Status

Headline

Current release is v0.8.12-ps1. Scenes validated under the project’s acceptance bar (pixel-perfect visuals plus synced SFX, signed off across every applicable variant – night, low-tide, holiday, raft-stage): 63 / 63. v0.8.9-ps1 is the current release: every row in the live per-scene ledger is signed off, all 126 high/low scene variants are routed and timing-bearing, deterministic BOOTMODE scene selection is logged and gated, VISITOR5 high/low now share green 30..46 retained-read baselines, and the latest WALKSTUF1 low in-place payload reductions are promoted. The chapter-select grid in the in-game Scene Explorer keeps the custom on-PS1-captured thumbnails for every one of the 63 scenes from v0.8.4-ps1 while streaming previews without a large paused-menu heap allocation. The public headless battle card is +0.2708% over target / 99.7337% target speed; the raw signed optimization matrix is -0.4963% / 100.5160%. The newest accepted BUILDING2 low pack promotion trims dead draw-tail payload without changing pack size/LBA or the PS-EXE bucket, improving low to 1339/1317, overrun 22, blocking/read time 53/150, reads 37, and due 12. BUILDING4 low remains on the accepted offscreen PAL4 draw-span clip at 2853/2816, overrun 37, blocking/read time 40/215, and prefetch overrun 34; v746 now shrinks frame 291 in-place, preserving offsets while reducing active payload 855284 -> 849109 with exact-flat timing. The newest WALKSTUF1 baselines are same-speed late-tail work-volume clips: high v654 clips frames 194..210 and keeps 1476/1434, blocking/refill 81/23, reads/due 65/16; low v653 clips frames 202..210 and keeps 1478/1431, blocking/refill 64/20, with v705 plus v760 bringing loop reads/read time to 60/272 and due misses to 11, and v747/v749/v750/v751/v753/v755/v756/v757/v759/v762/v763/v766/v767/v769/v770/v771/v772/v773/v774/v775/v776/v777/v779/v780/v781/v782/v783/v784/v785/v786/v787/v788/v789/v790/v791 also shrinking low frames 51/49/47/61/62/58/45/37/35/43/41/57/33/67/68/69/32/133/5/141/70/30/6/71/72/142/73/131/74/19/28/138/145/75/76 in-place to 801103 active payload after the release merge. Both drop draw pixels/spans/rows without changing timing/CD counters. VISITOR3 high keeps the compact tail-pack promotion at 1063/1040, and VISITOR5 high/low both remain green on the matching 30..46 retained-read shape. The VISITOR3 low frame132/frame137 setup-prime relocation keeps the fixed 1555450 byte VIST3LOW footprint, LBA/sectors 23371/760, and 217088 byte PS-EXE bucket while improving low to 1062/1040, overrun 22, blocking 42, reads/due 7/7. WALKSTUF1 high/low now measure 1476/1434 and 1478/1431; the latest WALKSTUF1 scalar and post-prepare scheduler closures kept that timing unchanged and moved the next attempt toward generated ownership or pack-side work. BUILDING2 low now adds the accepted 218..229 slack-8 retained-read row plus v739 draw-tail trimming, improving to 1339/1317, overrun 22, blocking/refill 53/0, reads/read time 37/150, and due 12. BUILDING2 high currently measures 1351/1311, overrun 40, blocking 54, hidden refill 18, and due misses 7; same-speed offscreen clips now reduce its runtime rows/spans/pixels to 18030/105645/446246. The live ledger is at /scenes/; the per-scene workflow that drives the bar is in docs/ps1/scene-status.md.

The narrative below is per-component, not per-scene. The regtest harness (config/ps1/regtest-scenes.txt + scripts/run-regtest.sh) is the source of truth for “does this still build and boot.” Human visual + audible signoff is the source of truth for “is this scene done.”

