Fairchild Channel F Game Console Repair

A fellow KZbinr asked if I could repair some rare game items. The first is the Fairchild Channel F, the first game console to use cartridges from 1976. I also included a review of the Wendy's Son of Baconator because I felt like it.
Their channel: / @tesseractunfolded

[@BenHeckHacks]

RE: Game prices. Yes, carts and ROMs jacked the price. SNES games needed more stuff on cart because the CPU was a dog. But even if we jump to the disc era (1995-present) games are still way below inflation. RE: www.usinflationcalculator.com/ 1995-2005 $50 becomes $64 so $60 was quite fair. If we take 1995 $50 to 2020 it's $84, so a $70 price (next gen only, XB1/PS4 still $60) is also fair. GAMES ARE CHEAP!

[@wyldelf2685]

Let me tell you Ben ,what burns my berries ,I remember some public legal advert few years back where game companies had inflated the value unjustly of certain chips in PlayStation ,Dreamcast ,and N64 so they could grossly overcharge the public , , ,some sort of class action thing in a tv commercial , , , ,$55 bucks in 1994 for Mortal Kombat-2 on SNES, game companies excuse for the high price were the cost of the memory chips in side ,but end of that year "Next-gen consoles came out , and a no memory chip CD-Rom title cost , , , you guessed it $55 or more ,, ,Greedy game companies nothing more ,cut n dry , , , , to day it's worse because now companies are greedy and lazy, , , they sell you an incomplete game on a disc at full sore ass price and then have the balls to send you a downloadable complete patch(rest of the game) for an additional transaction price $$ nowadays they get you coming and going 🥒🍑🌭 and you're completely fine with that Ben Heck ???? of all things man we look up to you 😔😞😞 also remember, , , , handheld GameCube in Bud the Cat Orange , , , ,

[@primus711]

Also way more buyers so they should be cheaper

[@vincediesil]

Agreed, I remember in the Genesis days some cartridges were selling for $89-109 at Toys R Us. I assume due to the price of ROM chips.

[@HylianOverlord]

If you actually understood the issue you would know that the problem people have with DLC and Microtransactions is that they hide the true cost of the game. Some games are over 200USD if you include all the DLC. Mictransactions are also very amoral and target people with gambling issues.

[@primus711]

Also the snes cpu being slower is also a misconception as 6502 or in snes case the 16bit variant can do way more ipc etc etc

[@reyrodrigues]

I come for the Gen-Xer singing, I stay for the Wendy's review.

[@theglurgle]

Really sounds like a boomer more and more lately

[@ferndog1461]

Please Ben, please stay on line. Your skillz & positivity is how the young folks may have a chance in today's workplace.

[@davidsavitt4954]

I had one of these as a kid. Dad bought all the systems when they came out. We had pong then video pinball/breakout from Atari, which predated the 2600, Magnavox, Coleco and so on. What I remember most about the Fairchild were the unique controllers and how fragile they were. The games were all numbered too.

[@autobotjazz1972]

Honestly in what inputs they were capable of the Fairchild F controllers were ahead of their time.

[@evensgrey]

Must have cost a fortune to get 8 degrees of freedom, too.

[@TesseractUnfolded]

So cool watching the process happen. Thanks again for fixing (and upgrading) my Fairchild!

[@BenHeckHacks]

Now let's hope I can fix the other one!

[@willierants5880]

On the inflation index it is important to note that it is not indicative to household incomes which lag far behind the inflation index. In some ways American's make less than they did in 1976.

[@mb987987]

I know I feel like it now!

[@Even-Steven]

Always a good day with Ben Heck's Classic Electronics Repair and Fast Food Review

[@DoRC]

Va is basically watts not amps. So 16 VA would be around 16 watts or 1.3a at 12v

[@BenHeckHacks]

Ah! Good to know.

[@Okurkaarrgghh]

VA is not 'basically' watts. It's Watts divided by the Power Factor.

[@Tahngarthor]

I would definitely rather pay a higher price upfront than have microtransaction loot prizeboxes. Also "special" and "ultimate" editions that cost more are very common today.

