Help

A labor of love by Hunter Davis. This section is the plain-language help desk for the PS1 port: what to press, what each menu screen does, and where the debug power tools live once you want to poke at the island instead of just watching it.

• Menu help guide

  Every major pause-menu screen captured from the PS1 build by the headless controller-input harness.

• Controls

  The quick player-facing control map for normal screensaver mode and Freeplay.

• Devices — what it runs on

  The emulator and hardware combinations actually tested: DuckStation as the every-commit reference, SCPH-7501 via TonyHax for real PS1 hardware, plus the should-work-unverified list and the BIOS requirement.

• Pause menu reference

  What every pause-menu sub-screen does — Scene Set, Scene Explorer, Freeplay Options, Controls, World Options, Holidays, Set Island Position, Accessibility, Sound Test, System, Set Time/Date, Set RNG Seed.

• Closed captions

  Off by default; toggle from Pause → Accessibility → Captions. Dark text band at scene start; corpus authored fresh for this port. The 30 HIGH / 21 MED / 12 LOW confidence breakdown for every scene.

• Freeplay reference

  Direct-control Johnny, gag and visitor catalogs, world toggles, fishing, and the memory rules that keep it running.

• Regression testing

  The headless DuckStation suite, including scripted pad input and screenshot capture.

• Scripted input harness

  How the menu screenshots are generated from actual PS1 controller routes, and how to write a repeatable input repro.

The menu screenshots are intentionally generated by automation. A guide page that cannot regenerate is a failed test, and a failed test is a gift: it tells us the controller path, the menu state machine, or the screenshot pipeline needs attention before a release goes out.