MODEL HALT AND CATCH FIRE IN PIXELS · ARC II · MUTINY · 1985–86 · page 11 of 32 · under KEEPER ERIS
11 · The Handshake
Dial tones, an answer tone, then two whistles that become a conversation at 300 bits a second. 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 1981 · The Hayes Smartmodem (1981) ran at 300 bit/s and introduced the AT command set (ATDT to dial with tones). (Hayes Smartmodem history)
- LIT 1962 · Bell 103 modems use frequency-shift keying: the originating side sends 1070/1270 Hz (space/mark) and the answering side 2025/2225 Hz. (Bell 103 standard)
- LIT 1963 · Touch-tone (DTMF) digits are two tones together, one from 697/770/852/941 Hz and one from 1209/1336/1477 Hz. (DTMF standard)
- LIT 1994 · By 1994 V.34 modems ran at 28.8 kbit/s. (ITU-T V.34)
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 Type a number and press DIAL: the visual plays DTMF pairs, the answer tone and FSK carriers. The page also encodes "ATDT" as Bell 103 tones and decodes it back.
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): 378d9e8e8110fa8ffdf1413d170a4a9a07e15cbb0ed70988f51b7129bca9fda1 · written to seals/hacf-11-modem-handshake.dlw only if missing