[@Jonny5a]

Whilst I often think of the inflation thing too there are two main reasons why games were expensive to make back then - cost of manufacture of the cartridge and ease of programming 1. Carts were expensive to make, there was more variation in game prices (not every game was $60) and often this was down to how much storage the ROM chip had. Nowadays burning 100,000 Blu rays is pretty cheap and digital distribution even more so 2. Whilst games are more complex now they are easier to make due to having enough compute power to brute force most issues you may come across, not having to write in assembly and any stock console being able to be turned into a Dev kit (may be out of date on this one, pretty sure Xbox still allows this). you don't need to go to sega and plead for specialist equipment anymore

[@SeanBZA]

Also back then you wrote the code, hopefully used a very expensive EPROM and development adaptor, to check it actually ran, with a 2 hour wait if you found the bug straight off. Then you took that code, printed it out on punched tape in Intel Hex format, and sent it off, along with a cheque for around $20k, and waited 6 weeks for your first run of 1000 mask ROM devices, which had both a different speed and a different pinout to your original EPROM, plugged it in and checked. Made a mistake you now had 999 dud devices, and another 6 week wait. There was a massive revolution when the first non erasable EPROM devices came out in a plastic package, even if they were triple the price of the mask ROM, they were selling like crazy, because you could use the same device in development, and knew it would work the same in production. Plus of course you also had to make a game fit in 2k, 4k, 8k or 16k of memory, and not a byte more, and also run on a system that was severely constrained in speed and resources. The more ROM you needed the higher the cost, as you needed more chips in the cartridge, and there was both limited room and limited address decode capability.

[@Charlesb88]

The FCC was really anal about RF emissions on home computers and game consoles back in the late 70’s and early 80’s and forced certain home computer manufacturers to modify their designs after they had been released to market. The Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 was one such machine. In some cases the need to include heavy duty RF shielding led to some compromises to redesign early microcomputers and game consoles to accommodate this requirement. Whether this was really necessary and beneficial to consumers and others is question that’s been debated. At some point in the 80’s i believe they relaxed this RF shielding requirement somewhat. Some interesting facts about the Fairchild Channel F is that it was the first console to use ROM cartridges rather then just running only built-in games like the Pong clones and other limited built-in game consoles. Now you mentioned the high cost of memory back then. The Channel F got around the high cost of memory at the time by only including 64 bytes RAM and a 2 KB video buffer which severely limited the graphics and gameplay complexity of games for the System. Few games for it are considered even decent, especially compared with the Atari VCS/2600 system, which itself has limited graphics and gameplay vs later systems (just not as limited as the Channel F. Most of the original 27 games for the Channel F released for the were educational and intellectual games vs the more action oriented Atari VCS/2600 games. This is partly why it didn’t succeed, especially once the Atari hit the stores in 1978. It would be interesting to see what a modern home-brew programmer might be able to due with the Channel F hardware but I suspect that it really was just to limited to be able to make a truly great game for it outside some simple games like Pong clones, video poker, or video bowling. Deposited its limitations and failure in the market, it remains an important part of the history of video game consoles, much like the ever more limited Magnavox Odyssey 1, the first game console to hit the market back in 1972. One good thing about the Fairchild though was it’s controllers which got good reviews and I believe Fairchild even released a version of them for the Atari 2600 you could buy as a third-party accessory at one point.

[@Lantertronics]

The Fairchild Channel F is such an interesting unit. Like the Apple 2, it doesn't have any sort of dedicated video chip (like the Atari 2600 or the Commodore VIC-20); it's all discrete logic. And as you noted, having an actual frame buffer was pretty rare back then. The only other console I can think of that had a frame buffer is the Bally Astrocade (itself an extremely interesting machine).

[@BenHeckHacks]

I wonder why the draw speed was so slow? Maybe the CPU only has access during the vertical blank?

[@Lantertronics]

@@BenHeckHacks Yeah, I wonder if the readout circuitry just takes over to keep the design simple.

[@Lantertronics]

@@BenHeckHacks Let's see, so D7-D10 is the video RAM. D5 is a 74195 shift register. F6, F8, F9, and F10 are 7439 4-bit counters that are hooked to a "SYNC ADDR BUS" that's connected to the RAM through some 74153 dual 1-4 multiplexers. Ah, and the multiplexers select between the SYNC ADDR BUS and the HORZ I/O BUS and the VERT I/O BUS... whatever those are. Ah, looking at the other schematic with the CPU, those I/O BUS are hooked to "port" pins on the CPU, so they're not part of the regular data address bus that connects to the cartridge ROM. So with the counters it looks like there is hardware that is spitting out the bits to the screen, so that part isn't in all handled in software like the Sinclair ZX80. But it looks like the video memory might be a bit of a pain for the CPU to get to. Just guessing...

[@big0bad0brad]

@@Lantertronics In that case it may be that the CPU can only access VRAM during VBLANK and maybe HBLANK but HBLANK is so short it might not have much time to do stuff during that.

