Closed captions

A labor of love by Hunter Davis. Closed captions are a PS1-only addition, not a feature of the original Sierra screensaver. The text was authored fresh for this port — it is not lifted from any prior caption corpus — and is intended for accessibility: a viewer who cannot hear the SFX or who finds the silent comedy ambiguous gets a short subtitle describing what Johnny is doing.

If you paid for this, you were cheated. Open source and free.

How it works

Three things plug together:

1. The caption corpus (captions[] in src/platform/ps1/ps1_captions.c) holds the actual subtitle strings. There are a handful of “special” captions (intro, christmas, halloween, night, lowtide, fadeout, etc.) plus 64 numbered scene captions (scene00 … scene63).
2. The scene-to-ADS map (captionSceneMap[], also in src/platform/ps1/ps1_captions.c) routes an (ads_name, ads_tag) pair to a caption id. When a scene starts, the runtime calls captionsOnAdsStart("FISHING", 3) and the mapper picks the right sceneNN string.
3. The render hook (captionsRender() called from grUpdateDisplay) draws the current caption inside a translucent dark band at the bottom of the framebuffer using the same 8x8 ASCII font the pause menu loads into VRAM.

The captions module shares VRAM with the pause menu: on first use it calls pauseMenuEnsureFontUploaded() so the captions don’t need to wait for the user to open the pause menu before subtitles can render. The font lives at VRAM (640, 256) with a CLUT at (640, 360) — those constants are exported from pause_menu.h.

When captions are disabled or no scene is active, captionsRender() returns immediately. It is zero-cost when off.

Public API

void  captionsSetEnabled(int enabled);
int   captionsGetEnabled(void);

/* Look up by scene id (e.g. "scene05"). */
void  captionsOnSceneStart(const char *sceneId);

/* Look up by ADS name + tag (the runtime dispatch path). */
void  captionsOnAdsStart(const char *adsName, uint16 adsTag);

/* Currently visible caption text, or NULL. */
const char *captionsGetCurrent(void);

/* Per-frame draw. No-op when disabled. */
void  captionsRender(void);

The toggle is reachable from the pause menu’s Accessibility sub-screen (Captions: ON / OFF).

The 2026-04-26 audit

The original captionSceneMap[] had a structural bug: it assumed caption_index == story_index in a strictly sequential sweep. That collides at every ADS group boundary — for instance scene10, which is about lilliputians and yacht photos, was being routed into a BUILDING sand-castle slot. The cascade error pushed every FISHING entry off by one and misaligned the JOHNNY and MARY day-arcs.

The audit re-derived the map content-first, anchoring captions to the ADS group they describe and then to SPOT / HDG / FIRST / FINAL / day_no flags from story-scenes.txt. The result is recorded in docs/ps1/caption-audit-2026-04-26.yaml.

Each entry carries a confidence rating:

The 63-entry audit shakes out as 30 HIGH / 21 MED / 12 LOW / 0 NO_MATCH. HIGH is dominated by the story arcs (every FISHING, JOHNNY, and MISCGAG entry is HIGH) and LOW is dominated by STAND idles, which are genuinely interchangeable from the corpus.

Confidence by ADS file

The four entries currently flagged as NO_MATCH candidates — BUILDING 6, VISITOR 5, WALKSTUF 2, WALKSTUF 3 — got assignments anyway, on the “least bad” principle. They’re the most likely sites for future blanking when runtime evidence makes a better mapping possible.

Post-validation runtime corrections (v0.8.4-ps1)

The audit was a structural fix — the off-by-one cascade is gone, every ADS+tag has some mapping, and the corpus + render path work as designed. What the audit could not resolve from text alone was whether the caption it picked actually described the gag the pack plays.

That second-order check arrived in v0.8.4-ps1, when the chapter-select grind walked all 63 packs on PS1 hardware and reconciled every scene-page title and body against the disc. The runtime evidence overturned a substantial fraction of the audit’s confidence ratings:

• Four flat mismaps named. FISHING 2’s pack reels in a Titanic life preserver, not a boot — the boot is at MARY 2. FISHING 3 is the octopus-steals-fish beat, not a crab snapping a nose. VISITOR 4 is just a coconut rolling into the ocean — the coconut-plane-hit is VISITOR 5. WALKSTUF 1 is a yacht-party- and-pass-out beat — the jog is WALKSTUF 3.
• Two HIGH-confidence FISHING entries were exact text-pack mismatches. FISHING 2 and FISHING 3 were both rated HIGH because the audit anchored on caught-object keywords (“boot”, “crab”). The keyword was in the corpus; the pack just doesn’t play it. The structural strength of HIGH (unambiguous keyword match) didn’t survive contact with the runtime.
• Multiple ACTIVITY / BUILDING / VISITOR MED entries flipped. ACTIVITY 5 (rain dance, not climb/look/dive), ACTIVITY 7 (book upside-down, not bathes/seagull), ACTIVITY 11 (bird-steals- clothes, not rain dance), ACTIVITY 12 (bird-on-head, not belly- flop), BUILDING 2 (lilliputian airport, not boot-roast), BUILDING 5 (builds fire, not raft/mermaid), BUILDING 7 (grills fish, not raft-build), VISITOR 1 (misses speedboat, not lilliputian arrival), VISITOR 3 (perspective gag, not yacht/photos).
• One audit NO_MATCH candidate turned out to be a clear gag. VISITOR 5 was on the “future blanking” list above; on PS1 it’s the unambiguous coconut-plane-hit beat that’s been miscredited to VISITOR 4 since the audit shipped.
• JOHNNY 3 / 4 were swapped. The audit had JOHNNY 3 as “his own SOS returns” and JOHNNY 4 as “writes a fresh SOS”. On PS1 it’s the other way around: JOHNNY 3 writes the letter to Suzy, and the SOS returns at JOHNNY 4.
• STAND idles read better than the audit could prove. All 14 STAND entries got concrete two-axis labels (position × pose: edge-of-island / front / right / left × adjusts-pants / adjusts- hat / looks-around / scratches-head / spyglass) once watched on hardware. The 8 LOW-rated rows are now distinguishable from each other in a way the corpus alone could not support.

