FISHING 1 — Catches a starfish, throws it back

FISHING 1 running on PS1 hardware: Johnny mid-cast. — FISHING 1 on PS1 hardware. The reference scene.

What happens

Johnny walks down to the water with a fishing rod, casts the line, and after a beat reels in a starfish. He looks at it, shrugs, and tosses it back. Then he packs up and walks back inland.

This is the reference scene for the whole pipeline. If FISHING 1 looks right and sounds right across all four variant flags, the host capture pipeline and the PS1 playback engine are working as designed. Every other scene gets validated against this bar.

Reference frames

These are the Sierra original — captured from the host build running the real ADS/TTM bytecode against the original Sierra data files. The host-vs-PS1 frame diff is the project’s whole signoff loop: a scene “clears the bar” when the PS1 frames match these references pixel-for- pixel across every applicable variant.

FISHING 1 reference, host capture: Johnny arrives at the shoreline carrying a coiled fishing line. — Reference · arrival. Johnny walks onto the shore with the rod tucked, line coiled. From the Sierra original via host capture.

FISHING 1 reference, host capture: Johnny mid-cast with the rod arched and the line trailing into the ocean. — Reference · cast. Rod arched, line out. The PS1 build's hero shot at the top of this page is the same beat, replayed from the captured FG2 pack.

FISHING 1 reference, host capture: Johnny reels in a small red starfish that flies off the line back into the ocean. — Reference · catch. The red starfish in flight — the line that gives the scene its caption ("He catches a starfish. He throws it back.").

Validation

Validated as of v0.3.6-ps1. Variants exercised: night, low-tide, holiday, raft-stage. This scene clears the FISHING 1 bar — pixel-perfect visuals plus synced SFX across every applicable variant.

Pack identifiers

ADS dispatch: FISHING.ADS scene 1
Slug: fishing1
High-tide pack: FG/FISHING1.FG2
Low-tide pack: FG/FISH1LOW.FG2

Variants

night — Dusk/night palette swap (BOOTMODE night 1).
low-tide — Tide state variant; different shoreline geometry (BOOTMODE lowtide 1).
holiday — Holiday overlay variants — christmas, halloween, etc. (BOOTMODE holiday N).
raft-stage — Cumulative raft-build state; raft sprite gains parts as the player progresses (BOOTMODE raft-stage N).

FISHING 1 running on PS1 at night: full moon, dark ocean, Johnny mid-cast at the moonlit shore. — FISHING 1 · night variant. Full moon, dark sky and water, the same cast pose against the moonlit shore.

FISHING 1 on PS1 with the raft built: Johnny stands next to a completed wood raft on the island shore. — FISHING 1 · raft-stage variant. Same scene with the cumulative raft-build state at completion.

Caption

This scene has on-screen caption text. Confidence: HIGH in the caption audit.

Johnny goes fishing.
He catches a starfish.
He throws it back.

Notable runtime history

FISHING 1 high-tide is the canary scene for the entire headless-perf matrix. Re-measured on every release; its loop_vb vs target_vb ratio is the load-bearing reference frame for “did this matrix-wide change just regress the easiest path.” The latest rollup at v0.8.12-ps1 lands at 1068 / 1072 VBlanks, 0.0% public over target, 100.0% public target speed, blocking_vb=5 — the raw signed CSV row is -0.4% / 100.4%. That is what “the FISHING 1 bar” means as a timing claim alongside the visual one.

The perf battle card shows the per-variant rows; the perf retrospective walks through how this scene’s stability paid for the rest of the matrix’s accepted optimizations — the promotion rule requires that the canary doesn’t move backward.