[@Lantertronics]

@@big0bad0brad Makes sense to me.

[@jasondebovis6427]

"Let's get this out on a tray... Nice" Steve1989 is great!

[@mullinsjm1]

Ben. I love your channel. Videos like this is the reason I keep coming back. Just makes this Gen Xer feel good.

[@bobweiram6321]

Gerald Lawson, the creator of the F1 was a brilliant and creative engineer. He was way ahead of his time. He invented a way of allowing callers to play a video on live television by using the phone's dial tone.

[@jrko0]

We look away for a second and now it's a wendys review

[@richfiles]

I had one of these as a kid, but I stupidly took it apart and never reassembled it. Eventually, parts were cannibalized or tossed, and it is no more... Except for a controller. I have a single Fairchild Channel F controller, and I am using it as my Translational Hand Control (THC) for an Apollo inspired instrument panel for playing Kerbal Space Program. Look up the Apollo Translational Hand Control, or the space shuttle's version of the THC, and you'll find it shares an incredible degree of similarity to a panel mounted Fairchild Channel F controller!

[@FluffyTheGryphon]

I've got one of these. Such a nice little piece of history! Also, love you pointing out video game prices over the years. I try telling people that prices are cheaper than they have EVER been and people just don't listen!

[@guerillagrueplays6301]

True, but Ben simply laughing off economy of scale IS a problem, and a very relevant argument. If prices simply grew in tandem with inflation, then video games are hardly the only things that should be *increasing* in cost rather than decreasing given the increasing cost of production as well. Prices don't, because generally a popular product will shift enough units to offset a lower profit margin per unit. There are a lot of reasons that microtransactions are problematic even beyond simply the hidden costs involved. There's also the ways that many of them prey on users with addictive personality disorders, or companies cut out content specifically to MAKE it such transactions, etc. It's a multifaceted argument that really can't be adequately covered in a two-line KZbin comment, or a snarky joke in a vid. All that said... happy to see a Fairchild on the channel! It's a console i've never gotten to see a whole lot of coverage on, and would love more information about.

[@johnsimon8457]

Every history about consoles pre 2600 I come across is “fcc emissions forced us to delay by 6 months and jack up the price so we could figure out the shielding”

[@agenericaccount3935]

11/10 Bud content. 12/10 Zucc impression.

[@Lantertronics]

Actually come to think of it, KZbin sometimes deletes comments with links, so I'll paste the appropriate info here for posterity (this is from a page called "Accessing RAM" from the VES Wiki: "To write data to video ram you have to load the x coordinate to port 4, y coordinate to port 5 and color to port 1 and then execute the transfer by writing to port 0. For compatibility with the first generation of Fairchild Video Entertainment System, especially the 2MHz PAL model, there needs to be a delay after sending the data through before the next pixel is loaded and sent. MESS will work fine without the delay but it's important for a real console or you'll get holes or gaps in what is drawn."

[@RodBeauvex]

KZbin has gotten very pissy about comments lately, even ones that don't have links.

[@Brad-D]

Your MRE review of Wendy’s lunch had me laughing out loud 🤣

[@ferndog1461]

Thank you for giving our neighborhood buddy's Fairchild, whose dad would buy most of the video games, toys a repair. Awesome. Legend has it that Popeyes still cooks their fries in beef Tallow. Just like we enjoyed them in 70's- 80's. Try them!

[@samurphy]

"Were youtubers infants in the 90s" no, ben, they weren't born until 10 years later.

[@paulstubbs7678]

They are not insulated pass through's, but feed through caps - the best way to feed signals into a shielded box.

[@eiv-gaming]

Bonus food review. Love it.

[@devikwolf]

Bud sounds exactly like my orange monster, with those little chirpy purrs.

[@prophetofash]

the burger teardown midway through is awesome

[@3DSage]

It's really fascinating to see this!

[@CarnorJast1138]

This was my first gaming console! In fact, it was my first time seeing "video games" and I never looked back! Cool console!

[@keithbk]

It's an interesting unit, and having grown up in that era, I'm surprised I never saw one as a kid. A friend had an Odyssey 2 (never saw an original Odyssey, but I understand those required TV overlays). I remember lots of people having the stand-alone Pong/clones as a kid.

[@megalinkv2]

You're the best Ben Heck!! Watching your videos is like hanging out with the cool Uncle I never had.

[@salty6pence672]

The color control WOZ gave away for free to the homebrew club. And that screwdriver takes me back to my childhood, I used that thing to take everything apart before I learned to put it back together.

