{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1", "title": "Johnny Castaway PS1 — Lab", "description": "Long-form retrospectives, war stories, and methodology essays from the Johnny Castaway PS1 port.", "home_page_url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/", "feed_url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/feed.json", "language": "en", "authors": [ { "name": "Hunter Davis", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/" } ], "items": [{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/63-heroes/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/63-heroes/", "title": "63 heroes", "date_published": "2026-05-09T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "A retrospective on the per-scene hero-image rollout — how the v0.8.4 chapter-select-grind captures became 62 of 63 figured-and-figcaptioned scene pages, what frame-selection patterns repeated, what cross-link clusters emerged, and how the missing scene was filled in headlessly." },{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/chapter-select-grind/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/chapter-select-grind/", "title": "The chapter-select grind", "date_published": "2026-05-08T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "A retrospective on the v0.8.4 chapter-select-thumbnail loop — what it took to ship a custom on-PS1 thumbnail for every scene and reconcile the website against the packs that actually play." },{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/from-87-to-99-5/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/from-87-to-99-5/", "title": "From 87 to 99.7: the post-validation performance loop", "date_published": "2026-05-06T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "A retrospective on the headless-perf battle card after complete scene validation — the methodology, the accepted optimizations (FGP3, scene-local prefetch relief, stream-window retuning, padded residual packs, scoped read groups), the rejected ones (-O2, naive read-group probes), and the discipline of preserving the experiment log." },{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/v081-mary4-freeze/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/v081-mary4-freeze/", "title": "v0.8.1 — what the soak found that the matrix didn't", "date_published": "2026-05-06T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "How a long-run randomized DuckStation soak surfaced a MARY 4 scene-load freeze in the Johnny Castaway PS1 fan port that the bounded headless-perf matrix never exercised, and the clean-rect pressure estimator that v0.8.1-ps1 shipped to fix it." },{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/the-site-itself/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/the-site-itself/", "title": "The site itself, as a small program", "date_published": "2026-05-05T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "How the Johnny Castaway PS1 site is built — the canonical_baseurl trick, the path-portable build, the no-plugin Atom feed, the pager pattern shared across catalogs, and the build-stamp coarsening that kills per-commit churn." },{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/build-farm/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/build-farm/", "title": "The 24/7 Build Farm", "date_published": "2026-04-29T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "A short lab note on the Johnny Castaway PS1 build farm: Dockerized toolchains, headless emulator runs, performance logs, and why the project treats regression testing as infrastructure." },{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/why-i-keep-porting-johnny/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/why-i-keep-porting-johnny/", "title": "Why I keep porting Johnny Castaway", "date_published": "2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "A personal retrospective on Hunter Davis repeatedly porting Johnny Castaway across Dreamcast, embedded Linux, picture frames, text editions, and now PlayStation 1." },{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/regression-as-lifestyle/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/regression-as-lifestyle/", "title": "Regression as a lifestyle", "date_published": "2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "A methodology essay about the Johnny Castaway PS1 regression suite: host references, DuckStation capture, frame metadata, perf logs, and human review." },{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/llm-pass/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/llm-pass/", "title": "The LLM pass", "date_published": "2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "A methodology essay on the LLM-assisted development workflow behind Johnny Castaway PS1: parallel agents, review loops, hallucination control, and where the human stays in charge." },{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/35-holidays-codegen/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/35-holidays-codegen/", "title": "35 holidays in 4 weeks", "date_published": "2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "A codegen retrospective on expanding Johnny Castaway PS1 from four original holiday overlays to a 36-holiday calendar with generated tables and emblem sprites." },{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/pixel-perfect-pivot/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/pixel-perfect-pivot/", "title": "The pivot that almost did not happen", "date_published": "2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "A retrospective on the Johnny Castaway PS1 pivot from approximate SDL-to-PS1 porting toward host-captured, pixel-perfect foreground replay." },{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/voice-anchor-problem/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/voice-anchor-problem/", "title": "The voice anchor problem", "date_published": "2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "A prose-process essay about the Johnny Castaway PS1 site's voice guide, drawCredits anchor, Hunter Davis writing style, and AI-drafted documentation review." },{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/two-day-spi-bug/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/two-day-spi-bug/", "title": "The two-day SPI bug", "date_published": "2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "A debugging war story about the PS1 controller SPI/SIO0 polling bug that blocked the Johnny Castaway PS1 pause menu." },{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/hallucination-engineering/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/hallucination-engineering/", "title": "Hallucination engineering", "date_published": "2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "A practical essay on controlling LLM hallucinations in a real C/PS1 port: source-first prompts, generated indexes, build gates, and review discipline." },{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/dunking-bird/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/dunking-bird/", "title": "The dunking bird", "date_published": "2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "Dunking bird is a small piece of software the author wrote to keep long-running unattended jobs alive. It got used a lot during the Johnny Castaway PS1 port." },{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/the-63-scene-grind/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/the-63-scene-grind/", "title": "The 63-scene grind", "date_published": "2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "A retrospective on the finite scene-by-scene validation grind behind Johnny Castaway PS1." },{ "id": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/fan-port-in-public/", "url": "https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/fan-port-in-public/", "title": "Building a fan port in public", "date_published": "2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00", "summary": "A practical essay on the legal and social posture of the Johnny Castaway PS1 fan port: GPL code, original Sierra assets, release artifacts, and public disclaimers." } ] }