Per-component status

Component	Status	Notes
Build system (Docker + CMake + mkpsxiso)	Complete	config/ps1/Dockerfile.ps1 on linux/amd64; PSn00bSDK 0.24; scripts/rebuild-and-let-run.sh is the one-command entry.
CD-ROM I/O (cdrom_ps1.c, ~2,570 lines)	Complete	Reimplements fopen/fread against CD sectors. CdSearchFile / CdRead / CdSync integration. The rest of resource.c is unchanged from upstream.
Renderer (graphics_ps1.c, ~4,900+ lines)	Complete	4-bit indexed sprite format (indexedPixels), palette LUT compositing, 4-pixel unrolled inner loop, opaque sprite fast-path, dirty-rect background restore (~80-95% reduction in per-frame data movement), black-backdrop temporal cleanup for full-screen scenes like JOHNNY 1, and grForceFullRedrawNextFrame for pause-menu resume. FntFlush is empirically broken in the scene-runtime context – do not regress on-screen text to it.
Audio (sound_ps1.c, ~445 lines) + SPU	Working	All 23 VAG SFX preloaded into SPU RAM at boot. Round-robin over 8 voices. Captured 0xC051 PLAY_SAMPLE events ship in the FG2 pack and fire from foreground_pilot.c with a 3-frame key-on delay. Mute writes the SPU master-volume registers directly because SpuSetCommonMasterVolume is not honored by DuckStation HLE. The VAG encoder (scripts/wav2vag.py) was extensively debugged during the v0.3.6-ps1 milestone (commit 355227fa); see that commit for the full bug list.
Input (events_ps1.c + src/spi.c)	Complete	Direct SPI driver, timer-2 + SIO0 IRQ at 250 Hz, lifted from spicyjpeg’s pads example. The BIOS pad path (InitPAD/StartPAD) is unusable in PSn00bSDK 0.24 + DuckStation. Poll TX is tx_len=5, not 4 – DuckStation only delivers button bytes when the full 5-byte sequence comes from the TX buffer.
Closed captions (src/ps1_captions.{c,h})	Working	On/off via Pause -> Accessibility -> Captions. Dark band at the bottom of the frame for ~5 seconds at scene start with descriptive subtitle text. Glyph atlas shared with the pause menu. Caption corpus from the upstream closed_captions branch of jc_reborn; the original sequential ADS-tag map had ~20 mismatches and was re-audited (docs/ps1/caption-audit-2026-04-26.yaml). HIGH-confidence matches dominate; LOW-confidence slots remain on STAND idles and a few VISITOR / WALKSTUF edges.
Holidays (36 of them, code-generated)	Working	Holiday emblem sprite sheet packed into the PS1 holiday overlay. Selectable via Pause -> World Options -> Holidays and BOOTMODE.TXT. Generation is offline; design notes in docs/ps1/holidays-expansion-design.md.
Story-loop walks (walk_pilot.c, walk_render.c)	Working	Johnny walks between scene endpoints using Sierra’s original walk_data.h routes instead of teleporting. The runtime restores from a persistent tight clean buffer, keeps waves moving, re-stamps holiday overlays behind Johnny during walk frames, and covers Johnny behind the palm trunk/leaves. v0.7.2 adds a backdrop-key guard so walks only run when the next scene matches the previous rendered tide, raft, night, holiday, and island X/Y state; v0.8.0 adds a clean-rect retry path; v0.8.1 counts wave-band/split-rect clean pressure before allocation.
Freeplay/debug mode (scene_freeplay.c)	Working	v0.5.0-ps1 promotes direct-control Johnny: D-pad/analog walking, L2/R2 speed modifiers, fishing, immediate R1+D-pad world toggles, gag/visitor debug catalogs, sound test, Select clear-screen rebuild, frog-clock loading transitions, and a no-allocation steady-state frame loop.
Pause menu (pause_menu.c)	Complete	Start opens the overlay mid-scene; custom embedded 8x8 ASCII font (because FntFlush is broken in scene context); POLY_F4 dim quad + panel quads. Twelve sub-screens: Scene Set, Scene Explorer, Freeplay Options, Controls, World Options, Holidays, Set Island Position, Accessibility, Sound Test, System, Set Time/Date, Set RNG Seed.
Memcard persistence (memcard.c)	Working / expanding	Pause-menu choices persist to bu00: block 0. Save/load wired; restore-on-boot wired. v6 saves persist holiday mode separately from manual holiday id. Broader menu-option persistence remains future work.
Telemetry / debug overlay	Complete	Five-panel left-edge overlay; gated by grPs1TelemetryEnabled in graphics_ps1.c with row writes scattered through src/ads.c and helpers like grPs1SetLastBmpTelemetry. Off by default in release builds. Decoded out of captured frames by scripts/decode-ps1-bars.py into telemetry.json during regtest. The historical visual-debug substrate when TTY printf was unsafe; still the right tool for per-frame state since text I/O can perturb timing.
Perf instrumentation (ps1_perf.c)	Complete	Level-gated JCPERF / JCPERF2 TTY lines. Levels: OFF, SUMMARY, DETAIL, DEBUG. Set via ps1PerfSetLevel. Off in normal operation; the user feeds JCPERF output to a perf-debug agent when chasing regressions.
TTY printf	Reliable	Restored 2026-04-25 on PSn00bSDK 0.24 + DuckStation through bounded vprintf plus DuckStation TTY/file logging. Gated BOOTMODE probes (printf-test, logtest). Must not be called per-frame – text I/O alters timing.
Regtest harness	Working	config/ps1/regtest-scenes.txt + scripts/run-regtest.sh drive a headless DuckStation pass. Source of truth for “boots and renders something.” Not the source of truth for “looks right” – that’s still human signoff.
Host capture pipeline	Working	scripts/capture-host-scene.sh runs the desktop build under controlled boot state; emits high/low PNG frames, frame-meta.json, sound-events.jsonl. scripts/export-scene-foreground-pilot.sh now defaults new scene bring-up to normal/far-left/far-right foreground-only multi-view stitching before compiling FG2.
CD packaging (mkpsxiso)	Complete	config/ps1/cd_layout.xml. Routed scenes contribute high-tide + low-tide pack entries; the full FG2 corpus is ~343 MB, of which a selected subset rides on the disc. Build outputs jcreborn.bin + jcreborn.cue. CD image at v0.8.12-ps1 is ~79 MB; PS-EXE is ~208 KiB after legacy ADS/TTM/FG1 paths were stripped from the linker pass.