[@mikerintzler518]

I picked one of these up at a neighbor's garage sale for $5 sometime in the late 80's. Even 10 years old, it was still innovative with those controllers. Unfortunately, my parents threw it out sometime after I went to college.

[@arcadesunday4592]

Hey, nice repair! Also like the automatic Bud feeder!

[@IanSlothieRolfe]

I remember back in the 90's I used to go to Wendy's here in the UK, and it was one of my favorite burger places. Unfortunately they pulled out of the UK in 2000 so the only big chains in the UK were McDonalds and Burger King for many years, and these were only a shadow of the US chains in terms of the variety of meals on offer. The situation has improved, I believe Wendy's has re-opened in Reading UK with an eye on expanding back into the UK, and a number of other burger chains both home grown and international are starting to get a foothold, so maybe it will start to get easier to get a decent burger!

[@LiquidPortalDigital]

$19.99 in 1976 is $98.77 in today's money. So a $60 game today would have cost $12.14 in 1976. So in a very very general sense games have gotten cheaper when accounting for inflation.

[@wolvenar]

In game sales make them FAR and away more expensive. So they are ok for cosmetic stuff, but pay to win, not so much.

[@LiquidPortalDigital]

@@wolvenar that's why I said in a very very general sense. They're making far more now than they did back then for a variety of reasons. But the base price of the game is still fairly cheap.

[@davidbunt]

I just consumed the entirety of the Ben Heck Show and Ben Heck Hacks. I think that legally makes us friends now.

[@BenHeckHacks]

Really? Seems more likely you'd be sick of me!

[@GORF_EMPIRE]

@@BenHeckHacks That's only people who don't get you Ben.... as in lack any sense of humor.

[@hene193]

Bud cameo is awesome. I love the small chaos in these videos.

[@John_Ridley]

Holy moley that TMNT voice is on target. He could legit do voice work on that show!

[@Hiraghm]

Odd how inflation only applies to video game cartridges, but not to abominations such as the minimum wage, or the price of hamburgers... A wendy's meal costs more today, not because of inflation (particularly the huge spike it just took) but because wendy's had to pay their poor downtrodden burger-flippers more.

[@BenHeckHacks]

Oh I've noticed. Local Wendy's (which is dangerously close to my house :) average meal shot from 7-something to low 9s just since summer. And all the listed prices are "small", kind of like a game you want more the real price is higher. I'm actually shocked this Wendy's is still decent, the sign says "starting at 13.50" which is really low for Madison.

[@donpalmera]

Not sure about the US but in the UK from my experience rich kids had consoles because games were expensive. For the poor kids a single cart game was a christmas and birthday for a year. A lot of us had Amigas, an external floppy drive, an old cover disk with the label partially ripped of and XCOPY written in the exposed white part of the label. Oh and if you don't want to pay full price wait a year and get it cheap on a steam sale. You don't have to play it on release day. You won't die.

[@BenHeckHacks]

Yeah I see pricing for your tape games and think it's really cheap!

[@makingthings277]

Geocities!? I mistook you for a Angelfire guy! 😎 And that MRE-Steve setup was perfect!

[@allluckyseven]

First check for bus activity. Then check for Bud activity.

[@darthv72]

The cutaway to disassemble the son of baconator is the best. Although you only went one layer in. You should have gone further to measure the cheese displacement between patties.

[@Maverick7r]

That's a really cool system... I could see owning one of those if I could find one. Never heard of it before now, great video and project!!

[@The_Real_DCT]

Not many people really have, it came out and died pretty quickly once Atari launched the original VCS the next year and Mattel launching the intellivision the year after that. At least it did better than the pathetically outdated RCA studio 2 which launched around the same time and lasted less than 6 months on the market

[@suterb]

Wendy's bacon is cooked in an oven, not microwaved. They changed it about 10 years ago. It's a lot better than it used to be.

[@BenHeckHacks]

Good to know! Biggest issue with most fast food these days is it appears to sit around a long while... And when labor/food costs go up it sits even longer.

[@me0262]

@@BenHeckHacks It's one of their taglines. Fresh never frozen, square so no corners are cut.

[@roskelld]

Street Fighter 2 Turbo on the SNES was £60 at launch in 1993, that's £130 in today's pennies or $170 in dollarydoos

[@BenHeckHacks]

Large characters, lots of moves, meant a large mask ROM was needed. SNES carts needed more add on chips than the Genesis did (because SNES CPU = a dog) and that caused higher prices too.

