MODEL HALT AND CATCH FIRE IN PIXELS · ARC I · THE CLONE · 1981–84 · page 03 of 32 · under KEEPER ERIS
03 · The Clean Room
Two rooms and one glass wall. One team reads the BIOS and writes specs; the other team never sees the code and builds from the specs alone. 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 1982 · Compaq was founded in February 1982 by Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto. (Compaq history)
- LIT 1983 · Compaq got around IBM's BIOS copyright with a clean-room workalike that did every documented BIOS function but was written from scratch. (Compaq Portable history)
- LIT 1981 · BIOS services are reached through software interrupts: INT 10h video, INT 13h disk, INT 14h serial, INT 16h keyboard, INT 17h printer, INT 1Ah time of day. (IBM PC BIOS interrupt map)
- AMBER 1983 · The cost of Compaq's clean-room BIOS effort is often put at about $1 million. (commonly cited figure)
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 BUILDER writes from specs, WEAVER carries spec cards through the glass, and CRITIC checks that no listing ever crosses. A contamination meter shows if one does.
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 · BUILDER+WEAVER+CRITIC
MODEL BUILDER and WEAVER take turns changing 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): 2a64029831c6f2214dc1278e61559cc1a88f19dfceb87fac42e03e3c15638ff9 · written to seals/hacf-03-clean-room.dlw only if missing