Voice — Johnny Castaway PS1

This page exists because the site has a deliberate voice and somebody is going to want to write a new page someday. The shorter version of what follows: read the in-game credits screen, then write like that. The longer version is below.

This page is the public distillation. The 450-line internal source-of-truth that drafting agents read before new prose gets generated lives at site/_includes/voice-guide.md — it’s anchored on a verbatim re-read of hunterdavis.com and carries the longer rationale for each rule here.

On this page

The voice in one paragraph
The drawCredits floor
Traits to keep
Traits to avoid
Phrases that fit
Words to skip
How expertise is handled
How dead ends are handled
A test for any new sentence
Further reading

The voice in one paragraph

First person, plainspoken, often mildly self-deprecating about the artifact and quietly confident about the choice. Sentences are short or medium; long sentences appear, but they earn it by carrying actual content. Numbers carry the weight that adjectives don’t. Dead ends are named, often with a one-word lampshade. Realizations are named too. Johnny Castaway is treated as a recurring craft obsession, not a one-time curiosity. The phrases “a labor of love” and “if you paid for this, you were cheated” come straight off the in-game Credits screen and are load-bearing — every prose surface on this site has to match them, not the other way around.

The drawCredits floor

The irreducible voice sample is the four-line in-game Credits screen, in src/pause_menu.c::drawCredits:

A labor of love by Hunter Davis.

Hunter does not own or have a license to the Johnny Castaway character. The original creator generously allows fan ports.

If you paid for this, you were cheated. Open source and free. github.com/huntergdavis/johnny-castaway-ps1

If a sentence on this site fails to make sense alongside that block, it’s wrong. That’s the whole test.

Traits to keep

First person singular. “I”, almost always. “We” only when speaking for an actual lineage (jno6809, JCOS, the toolchain authors), and even then “I” is often clearer.
Lists with conversational bodies. Numbered lists in particular, with items that read like sentences someone actually said, not bullet-deck fragments.
Show the constraint, then the realization. Walk the reader through why something was hard before reporting that it worked.
Specific numbers. 64 MB, 350 KB, 2 watchers, 8 stars, 1 fork (mine). Numbers are the voice’s currency.
Parentheticals as asides. (remember those!), (mine). They’re how the voice breathes.
Em-dashes and short interruptions. Whole sentences are allowed to end on a comma into another short clause.
Honest scope statements. “Out of scope for this initial release” — followed by an actual list. Never “stay tuned!”
Self-deprecation that’s also confidence. Diminutive language about the thing, absolute confidence about the choice. The Credits screen is the canonical example.
Sentence fragments as topic markers. “Conway’s Law.” Full stop. Then the elaboration.
Negation as definition. Not X. Y. This pattern already runs throughout the site (“Not an emulator. […] It replays packs.”) and is correct — it’s the native rhythm.
Specific named technical vocabulary, no scaffolding. FntFlush, dirty-rect bookkeeping, SPI tx_len, ADS / TTM bytecode, CLUT-indexed sprite formats. The reader will follow.
Comma splices. Don’t “fix” the conversational comma splices into formal prose; they are the rhythm.

Traits to avoid

Performative enthusiasm. delighted, thrilled, excited to announce. Announce things by saying “Announcing X” and describing what X does in the second sentence.
Marketing transitions. But that’s not all! / Without further ado / Now let’s see / Let’s dive in / Stay tuned / We’ve got something special. None of these appear on the project’s source blog. None should appear here.
Hyperbolic adjectives. elegant, powerful, seamless, blazing-fast, world-class, enterprise-grade, industry-leading, revolutionary, stunning. The space these occupy is very narrow, and the project’s actual prose (“rock-solid 60 FPS”, “splendidly”, “criminally under-exposed”) is not in it.
Triplets and corporate parallelism. It’s fast, it’s flexible, it’s free — the cadence is fine when the items are diminutive (“Useless, silly, simplistic”), wrong when used to brag.
“We” used to fake a team. There is one author. The Credits screen says so.
Apologizing for scope or pace — just a small project, still rough, early days. Small things are shipped on purpose and framed as small joys; the prose should match.
Flattening technical concepts further than the source voice would. The project’s blog posts publish C, talk about VRAM in 1 MB, list ADPCM nibble pair order. The site doesn’t need to oversimplify.
Roadmapping the page. In this post we’ll explore… — just write the page.
“Journey” as a metaphor for the project arc. Overused everywhere, never on this site.
Closing rhetorical questions. Pretty cool, right? / Sound familiar? Inside-paragraph rhetorical questions as setup for technical answers (“Why? Because the SPU HLE doesn’t honor it.”) are fine. Closing on one is what to avoid.

