Update 1 - full speed & better sound.
Update 2 - fix missing mouse cursor.
Update 3 - fix speed decrease in Pico8 0.2.0
Update 4 - support cart/bios drag&drop and function keys.
An emulator for the Fairchild Channel F, the first console to use programmable ROMs and a microprocessor.
The console was released in 1975, so don't expect much in the way of graphics, gameplay, or usability.
See Wikipedia for more info.
That's a homebrewed (i.e. - NOT original) game made by Blackbird and e5frog. You can find it here.
Any sound glitches are due to the emulator, not the game, by the way. (See below)
It pushes the capabilities of the console to its limits, so its quality is considerably higher than that of the other games for the console.
It's also anachronistic - the original Pac-Man wasn't released until 1980.
In order to play other games, you first need the console's two BIOS files and the ROM for the other game you want to play. (Having these is up to you and they cannot be shared)
If you have those, simply drag & drop them one-by-one into pico-8. (E.g. drop each of the bios files, then drop the cart).
If you want to run the game included in the bios, drop only the 2 bios files, then press the reset button.
By the way, a BIOS is needed since the "BIOS" included with the emulator is a homebrewed one which is only good enough for running a few games which don't use it much.
If you wish to copy the BIOS and ROM to the cart yourself - e.g. via cstore, they should be copied sequentially: BIOS SL31253 or SL90025 to location 0x0, BIOS SL31254 to location 0x400, and the cart to location 0x800. (Just like the Fairchild's own memory layout)
In "1P" mode (default), the controls are:
In "2P" mode, the controls are:
In both modes, additional controls are:
All functionality is working and most likely bug-free, so all original and homebrew games work well, including the carts with extra memory.
(Exception: no support for the homebrewed multicart, which is too large for pico8 anyway)
Thanks to some optimizations, games now usually run at full speed.
Sound has occasional glitches (either due to pico8's sound limitations or my implementation).
Keys sometime need to be pressed for a few moments to work in some games. This might be due to the original console's controls being slow to press.
Proving that emulators for non-trivial systems are possible to do in pico-8.
And just for the fun of creating and/or playing an emulator!