[@urdnal]

Man I remember convincing my mom in 1989 that yes, Phantasy Star was worth the $100 Canadian for my birthday.

[@urdnal]

Wow I just checked and that’s almost exactly twice as much today, $199.86

[@TheRealSinjinsmyth]

$90 for Mario 64 here lol.

[@mkeolver]

It looks like an oversized 8 track player, I love it.

[@TesseractUnfolded]

Even the cartridges are about the right form factor for an 8-Track... Despite the insides being more sparse than an NES cart!

[@mkeolver]

@@TesseractUnfolded Atari VCS carts were mostly empty too, so much wasted plastic. lol

[@TesseractUnfolded]

@@mkeolver Fairchild carts are even more insane. There's not an IC-style chip inside, it's a tiny bare silicon chip on a PCB covered by a small plastic cap about the size of a DualShock Controller's face button with traces going right out to the edge connector. I'll open one up for my video once I retrieve my Fairchild from Ben. It's kind of insane!

[@mkeolver]

@@TesseractUnfolded sweet, subscribed. 👍🏻

[@TesseractUnfolded]

@@mkeolver Thanks!

[@Hiraghm]

The sad part is, the 6 month single-person game is usually better. And many of those $19.99 games sold back in the day were by one or a handful of guys in six months... or less.

[@BenHeckHacks]

Imagine programming Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 in 6 months and being paid ONE MILLION DOLLARS in 1982 money. That really happened!

[@mullinsjm1]

@@BenHeckHacks I absolutely loved my pac man port on my 2600 back in 1984. It stayed in a special part of my conscious for years. One day I decided to look it up on KZbin. MY LANDS! I definitely never knew how bad it was...

[@yadabub]

@@mullinsjm1 Dong, dong, dong, dong. We loved it too. But we didn't do much comparing to the arcade version. In the arcade you had to lighten your pockets to play. At home you just had to fight for TV time.

[@Hiraghm]

@@BenHeckHacks In 82 I bought my first computer, a Vic-20 for which I wrote a pac-man clone... in basic... commodore basic... and I didn't get a million dollars either. Life's not fair.

[@fanatic26]

Ahh yes, Fairchild. That name brings back a lot of memories. One of their semiconductor plants in San Jose poisoned my entire neighborhood with its leaking underground waste tanks. There a chance the chips in this video were made there. That superfund site, no joke, has a McDonalds and a grocery store sitting right where the underground tanks used to be

[@evensgrey]

That Superfund site was how I learned one of my chemistry professors in university had lied to us about something kind of important. He claimed phenol was quite harmless, comparing it to maple syrup without being sticky.

[@juanee2]

Could you drop a pin to the exact location?

[@Waifu4Life]

He lives!

[@QsTechService1]

Looks like Bud the Kitty cat is busy taking D dvd cases off the shelf haha lol

[@chadwicknofx]

21:45 Thanks Ben, now I have the Millennial Fair theme stuck in my head 😀

[@BenHeckHacks]

Damn. Nice catch. Well done.

[@chadwicknofx]

@@BenHeckHacksgreetings from River Falls, Wi. Anyway, one of the best video game soundtracks ever. Go listen to the Megaman 2 soundtrack. You're welcome 🤣

[@-INFERNUS-]

The first video game console to use cartridges, and the first console to use a microprocessor. 😁

[@SK83RJOSH]

As a game developer, the soapbox rant was appreciated. My salary may suck compared to my rockstar predecessors, but at least some care to point out the disparity.

[@BenHeckHacks]

You're welcome! I was mowing lawns to buy games with my own money before most of these YouBoobers were even born. I know first hand how slowly prices has risen.

[@LumenateTV]

At this pooint Bud probably thinks of you more as an unwanted roommate the auto feeder now controls the food supply.

[@iamsleepyhollow]

The Wendy's bacon is fresh bacon that is baked in the oven, then kept in a warmer tray until another batch is needed. At least, that was how we did it when I worked there ~7 years ago 😂

[@SeanBZA]

2k of RAM because they needed a stack and some working memory, so likely that is all mapped into the lower 1k of RAM, leaving the other 1k for the bitmapped screen. The F8 is all 3 40 pin chips, and yes probably spent almost all of the execute time generating the screen, only having time in the blanking and retrace intervals to do the actual game. Internal 1k of ROM, so those game cartridges are likely mapped in as needed, on the CPU detecting either a set of magic bytes or an actual switch on power up. You can do a lot with only 2k of memory, remember the Apollo computers were able to fly to the moon on less than that, and at a twentieth of the clock speed as well, though they did have the advantage that they would be guaranteed no bit rot in the ROM.

