MODEL HALT AND CATCH FIRE IN PIXELS · ARC II · MUTINY · 1985–86 · page 10 of 32 · under KEEPER ERIS
10 · CBBS · Chicago 1978
One phone line, one modem, one caller at a time: the bulletin board starts in a Chicago snowstorm. 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 1978 · CBBS, the first dial-up bulletin board system, went online in Chicago on February 16, 1978, built by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess. (CBBS history)
- LIT 1978 · Early boards took one caller at a time on one phone line. (CBBS history)
- LIT 1977 · Ward Christensen also wrote the XMODEM file-transfer protocol (1977). (XMODEM history)
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 Log in to a pretend board: read the bulletins, page the sysop, leave a message. The ANSI colours come from real escape codes, parsed live.
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): aff76485347e3f279c5bc5d0ede6a40b4c60017c95c475a69c579db246974881 · written to seals/hacf-10-cbbs-1978.dlw only if missing