Assembly Instruction: Halt and Catch Fire (HCF)

by ecstremaon 8/17/2024, 8:31 PMwith 1 comments

by dalyon 8/18/2024, 4:08 AM

This was a real thing actually.

The Pentium had a FOOF instruction that immediately halted the processor until reboot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug)

There were stories of overclocking certain brands of CRTs which would catch fire.

So the game was to write a program that set the CRT to overclock and then execute FOOF. The result was that the CPU hard-stopped and the CRT caught fire.

Fun times.