Tents and Trees

A deceptively simple puzzle game written for the Fairchild Channel F, the first ever games console to use ROM cartridges and a microprocessor, which launched in 1976.

Unfortunately with its quirky CPU and low video resolution of 102x58, it was soon superceded by the Atari 2600 and only 26 official games were ever released for it, together with a handful of modern homebrew games. However it deserves its place in history for being the first true 'games console' as we understand the term today.

I thought it would be an interesting challenge to learn how to program its F8 processor. Many of the games only utilised the 64 bytes of 'Scratch RAM' built-in to the actual CPU, however this game takes advantage of a 2K RAM chip that some titles had, although I'm only using perhaps 150 bytes of that. Once I got the hang of it I've found it much easier to program than the Atari 2600 because you can just push pixels to the screen and don't need to worry about where the raster beam is.

It was a lot of fun to make this game over the course of 2-3 days, and I'm already thinking of more ambitious projects for the future. Thanks to the excellent site Veswiki and the many contributors therein without whom this game wouldn't be possible. The code is available here: