MODEL HALT AND CATCH FIRE IN PIXELS · ARC I · THE CLONE · 1981–84 · page 08 of 32 · under KEEPER ERIS
08 · HCF · Halt and Catch Fire
The opcode the show is named after: run it and the CPU stops listening, while the address bus becomes a counter. 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 1974 · The Motorola 6800 was introduced in 1974; its incomplete opcode decoding left undocumented opcodes 9D and DD that lock the CPU until reset. (HCF (computing))
- LIT 1977 · Gerry Wheeler gave them the unofficial mnemonic HCF in "Undocumented M6800 Instructions", BYTE, December 1977: the address bus turns into a 16-bit counter. (BYTE Dec 1977)
- LIT 1977 · Motorola kept the behaviour in the 6802 as a quick self-test for its 128 bytes of on-chip RAM. (HCF (computing))
- LIT 1980 · HCF began as a joke mnemonic; a list of "Overextended Mnemonics" with HCF ran in Creative Computing in April 1980. (Creative Computing Apr 1980)
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 Press RUN and the toy CPU executes DD: 16 LEDs count through every address and interrupts are ignored. Only RESET brings it back.
MODEL sapphon tie-in (MODEL): PATRICIA can rewind 10/15/30 s; an HCF machine has no rewind, only reset.
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): 0913646c29f3dde9fd164d488a3a67a34da3d5cebe4451497a39ade6c54fb921 · written to seals/hacf-08-halt-and-catch-fire.dlw only if missing