The Channel F came out in November 1976 and started everything: it was the first console you could buy games for, on cartridges, instead of the handful wired into the box. Its games are tiny, and one emulator plays all of them.
We have 28 Channel F games on My Abandonware — nearly every Videocart ever sold, from Videocart-1 to a Pac-Man written for the console in 2009.
Emulators
FreeChaF is the one to use, as a core in RetroArch. MAME plays the Channel F too, and it knows the European machines the console was sold as.
- FreeChaF: a core for RetroArch, on every system. Written for the console, and it draws the buttons of the box on screen. Recommended.
- MAME (Windows, Mac, Linux) knows the machine as
channelf, the 1978 model aschannlf2, and the German and Swedish ones assabavdplandluxorves.
Running the games
FreeChaF wants two BIOS files, sl31253.bin and sl31254.bin, in the system folder of RetroArch. Then open the game and play.
The names are in lower case and the core checks them exactly. A third file, sl90025.bin, is the BIOS of the 1978 Channel F II; it is optional, and every game runs with either one. See our page about BIOS files to get them.
Our games are .bin files inside a zip, 1 to 5 KB — a whole cartridge is smaller than this page.
The controller
The Channel F controller was a stick you could also pull up, push down and twist both ways. Games use all of it, and a gamepad has to be told which button is which.
There was no fire button and no pad. The grip did eight directions, and the knob on top came up, went down and turned like a dial, which is how the paddle games work. FreeChaF spreads that over a modern gamepad:
- Direction pad: forward and backward.
- Y and L turn left, A and R turn right.
- X pulls up, B pushes down.
The right stick does the same thing if you would rather: up and down for the plunger, left and right for the twist.
The buttons on the box
The Channel F had no menu. Its buttons were on the console itself, and they start the game, change it and pause it. FreeChaF puts them behind the Start key.
Press Start on either gamepad and a row of console buttons appears. Move left and right to pick one and press any face button to push it. Start again hides the row.
You need them at once, because many carts hold several games: Videocart-1 alone holds four. One console button chooses which game, another sets how long it lasts, and a third holds the picture still.
Two games are already in the console, Hockey and Tennis, both in the BIOS. They are there before you open anything, and no download on our site carries them.
I need help!
We do not provide support for running abandonware games. The Channel F has a handful of people keeping it, and they wrote most of it down.
The VES Wiki covers every Videocart, every European version of the console and the hardware itself. The Emulation General Wiki compares the emulators.
Checked in October 2026 against each emulator's own documentation and, where it exists, its source code. Game counts and file sizes come from our own catalogue. These guides were drafted with the help of an AI assistant and checked by hand before publishing. If something here is out of date, tell us.