Cerberus Card

> A shareable trading card for your vintage PC.

Every CERBERUS run produces a hardware fingerprint and a verdict tally. A card is one of those runs, condensed onto a single shareable visual: identity, detection summary, what passed, what didn’t, and how your machine stacks against a PC XT. Run CERBERUS on your iron, paste the cerberus.ini below, and yours renders live.

The example below is a real capture: CERBERUS HEAD on DOSBox Staging, hardware fingerprint bea58129.

Cerberus Card HW: bea58129

Identity

Handle: SCREENSHOT
Run: v0.8.1 · quick · 1 pass
Notes: site-capture

Detection

CPU: Intel i486DX (A-step)
FPU: Integrated i486DX FPU
Memory: 14,912 KB ext / 640 KB conv
Bus: PCI
Video: S3 Trio64
Audio: Sound Blaster 16 (CT2290)
BIOS: unknown (low conf.)

Verdicts

PASS

WARN

FAIL

UNK

129 result keys total

PC-XT Factors

CPU

11.02x

MEM

40.98x

FPU

n/a

Multiples of an 8088 + 256 KB + MDA baseline.

Headline Numbers

Integer: 2,967,359 iters/s · 3,793 Dhrystones
FPU: 8,547,008 ops/s
Memory: R 2,913 / W 5,722 / C 5,738 KB/s

CERBERUS v0.8.1 barelybooting.com/card

Build your card

Run CERBERUS on your machine, copy the .INI output, paste it here. Everything happens in your browser. No upload, no tracking. To share the card, right-click and save as image, or screenshot the card region.

I confirm the INI above is mine to publish. Submission will publish it at barelybooting.com/hw/<fingerprint> with nickname and notes visible. claim token (optional, paste if resubmitting an existing fingerprint)

Render keeps everything in your browser. Submit posts the INI to barelybooting.com and gives you a permanent URL at /hw/<fingerprint>.

Warning: if your INI contains [upload].claim_token=, strip that line before submitting. The token is private and is sent only via the Bearer prompt below. The server rejects submissions whose body includes claim_token=.

What’s on the card

HW fingerprint. An 8-character SHA-1 prefix over the canonical hardware-signature key set. Two machines with the same fingerprint have the same identifiable silicon. When barelybooting.com opens uploads in v0.9.0, the fingerprint becomes your hardware’s public address.
Detection. What CERBERUS read off the hardware. CPU, FPU, memory map, bus, video chipset, audio, BIOS family.
Verdicts. Pass / warn / fail / unknown totals from the diagnostic + consistency engines. The consistency engine is the interesting one: it’s what catches counterfeit 486SX-as-DX silicon, thermal throttle, TSR storms, and a half-dozen other things that look fine in detection but behave wrong at runtime.
PC-XT factors. CPU and memory scaled against an 8088 + 256 KB + MDA baseline. A factor of 11 means your machine is 11 times faster than the canonical PC XT.
Headline numbers. Dhrystones, integer iterations per second, FPU ops per second, memory read/write/copy throughput.

Coming with v0.9.0

Three changes the upload pipeline brings:

Persistent URLs. Your card gets a permanent home at barelybooting.com/hw/<fingerprint>. The browser-side generator still works; the URL just becomes the canonical share target.
Rarity score. “You are one of N people who have submitted this chip.” The Pokedex of vintage silicon, opt-in, MIT-licensed dataset.
Leaderboards. Fastest 486 in the wild. Fastest 286. Fastest XT-class. Per chip family, ranked by Dhrystone with PC-XT factor as the secondary sort.

None of that exists yet. The card you can build today is a preview. It still works as a share artifact, and the format will not change in a breaking way: if you save a card today, it’ll still be readable and recognizable after v0.9.0 ships.