The corpus and on-screen captions themselves did not change in v0.8.4-ps1. What changed is the website’s description of which caption belongs to which scene — the per-scene index.md titles + bodies, the scenes.yml notes, the scene-status.md Notes column, and the in-game Scene Explorer’s display strings (regenerated from those sources). The captionSceneMap[] array in src/platform/ps1/ps1_captions.c was not updated as part of v0.8.4-ps1; the runtime continues to play whatever caption the audit’s mapping picked. Repointing the captionSceneMap[] rows where the caption text contradicts the runtime gag (notably FISHING 2 → MARY’s boot, FISHING 3 → the crab caption belongs elsewhere or stays as NO_MATCH) is open work.

The 2026-04-26 audit’s confidence ratings should now be read as “how well the caption corpus maps to the audit’s notion of what each scene should be,” not “how well the caption text describes what the scene actually plays.” The audit was a necessary structural fix; the chapter-select grind was the runtime cross-check the audit had explicitly anticipated.

How to add a caption

The pipeline is two arrays in one file. Both live in src/platform/ps1/ps1_captions.c.

1. Add the caption text to the captions[] array.

   {"sceneNN",
       "Short opening line.\n"
       "Second line, ~35 chars max.\n"
       "Optional third line."},
   

   Lines wrap at \n. Three lines fit in the dark band at the rendered font size; a fourth line clamps the band but is supported. Keep each line at or under ~35 characters at 16px draw width to avoid edge clipping at 320 logical width.

2. Route an ADS tag to it via captionSceneMap[].

   { "sceneNN", "FISHING", 9 },
   

   The first match wins, so if you add a more specific entry above the sequential default, that wins.

3. Rebuild. There is no codegen — both arrays are hand-edited C.

If a scene legitimately has no fitting caption, leave the corresponding row out of captionSceneMap[] and the renderer will simply show no subtitle for that scene. That’s preferable to a wrong caption.

The render path

captionsRender() is called from grUpdateDisplay after the scene composite + LoadImage and before VSync. The render uses three OT slots in a small dedicated ordering table (capOt[]):

• Slot N-1 — a DR_TPAGE setting the texture page for the font region with abr=1 (semi-trans 50% blend).
• Slot N-2 — a POLY_F4 flat quad at full transparent black, sized to the actual line count (1–4 lines), positioned along the bottom of the 640x480 frame. The semi-trans bit lets the underlying scene show through.
• Slot N-3 — one SPRT per glyph, sampled from the pause-menu font atlas at draw size 16x16. Lines are centered horizontally inside the band.

Glyphs come from the embedded 8x8 ASCII font that pauseMenuEnsureFontUploaded() uploaded once at startup. PAUSE_GLYPH_FIRST = 0x20 and PAUSE_GLYPH_COUNT = 96 cover the printable ASCII range. Anything outside that range renders as a blank advance.

On the host build (#ifdef PS1_BUILD is false), captionsRender() is a no-op stub — captions are a PS1-only feature.

Related pages

• Pause menu — owns the shared font atlas and the Captions: ON / OFF toggle.
• Development workflow — how the per-scene loop validates that captions fire on the right ADS tags.
• AI sub-agents — the caption corpus and the 2026-04-26 audit’s confidence ratings were drafted by an LLM sub-agent and then human-edited; this page records what that did and didn’t cover.
• Lab: the LLM pass — magazine treatment of the same disclosure, with the caption corpus named as one of the canonical agent-drafted artifacts.
• Lab: the chapter-select grind — the v0.8.4-ps1 retrospective on walking all 63 packs on hardware to ship the on-PS1 chapter-select thumbnails, which also surfaced the caption-mismap set this page’s post-validation runtime corrections section enumerates. The pixel-validation bar guards pixel drift, not caption drift; that loop reconciled the prose against the discs.
• Voice guide — the editorial standard the caption text is held to (short lines, plainspoken, describes-the-gag-not-the-frame).

View source on GitHub

• docs/ps1/caption-audit-2026-04-26.yaml
• src/platform/ps1/ps1_captions.c
• src/platform/ps1/ps1_captions.h