What’s currently broken

Honest list, narrowed to specifics:

• Post-validation regressions. Scene coverage is complete at 63/63, but future bugfixes can still be needed when broader play, new features, or performance changes disturb a signed-off path. v0.8.1 fixed the latest random-run clean-rect pressure freeze; the scene ledger remains the acceptance source after each fix.
• Memcard fresh-card edge cases. Save / load works on a card that already holds the project’s block. Behavior on a freshly formatted card or a card with a corrupted block is still being shaken out.
• SpuSetCommonMasterVolume HLE divergence. Worked around with direct register writes; the divergence itself is a DuckStation HLE quirk, not a project bug, but it does mean audio-on-real- hardware needs verification before any release calls itself hardware-confirmed.
• Real hardware soak. Smoke-tested on an SCPH-7501 via the TonyHax softmod path — the disc boots and runs. Long-term observations on real hardware (extended idle, real SPU register behavior, real CD seek timing under random-position scene picks) are still on the wishlist. The SpuSetCommonMasterVolume HLE divergence above is a concrete reason to keep treating hardware audio as unverified until the soak loop covers it.
• Older count-based status models (25/63, 27/63, 60/63, 63/63) from prior validation eras are retired, not current. They are preserved in current-status.md for searchability and demoted explicitly. Do not cite them as current progress.

If a specific bug isn’t called out here, it lives either in the GitHub issue tracker on huntergdavis/johnny-castaway-ps1 or in the dated worklogs under /devlog/. The regtest harness output is the SoT for build-and-boot regressions.

What’s currently in motion

Pulled from the live narrative in docs/ps1/current-status.md:

• Optimization after full validation. With all 63 scenes signed off, the next focus is preserving pixel-perfect playback while improving speed, loading, memory pressure, and release polish. v0.8.12-ps1 has the public-capped headless baseline at 99.7% target speed across all 126 timing-bearing rows after the VISITOR3, WALKSTUF1, MARY3, BUILDING, ACTIVITY9, JOHNNY1, and WALKSTUF3 promotion arc. The bring-up loop remains in docs/ps1/development-workflow.md.
• Scene-by-scene FG2 routing. All 63 scenes have generated high-tide and low-tide FG2 packs sitting in the corpus; routing them onto the CD image is selective during bring-up so the image stays manageable.
• Memcard hardening. Closing the fresh-card and corrupted- block edge cases.
• Persisted-options continuation. v0.7.1 shipped the holiday-mode slice: AUTO DATE:ORIG4 is now the fresh/no-card default and memory-card schema v6 stores automatic policy separately from manual holiday id. Captions, Scene Set, tide, raft, island-position, freeplay/perf preferences, and menu cursor defaults remain future work.
• Caption audit follow-through. Two layers, with one done in v0.8.4-ps1 and one still open. Done: the website’s description of which caption belongs to which scene was reconciled against the on-PS1 packs during the chapter-select grind — per-scene index.md titles + bodies, scenes.yml notes, scene-status.md Notes column, and the in-game Scene Explorer display strings. The runtime evidence overturned a substantial fraction of the audit’s confidence ratings, including two HIGH-rated FISHING entries (FISHING 2 boot, FISHING 3 crab) that were exact text-pack mismatches and the VISITOR 5 NO_MATCH candidate that turned out to be a clear unambiguous gag. Open: the runtime captionSceneMap[] array in src/ps1_captions.c was not changed in v0.8.4-ps1; the on-screen caption band continues to play whatever caption the original audit picked, even on rows where the website now disagrees with that pick. Repointing the runtime mapping (or blanking the rows where text and pack can’t be reconciled) is a future-release item. The post-validation runtime corrections section lists the named mismaps.
• fgpilot -> “PS1 scene playback” naming migration. The internal code-name in foreground_pilot.c and friends remains fgpilot; the public-facing name is moving to “PS1 scene playback.” The migration plan lives in docs/ps1/ps1-branch-cleanup-plan.yaml under fgpilot_naming_migration_plan.
• Milestone release cadence. v0.8.9-ps1 promotes the current mainline optimization set: VISITOR5 low reuses the green 30..46 retained-read shape, BUILDING2 low carries the 218..229 slack8 row plus v739 draw-tail trim, and WALKSTUF1 low carries no-shift frame 51/49/47/61/62/58/45/37/35 in-place payload reductions. v0.8.8-ps1 promotes the VISITOR5 high 30..46 retained-read group on top of the v0.8.7 stability hardening. v0.8.7-ps1 is the deterministic BOOTMODE scene selection and Scene Explorer preview stability point release on top of the v0.8.6 performance follow-through: direct-scene boots are logged and gated, Suzy backdrop cleanup restores scene state, and Scene Explorer thumbnails stream without a large heap allocation. v0.8.6-ps1 is the WALKSTUF1 / VISITOR3 setup-segment compaction follow-through point release on top of v0.8.5’s full 126-row baseline (WALKSTUF1 low gap6-prefix + slack-guard, WALKSTUF1 high window-prefetch / slack4 guard, VISITOR3 high/low setup-segment resident copies for frames 131 / 128). v0.8.5-ps1 is the full 126-row headless performance matrix release. v0.8.4-ps1 is the chapter-select thumbnails content release — 63 custom on-PS1-captured grid slots and a scene-page reconciliation pass against the actual on-PS1 packs. v0.8.3-ps1 is the WALKSTUF1 compact foreground performance pass. v0.8.2-ps1 is the VISITOR3 guarded-read performance pass. v0.8.1-ps1 is the clean-rect pressure stability point release. v0.8.0-ps1 is the complete-scene performance baseline. v0.7.2-ps1 fixes stale-backdrop story-loop walks. v0.7.1-ps1 adds the original-four auto holiday default and persisted holiday mode. v0.7.0-ps1 validates all 63 scenes and moves the project into bugfix/optimization mode. v0.6.10-ps1 validates MARY 5 after the NORAFT raft clamp and FIRST full-wipe transition fix. v0.6.8-ps1 validates MARY 2 after the wide multi-view stitch and fish thought-bubble repair. v0.6.6-ps1 removes the old FISHING7/FISHING8 runtime pins after far-left recapture proved both packs are random-position safe. v0.5.0-ps1 is the freeplay/debug release. v0.4.20-ps1 was the walking-loop stability release. v0.3.9-ps1 was the fishing3-loop-stability release; v0.3.6-ps1 was fishing1 with full SFX across all variants.

For dated context on any of the above, see /devlog/.

Related pages

• About: Method — the canonical methodology essay this status page tracks the implementation of.
• About: History — how the components above got to “complete” or “in motion.”
• About: dev environment — the workflow photograph behind every row in the component-level table.
• Scene ledger — the visual signoff bar; the per-scene status the table summarizes.
• Performance battle card — the second ledger; per-scene/tide timing for every component listed under “performance” above.
• Releases — short notes on every tagged version named in the milestone-cadence list above.
• Glossary — vocabulary anchor for FntFlush, clean-rect, fgpilot, BOOTMODE.TXT, and the rest of the terms this page uses without scaffolding.