Therons Quest Track02 Internals

Theron's Quest Track 02 Internals

Why the Disc Is Not an ISO Filesystem

PC Engine System Card software works with record numbers relative to a CD base. Official Hu7 production places record constants in the executable; the finished disc has no runtime central directory for a game to enumerate. Firestaff uses strict CUE parsing, raw-sector layout validation, known hashes, and traced record transitions rather than filename inference.

IPL and Stage Two

For verified raw JP/US Track 02 media, the IPL executes record 0x0003e7 into local RAM $4000. The subsequent observed CD_READ loads a single sector into $3800: record 0x04df in JP and 0x04e0 in US. The receipt records variant, record, raw sector, MODE1 user-data offset/size, content hash, destination, and live record-register provenance.

The initial $3800 payload begins BRK $ff followed by $0308 and a bounded 218-entry envelope. BRK $ff is control transfer through the active HuC6280 IRQ2 protocol; the subsequent six-byte entries are not executable code merely because they share the loaded sector.

Stage Three Boundary

The stage-two runtime handoff accepts the exact traced record and structural manifest receipt, then rejects a mismatched or mutated record before startup state can advance. This is intentionally transport evidence only. It does not name a manifest entry as a level, object, bitmap, palette, sound, or script.

Startup and Route Transactions

M12 carries strict CUE/Track02 provenance into M11. Startup title, stage, Soul Room, forcefield, and Continue routes require all of their original bitmap and level receipts. Route assembly is candidate-first: a level/object route is committed only after every required data receipt validates. An incomplete route leaves the old runtime state unchanged and cannot fall through to a synthetic surface.

SRM Boundary

Save Disk candidates require one valid gzip member with bounded header parsing, CRC32, and ISIZE validation. Unknown original bodies can be catalogued but are not restored until their structure is independently correlated. Firestaff-native SRM export uses no-replace atomic publication so an original artifact is not overwritten by a test save.

Continue carries the accepted media route mask, checksum, and selected level bank in its receipt. Restore is atomic: bad media, bad gzip, or an unbound body cannot partly mutate the live world.

Verification

FIRESTAFF_THERON_TRACK02_US_BIN=/path/to/us.bin \
FIRESTAFF_THERON_TRACK02_JP_BIN=/path/to/jp.bin \
  ./build/firestaff_theron_v1_track02_ipl_loader_probe

./build/firestaff_theron_v1_track02_level_handoff_probe
./build/test_theron_v1_startup_save_resume_pc34

The next valid semantic step must come from an original loader read, dispatch, or layout correlation for a later record. Repeated bytes, descriptor adjacency, and guessed PC Engine data formats are not sufficient evidence.