MODEL HALT AND CATCH FIRE IN PIXELS · ARC I · THE CLONE · 1981–84 · page 04 of 32 · under KEEPER ERIS
04 · The First Clones
Clones line up on a showroom carpet. The test is simple: does the software run? 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 · Columbia Data Products' MPC 1600, released in June 1982, is counted as the first IBM PC compatible. (Compaq Portable history)
- LIT 1983 · Eagle Computer and Corona were threatened by IBM over BIOS copyright and settled, agreeing to re-implement their BIOS. (Compaq Portable history)
- LIT 1984 · Phoenix Technologies began licensing a clean-room PC BIOS to other makers in 1984, which opened the clone market. (Phoenix BIOS history)
- LIT 1983 · Many early clones reached only partial compatibility (often quoted as about 95%) until Phoenix and others sold reverse-engineered BIOSes. (Compaq Portable history)
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 DEX sells and BOSS BEIGE counts. The compatibility rig runs a list of BIOS calls against a clone and scores it. One wrong answer and a program crashes.
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): e3cd9569595a78308a0bd3e326c160eb19f7fec25ebd3ed19ac1c9204cc2d6af · written to seals/hacf-04-first-clones.dlw only if missing