[@BenHeckHacks]

128x64 = 8192 pixels / 8 pixels per byte = 1024 BUT it has multiple colors so 2 bits per pixel = 2048K. The work RAM was probably on the CPU.

[@SeanBZA]

@@BenHeckHacks A whole 64 bytes yes, on the CPU trio, but I doubt all the RAM was used, likely only 16 colours, so allowing you to only use 1k of that precious RAM. But then, you also had around the same time single chip micros come out with a half dozen registers and 16 bytes of RAM, and they actually proved very useful. Had a washing machine that used one, with it's whole 16 bytes working to hold all the state and the 1k of mask ROM. The manufacturer, AEG, tried to disguise what processor they used by ordering them with the leadframe bent the other way, so the pinout was reversed, but there were not exactly many single chip processors with the on chip oscillator on board using those particular 2 pins, and the layout of the IO was also a mirror match for that Intel processor. A whole 8 bits, and 3 ports.

[@neuro_davinci]

I love how ben even needs to perfect the feeding algorithm of his cat.

[@JenGM24]

Nice video ben, always love your content.

[@Dwedit]

A perfect Jim Sterling impression at 1:40.

[@absalomdraconis]

"Were you an infant in 1990?" I honestly think that perhaps half of them weren't born until the mid 90s, so even worse.

[@melcor88]

Videogames sell way more than they did in the 70s. With a cartdrige you were also paying for they materials and manufacturing of said cartdrige when today, in most cases, you are only paying for the software. Making games today is cheaper and easier than it was before due to how widespread computers are today, the exponential increase in computer power, and standardization of programing tools and coding languages. Also, "AAA" developers (the ones that sell games at 60 or more) were already raking millions, even billions, in profits every year without microtransactions, they dont need the money except to satisfy their greed. And I havent even mentioned the negative impact microtransactions have on game design or the fact that, by inflation, wages have actually decrased. Theres no valid, economic, justification for microtransactions in paid games. The inflation argument has been refuted plenty of times in the past. Great video, as always.

[@greenaum]

Microtransactions are for shit, simple as that. They're not usually "micro" either. It's the same drive, among business "experts" that sprung up a few years ago, that's leading to Microsoft leasing out Office and Windows rather than flat selling you it. So that way the money keeps coming in even after you've bought the product, you pay just to USE it. To use the thing you bought. It's like having a spade with a coin slot on it, or a screwdriver that needs to swipe a debit card before it will turn. Actually in Philip K Dick's "Ubik" (which is a _dys_topia), the protagonist can't leave his house one morning until he pays the door for it's service. All his appliances are the same. He argues the terms of his contract, but the door is stubborn, til Joe threatens to get the screwdriver out! As ever, it pays to be an engineer! Or at least know how things work. Games worked fine the day before this micro bullshit. None of the games I own have it (there's a reason for that), and they work very well, lots of fun. Meanwhile the company stays in business by creating the next game. Just like a baker has to sell new bread every day rather than lease your colon and it's right to digest. Every business would love to be paid for doing nothing. So would I. So would anybody. It's just a shit deal on the customer. Still if people are gonna be stupid like that, let them, I'll just stick to playing stuff without it, and if the day comes, I'll just stick with the games I already have. If that fails, I'll plant a garden or something. Catch up on my wanking. Lots of things in life remain free.

[@brazilian_oak]

1:40 I'm 25. I never had a Channel F or a 2600. I never lived in that time period to see a game cost the equivalent of US$ 100. And yet I kinda agree with Ben. The world is weird.

[@SK83RJOSH]

He's totally right honestly, like if games kept up with inflation and people were willing to pay more for entertainment I'd be a much happier fella. Game studios bleed us dry and keep the diminishing profits for themselves. Wishful thinking, but I'd love to get paid as much as almost every other kind of programmer instead of make as much as a McDonald's manager because I wanted to follow my passion. Big sad.

[@olik136]

from what I remember Nintendo 64 games were up to 119 DM in Germany in the 90s- that would be a bit over $100 today

[@BenHeckHacks]

ROM size

[@adventureoflinkmk2]

@@BenHeckHacks yessir you are correct. I distinctively remember Super Mario RPG costing $80 in like 1996

[@konradrueb1713]

Thanks for another great video Ben and bud.

