MODEL HALT AND CATCH FIRE IN PIXELS · ARC III · THE VALLEY · 1986–90 · page 23 of 32 · under KEEPER ERIS
23 · The Swap Meet
A pixel bazaar: strangers trade online, before anyone was sure that could work. 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 (P4 white) and snaps colours to the valley 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 1995 · eBay began as AuctionWeb, launched by Pierre Omidyar on September 3, 1995. (eBay history)
- LIT 1961 · In a second-price (Vickrey) auction the highest bidder wins and pays the second-highest bid, so bidding your true value is the best plan (William Vickrey, 1961). (Vickrey auction)
- MODEL 1986 · In the show, an online swap meet is one of Mutiny's big ideas, years before real online auction sites. (Halt and Catch Fire S3 (reference))
Checked live on this page:
- checking…
The show & the cast
MODEL Season three moves Mutiny to California (1986), with an IPO, an antivirus product built by Joe MacMillan and the NSFNET on the horizon; the season ends with a jump to 1990.
MODEL Agents with secret values bid for pixel trinkets. CRITIC checks that the winner always pays exactly the second-highest bid.
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): e295d3b75c45c98330dc6173235a39025310ce88a4696114ba6d79a43b9b2e29 · written to seals/hacf-23-swap-meet.dlw only if missing