch.io/game-no-watch-ball-channel-f

Very cool great work!