[@wesmadebuilds681]

There is a podcast about how the fries were formulated to last on the ride home. It came out right before the pandemic and Wendy’s jumped on it. The lady got the idea watching food delivery guys on mopeds in Asia.

[@killcar5nbike2]

Back in the days when there was very little electrical noise and everyone could still listen to AM broadcast radio. The FCC would have a fit of you took todays house full of devices back in time.

[@e4rth_beats551]

Bud cameo was the best

[@benjaminaburns]

some good bud this video

[@sideburn]

And the inventor of the channel F never got any credit 😢

[@TesseractUnfolded]

RIP Jerry Lawson

[@GORF_EMPIRE]

Most Big names back then did not credit their engineers or programmers.... hence why Activision and Imagic came about.

[@jamielee8991]

I remember when NES games were $40 to $60

[@TesseractUnfolded]

My dad paid $80 for Sonic and Knuckles when it was new. Which was basically the second half of a full game. XD

[@mkeolver]

iirc some of the RPG games for the NES were $70+ as well.

[@allluckyseven]

Yes, and we would rent those.

[@Blitterbug]

"I'll have to run some more tests..." Oh dear god... Run, Bud!

[@charlesfoster1119]

I now know what size filter your furnace takes! It's a very specific kind of doxxing.

[@Blownproductions]

There he is!!!

[@Netbug]

I have a TRV33 that I've dug out for some firewire goodness more than once.

[@racgrac28]

I was in high school and I bought one just to take it apart to see what chips it had. back then, I made a pong game that was published in the Radio-Electronics Magazine, I etched the circuit board using a film negative. the whole circuit used cd4000 series chips that I got from Jameco Electronics.

[@AgentOrange96]

10:40 Of course there's no switch to change what channel it goes to. It's always the same channel: Channel F! Also, the story behind the Channel F is really fascinating. As much as I love the VCS, it's sad that the Channel F got so eclipsed by it.

[@The_Real_DCT]

Sadly if it wasn't the VCS that did the Channel F in it would have been the intellivision by 1979.

[@Torontodude20000]

Worked at Wendys as a teenager. our store grilled the bacon on the flat grill in the mornings and it basically sat in a hot pan till we ran out and then new ones are made. After a couple of hours the bacon gets really crispy and hard. Still they insisted on using them.

[@evensgrey]

The Fairchild Channel F wasn't the first home console that used cartridges. The first home console that used cartridges was the Magnavox Odyssey. The Fairchild Channel F was the first home console that used a microprocessor. (The Odyssey was purely analog. The cartridges were basically packages of jumpers that connected the circuit elements in the console together to generate the desired image elements and control responses. The circuits were made out of a total of 40 diodes and 40 transistors.) Interestingly, the Fairchild Channel F came out at about the same time as the Apple I computer. Steve Wozniak was able to program a version of Breakout in the BASIC he wrote for the Apple I in about half an hour, while doing it in hardware was normally expected to take a skilled engineer about 6 months. (The Woz did it in a weekend, but that's him. Atari decided not to produce his design because none of their engineers could understand how it worked. They went with a design that cost twice as much to make but engineers with less sheer skill than Steve Wozniak could understand.) The designers at Fairchild had independently had the same fundamental idea about the future of video games. And, of course, they were right: Very shortly afterwards, all video games were microprocessor based. There were still a lot of custom boards for quite a while until it became feasible to build relatively generic arcade machines, as sound and graphics chips got to the point where they exceeded the requirements for most games. (The old game Paperboy even had two microprocessors, a 6502 that ran the sound and a J11 that ran everything else. Most people have probably never heard of the J11. It was a single-chip implementation of the processor for a PDP-11, originally a minicomputer designed in the 1960's, built out of discrete components and using magnetic core memory. By 1982, the processor was able to be put in a single chip.) Of course, the improvements in sound and graphics for generic use ultimately killed arcade machines off by making games on home computers and consoles look and sound as good as anything you could get in the arcade, and ultimately be cheaper than coin-op games as well.

[@marsilies]

Maybe it could be phrased that the Channel F is the first to use ROM cartridges. Also, Steve Wozniak designed Breakout in hardware in 1975. The Apple I wasn't released until 1976. Woz wrote the BASIC program Brick Out, or Little Brickout, for the Apple II, so sometime between 1976 and 1979, when it was officially released in AppleBASIC. Also, the issue with Woz's design wasn't that the Atari engineers didn't understand it, but they couldn't mass produce it using their existing manufacturing processes.

[@Cosper79]

I love the lunch intermission. Get a console fixed and a food review!

