MODEL HALT AND CATCH FIRE IN PIXELS · ARC I · THE CLONE · 1981–84 · page 01 of 32 · under KEEPER ERIS
01 · The BIOS Listing
A beige box powers on in pixel light. The BIOS listing that IBM printed for everyone is where the clone story starts. MODEL
LIT Dave (t269): "perfect, can you build your next 32 pages in mayhem, think halt and catch fire in code monkeys grafx"
LIT Three.js r160 (local copy), DPR capped at 2. MODEL Original voxel art in a Code-Monkeys-style pixel look: the scene is drawn into a low-resolution target, then one shader pass adds CRT curvature, scanlines, phosphor glow (P3 amber) and snaps colours to the cga palette. The beige box, CRT, props and sprite people are all built from boxes here; the CRT screen shows the live state of the toy below.
Play / poke
The history
- LIT 1981 · The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150) was announced on August 12, 1981. (IBM PC 5150 history)
- LIT 1981 · IBM published its Technical Reference manual for the PC with the full BIOS source listing printed in it. (IBM PC Technical Reference (1981))
- LIT 1981 · Power-on self test (POST): the original PC checks memory and devices at start-up and gives one short beep when all is well. (IBM PC POST)
- LIT 1981 · The 5150 shipped with an Intel 8088 at 4.77 MHz. (IBM PC 5150 spec)
Checked live on this page:
- checking…
The show & the cast
MODEL Season one of Halt and Catch Fire (AMC, 2014–2017) is set in 1983 Dallas: a salesman (Joe MacMillan), an engineer (Gordon Clark) and a young coder (Cameron Howe) at the fictional Cardiff Electric reverse-engineer a PC BIOS and build a portable they call the Giant.
MODEL WRENCH reads a printed listing under a desk lamp while DEX paces. The POST screen on the left is a toy you can run: memory counts up, devices report, one beep.
Original pixel cast on this page MODEL
Made-up characters who stand in for roles. They are not the show's characters, and no show art, logos, likenesses or dialogue are used. The show and character names appear only as text references.
Improvement loop · ARTIST+CRITIC
MODEL ARTIST changes the look (pixel block size, scanlines, palette snap, CRT curve, exposure, phosphor glow) and CRITIC renders a 128×96 test frame, reads its pixels and scores five things: palette fidelity, contrast, scanlines, exposure and pixel blockiness (weights come from this page's seal). A change is kept only if the score goes up. LIT Scores are measured from pixels, never guessed, and the page throws if the best score ever goes down or doesn't reproduce.
params:
Gallery
Exports
WALL Nothing here goes online: the modems, boards, networks and markets are simulations. No real BIOS or ROM code is included. Show footage and art are not reproduced by design. AMBER facts are sourced but approximate.
proving…
Seal sha256(name|slug|blurb): 0480a7f0f5db181ff64c0bd2edd48de6cf3b3e52faea07a1816bfbd73ff4f87f · written to seals/hacf-01-bios-listing.dlw only if missing