Phrases that fit

These are paraphrasable lines from the project’s source voice. Cite them, echo their cadence, or use the ones that match the page’s content.

“A labor of love by Hunter Davis.”
“If you paid for this, you were cheated. Open source and free.”
“didn’t take me too long to port. It’s working splendidly!”
“A glorious internal 640x480 screen resolution and a rock-solid 60 FPS”
“Lightbulb moment!”
“Bummer, SDL 2.0 doesn’t support console framebuffer any longer.”
“useless, silly, simplistic, exactly what I had envisioned”
“Now is the time for small joys, for silver linings.”
“little things that bring me joy. Things I might dip in and add a feature to once a year, for 30 years.”
“So few, so laughably few. But hey, enough to honestly help in some situations.”
“criminally under-exposed for how good it is” (about jc_reborn — the seed for this entire project)
“Out of scope for this initial release” (followed by an actual list)
“Pretty straightforward!”
“And that’s about it!”
“Hey, progress is progress :D”

Words to skip

A short banned-word list, with the reason rather than the prohibition:

delightful, delighted, thrilled, excited — the voice doesn’t perform enthusiasm; it describes what got made.
elegant, powerful, seamless, blazing-fast, world-class, best-in-class, enterprise-grade, industry-leading, mission-critical, battle-tested — sales vocabulary. This is a fan port, not a product.
journey (as a noun for the project arc), unlock (as a verb for enable), empower, leverage, robust, cutting-edge, ecosystem, synergy, stakeholders, holistic — corporate vocabulary; off-voice.
experience the magic, fall in love, next level — none belong here.
modern web standards, best practices — vague appeals to authority. State the specific practice or skip it.
just a small project, still rough, early days used apologetically — small things ship on purpose. Match that.

How expertise is handled

The project author has a long technical CV. None of it leads. The blog posts open with what the new thing is and why somebody wanted to make it, and credentials show up by accident, embedded in detail. Site prose carries the same posture: hardware constraints stated as plain facts; named technical vocabulary used without scaffolding; mistakes reported as facts, named precisely. The voice never says “I’m an expert” — it just writes the way an expert writes: dense, specific, declarative, no padding.

Concretely:

The home page doesn’t get a “by Hunter Davis, who has ported Johnny to N platforms” bio block.
The Credits page lists prior ports as part of the lineage, links hunterdavis.com once as the longer version, and stops.
The History page can mention “this isn’t Hunter’s first port of Johnny” because the prior ports literally explain why the PS1 was tractable. That’s content, not bio.
When prose needs to gesture at duration, prefer round numbers and “about”. Avoid spurious precision (29.4 years, since 1995-04).

How dead ends are handled

Out loud, often with a one-word lampshade. “Bummer.” “Lightbulb moment!” The full arc — here’s what I tried, here’s what didn’t work, here’s what made me realize the right thing — is a recurring shape on the project’s blog and shows up on this site as the reason the archaeology section exists. Dead ends are content. They aren’t apologies.

A test for any new sentence

Three quick checks before publishing prose on this site:

Could this sentence appear, unedited, on hunterdavis.com? If not, it’s off-voice.
Does it sit comfortably next to “if you paid for this, you were cheated”? If the contrast is jarring, the sentence is the problem.
Did it earn its length? Long sentences are fine; long sentences without specific content are not.

That’s it. The disc plays. That’s what mattered.