A labor of love

Credits

The full acknowledgements behind a small port.

On this page

In the game

The pause menu’s Credits page reads, verbatim:

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

That’s the whole credits screen on the disc. The list below is the longer version — the people whose work this project stands on.

Original game

  • Sierra On-Line — the original Johnny Castaway (1992), the character, all original art and audio. The Castaway character is theirs, not this project’s. This site reflects that in its chrome and its legal page.

Prior ports (the giants whose shoulders this stands on)

  • jno6809/jc_reborn (Jérémie Guillaume) — the SDL2 port that decoded the original engine’s ADS / TTM / RES bytecode. This project’s host build is a fork of that work.
  • nivs1978/JCOS (Hans Milling) — an alternate decoding effort that helped cross-validate frames.
  • xesf/Castaway (Alexandre Fontoura) — additional reverse-engineering notes.
  • The Sierra Chest archive — preserved manuals and box copy.

Toolchain

  • PSn00bSDK (Lameguy64 et al.) — the open-source PS1 SDK that makes a project like this thinkable in 2026.
  • DuckStation (Connor McLaughlin et al.) — the emulator that every commit gets tested against.
  • mkpsxiso (Lameguy64) — .bin/.cue packing.
  • spicyjpeg’s pad-poll example — the SPI driver used here is derived from that MPL-licensed code (see src/spi.c).
  • Meeus / Jones / Butcher — the Easter algorithm used for movable holidays.

This port

  • Hunter Davis — wrote it, broke it, fixed it again.

AI sub-agents

LLM sub-agents — Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and Codex (OpenAI) — were all used extensively across this project. They drafted text, scaffolded code, ran parallel research passes, and generated the holiday-emblem sprite primitives. They do not own decisions, do not validate scenes, and do not sign off on releases. Every agent-drafted page on this site got at least one factual edit on review; a few got rewritten substantially. The disclosure surface is documented at /docs/agents/; every page’s footer carries the short version.

Closed captions

The caption text was authored fresh for this port from scene content, not lifted from any prior corpus. The caption audit shows the confidence level of every ADS-tag → caption mapping.

Site typography

This site self-hosts four font families as woff2 (seven weight files in total). All are released under the SIL Open Font License, which doesn’t strictly require attribution but the project’s voice does:

  • Bitter (Sol Matas, Huerta Tipográfica) — display serif, used for headings.
  • Inter (Rasmus Andersson) — body sans-serif.
  • IBM Plex Mono (Mike Abbink + Bold Monday for IBM) — code blocks and the build-stamp meta.
  • VT323 (Peter Hull) — pixel display font, used for eyebrows, jump-nav labels, and pager hints.

Subsetted to Latin and stored under site/assets/fonts/. The full SIL OFL v1.1 license body and each family’s upstream copyright line ship beside the woff2 files at LICENSE-FONTS.txt.

Ocean ambience

The looping background ocean track shipped with v0.6.0-ps1 (toggle: Pause → Accessibility → Ocean) is sourced from BigSoundBank.com sound 0266 — “Sea: Waves”, released under CC0 / public domain. The on-disc OCEAN.VAG is a 20-second seamless loop derived from that recording, downsampled to 11.025 kHz mono and encoded to Sony VAG ADPCM. The seam is hidden by an equal-power crossfade with the recording’s natural continuation, so the SPU’s hardware loop reads as unbroken ocean rather than a wraparound. Encoding pipeline lives in scratch/ocean-ambience/; design rationale in background-music-feasibility.md.

  • Legal — the licensing companion to this attribution: GPL-3.0 on the project’s own code, MPL-2.0 on the SPI driver derivation, the Sierra character disclaimer, the takedown procedure.
  • Voice — the editorial standard the credits voice anchors. Why this page reads plainspoken instead of marketing-speak.
  • humans.txt — the same attribution surface in the IndieWeb-standard humans.txt format, mirroring this page’s content.
  • Feeds & well-known endpoints — the reference for every machine-readable URL on the site; humans.txt is one entry in a longer list that also covers robots.txt, RFC 9116 security.txt, the W3C web manifest, the Atom + JSON feeds for the devlog and lab, and the Schema.org JSON-LD records emitted in every page’s head.
  • FAQ — Is this legal? — the short author-written restatement of the fan-port stance.
  • About — Pointing at this work — one-line web reference + BibTeX block for linking the project from a blog post, paper, or retro-dev podcast’s notes file. The version pin matters; this is an active project.

The site is text-only on purpose — no portraits, no contributor avatars. The drawCredits voice is plainspoken, and the chrome matches.