[@KJohansson]

Ah.. Nice, I have "Luxor" branded version of this in the basement! Haven't tested it, but now I want to bring it up!

[@craigjensen6853]

LOLZ... the video game department at Montgomery Ward's.

[@Lee_Adamson_OCF]

You can reheat those fries with your soldering iron.

[@noisetv1863]

Lots of Bud content, A+

[@forevernotjohn]

The TRV series and XV series were often used with early skate videos. The TRV 900 is sometimes seen nowadays and the VX1000 is still very prevalent but slowly dying out

[@UpLateGeek]

I think I remember reading Fairchild were pioneers in commercialising LEDs in the 70s, so putting pointless LEDs in their products was probably a point of pride for them.

[@jasoneverett]

I managed a Wendy's in the late 90's/early 2000's and we cooked the bacon fresh at that time, did it change?

[@goilup]

came for the repair, stayed for the Wendy's food review

[@me0262]

I actually have never had a Baconator. Now I'm kinda interested to try one.

[@GORF_EMPIRE]

@@me0262 Treat yourself. No really. You wont be sorry.

[@CCGamesceo]

#Inflation what's that? 😂 Also holy molex connectors Batman. Also the Turtles Domino's voice acting was spot on. "Fairchild is the sperm of cartridge based systems."

[@BenHeckHacks]

I made my niece watch the OG TMNT movie a few weeks back. It mostly holds up!

[@TanjoGalbi]

ZED-EX 80! It's like the ZX Spectrum, it's the British name of the machine not just letters. It's like data the word vs Data the name in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Respect the name. Note: This applies to the ZX-81 too! 🙂 Also, a logical reason for using ZED and not ZEE in general is that ZEE sounds a lot like SEE (for C) so ZED helps differentiate the two. It's just one possible reason as many Americans ask why we use ZED, not saying you have to use it... well, except in the British product names! lol

[@xKynOx]

Being from the UK paying over 3 quid was a no no for a game back then.

[@twicethemegapower3995]

Whoa! @24:30 did Ben homage Cathode Ray Dude?😳 Oh man that was a treat

[@The1neo34]

The MRE guy skit! love it :D

[@TAGMedia7]

I have that exact model handycam. I use it in my side business for digitizing people's old home movies! Also: I don't need to tell you, but everyone else: for the love of all that is holy: RENDER YOUR FOOTAGE CORRECTLY! When deinterlacing your VHS, 8mm and Hi-8 tapes, double the framerate to 59.97 to preserve the motion fluidity of the source material! Encoding to 29.97 progressive throws out HALF the picture data! You've got an effective 60 fields interlace in the source, DON'T THROW THAT OUT. Okay, rant over.

[@BenHeckHacks]

Yes very good point! Fields! = frames. I might do a Super 8 project this yest, I recently fixed the camera I found.

[@TAGMedia7]

@@BenHeckHacks I'd be all in for seeing that!

[@Mutato-]

The MRE joke made me laugh. 😆

[@MrHunterseeker]

2:00 YES. So much this. The "games journalists" (not journalists- they never even had a community college course on journalism, or writing) have no idea, because they aren't gamers either. I remember back when the NES first came out as a kid in elementary school and the prices on games were 80 to 90 bucks for a new game. I also remember most department stores didn't sell video games in their electronics sections because they needed to keep them secure behind glass cabinets and glass counters because of shoplifting problems, so boys had to go to the perfume counters or jewelry counters to see the games. The only time games dropped in price was in the mid 90s when the first playstation came out and all the games were done on CD so they passed the savings on production onto the consumer and games for the PS1 and the PC dropped to $40 to $50. They stayed there until PS2 started using DVD media then they jumped back up to $60 to $70. I still don't think inflation merits all the nickel and diming they are doing with some of these games and their "ultimate" packs for $150 to $200 we are seeing now in gamestop. Digital copies of games, since they don't have to make physical copies in a factory and ship them to the states, should be 1/2 the price of a physical copy. Edit: 6:40 The shielding is probably to protect the system from radio interference. Back then everyone and their mother had a CB radio/Ham Radio setup. Every vehicle had one almost and people had base stations set up in their homes, everyone used to use them to talk/eavesdrop on gossip. This caused a lot of interference in TV signals, which if you remember, the way these old systems used to plug into your TV was through the old analog coax switches that came with the game system. Someone driving by your house on a CB would cause interference in the video signal. This might be why everything was so shielded. EDIT: 8:13 BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHHAHAH NICE reference to Steve1989MREInfo