MODEL HALT AND CATCH FIRE IN PIXELS · ARC II · MUTINY · 1985–86 · page 09 of 32 · under KEEPER ERIS

09 · The Mutiny House

A rented house full of desks, cables down the stairs and a chat room that never sleeps. 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 (P1 green) and snaps colours to the c64 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 1980 · CompuServe's CB Simulator (1980) was one of the first online chat services for the public. (CompuServe history)
  • LIT 1985 · Online time was billed by the hour; CompuServe charged $6 an hour at 300 baud and $12 at 1200 baud for games such as Island of Kesmai. (Island of Kesmai history)
  • MODEL 1985 · In the show, Mutiny runs its games and chat from a house in Dallas. (Halt and Catch Fire S2 (reference))

Checked live on this page:

  • checking…

The show & the cast

MODEL Season two (1985–86): Cameron Howe and Donna Clark run Mutiny, a fictional online-games company working out of a Dallas house, on dial-up lines and rented mainframe time.

MODEL MADGE watches the line count, ROXY ships a patch and KID lurks in the lobby. The chat room is played by little bots that take turns, all made up.

Original pixel cast on this page MODEL

ROXY ROM · the punk coder
MADGE MODEM · the operations lead
KID CRAWLER · the teenage web builder

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): d9f49b09af4024d36c0caa11cbccd03ee1b50a11c9ca0ebf96011ef0ed342604 · written to seals/hacf-09-mutiny-house.dlw only if missing