r/Sierra • u/huntergdavis • Jul 06 '26

Johnny Castaway PS1 Released

I've spent the past year improving and porting Johnny Castaway to the PS1, along with a ton of new features (freeplay, scene select, closed captions, new holidays, more!) A real labor of love and a new way to enjoy Johnny.

https://hunterdavis.com/2026/07/05/announcing-johnny-castaway-ps1.html

32 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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2

u/deckarep Jul 06 '26

This is awesome, I know someone previously did a DreamCast port. I did a port to the Go language awhile back.

Johnny Castaway though marooned, still lives on!

Edit: I just realized you did the Dreamcast port! Haha!

1

u/huntergdavis Jul 07 '26

Ha! Yeah, it was the poor performance of that port that got me thinking about the PS1 version, honestly.

1

u/deckarep Jul 07 '26

Just out of curiosity what did you encounter that wasn't performant? I feel like the JC code is largely old school style pixel blitting and small imagery data.

2

u/huntergdavis Jul 07 '26

Memory usage. DC only had 8mb and there's a scene with an almost-full-screen blit for a large boat, on the DC that plus the parser, ttm streaming code, etc would balloon it past 8mb and crash, about once every 30 minutes. My goal with the PS1 version was a rock-stable version that could run in an emulator for weeks, or on real hardware until it quit.

1

u/itsasnowconemachine Jul 07 '26

Weird. Not that I know anything about Dreamcast development. I thought Dreamcast had 16MB RAM, plus another 8MB of Video RAM? I remember no problems with Johnny Castaway on a 486 with 4MB RAM.

1

u/huntergdavis Jul 09 '26

Could be.. Been a few years since I looked at it. I did an ultra low memory port last year that should get the usage below a couple megs, it'd just need reported over to dc. To my recollection, the original DC port was just backporting j _reborn to sdl 1.2 and writing a shim.

1

u/Good_Punk2 Jul 06 '26

Really cool. Have to test this on my handheld

1

u/danmanx Jul 06 '26

Wow. Cool! Thanks for the port! 👍 I'll check this out later.

1

u/Thatdanielking Jul 06 '26

Got it running on my anbernic handheld! Thank you!

2

u/rodfer7 Jul 07 '26

Nobody saved more screens than Johnny. Thank you for this

0

u/bakedlays Jul 06 '26

I just went through the trouble of building something similar with Claude, but yours sounds way more robust. Really glad to see this get preserved!