Long-form retrospectives, war stories, and methodology essays from the Johnny Castaway PS1 port. https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/ 2026-05-09T00:00:00-04:00 Jekyll (no plugin) Code GPL-3.0. Sierra art and the Johnny Castaway character are © Sierra On-Line and not licensed under GPL — see /legal/. Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/ https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/63-heroes/ 2026-05-09T00:00:00-04:00 2026-05-09T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

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.

https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/chapter-select-grind/ 2026-05-08T00:00:00-04:00 2026-05-08T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

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.

https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/from-87-to-99-5/ 2026-05-06T00:00:00-04:00 2026-05-06T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

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.

https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/v081-mary4-freeze/ 2026-05-06T00:00:00-04:00 2026-05-06T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

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.

https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/the-site-itself/ 2026-05-05T00:00:00-04:00 2026-05-05T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

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.

https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/build-farm/ 2026-04-29T00:00:00-04:00 2026-04-29T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

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.

https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/why-i-keep-porting-johnny/ 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

A personal retrospective on Hunter Davis repeatedly porting Johnny Castaway across Dreamcast, embedded Linux, picture frames, text editions, and now PlayStation 1.

https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/regression-as-lifestyle/ 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

A methodology essay about the Johnny Castaway PS1 regression suite: host references, DuckStation capture, frame metadata, perf logs, and human review.

https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/llm-pass/ 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

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.

https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/35-holidays-codegen/ 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

A codegen retrospective on expanding Johnny Castaway PS1 from four original holiday overlays to a 36-holiday calendar with generated tables and emblem sprites.

https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/pixel-perfect-pivot/ 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

A retrospective on the Johnny Castaway PS1 pivot from approximate SDL-to-PS1 porting toward host-captured, pixel-perfect foreground replay.

https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/voice-anchor-problem/ 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

A prose-process essay about the Johnny Castaway PS1 site's voice guide, drawCredits anchor, Hunter Davis writing style, and AI-drafted documentation review.

https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/two-day-spi-bug/ 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

A debugging war story about the PS1 controller SPI/SIO0 polling bug that blocked the Johnny Castaway PS1 pause menu.

https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/hallucination-engineering/ 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

A practical essay on controlling LLM hallucinations in a real C/PS1 port: source-first prompts, generated indexes, build gates, and review discipline.

https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/dunking-bird/ 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

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.

https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/the-63-scene-grind/ 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

A retrospective on the finite scene-by-scene validation grind behind Johnny Castaway PS1.

https://hunterdavis.com/johnny-castaway-ps1/lab/fan-port-in-public/ 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 2026-04-26T00:00:00-04:00 Hunter Davis https://hunterdavis.com/

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.