Theron authentic Track 02 startup handoff

Verified: 2026-08-08. This receipt records a real PC Engine CD startup through Mednafen using the supplied US Track 02 media. It is deliberately separate from Firestaff’s semantic loader and screenshot-promotion gates.

Bound inputs

The game data and System Card remain user-supplied and are not committed to the repository. The image is a crop of the real Mednafen window, not generated art and not a Firestaff renderer frame.

Positive evidence

The authenticated VDC/VCE replay path also has a narrow palette receipt: after the real BAT window is decoded into 4bpp tiles, each BAT-selected palette group is compared byte-for-byte with the corresponding native little-endian BGR333 words in the same authenticated VCE snapshot. This binds the screen-space tile pixels to their source palette. It still does not bind those cells to dungeon squares, perspective, HUD/object records, or gameplay semantics.

The newly admitted active-dungeon screen pair is recorded by complete-file FNV-1a identities VRAM=105dcffb and VCE=ea83f117. The raw pair remains on the external disk; only its identity is tracked here. Its admission is still screen-space-only and does not authorize square-to-tile or gameplay rules.

The later authenticated manual dungeon capture from 2026-08-10 is also admitted by the production screen loader as VRAM=5d20ebc7 and VCE=ea83f117. Its external receipt records the US Track 02 hash, System Card hash, Mednafen binary identity, CD-sector transition and 64 KiB/1 KiB snapshot sizes. This extends the source-bound screen-state allowlist only; it does not promote a dungeon-square, object, AI or T900 consumer.

The host event path received a real macOS Return key pair (SDL scancode 40), Mednafen exposed the configured PCE Run bit as raw=0008, and the CD trace recorded 56 SCSI reads and 175 raw-sector records. The first authenticated Track 02 reads include LBA 3234 followed by LBA 4165 and later startup reads. The resulting image shows the authentic Theron’s Quest title/menu screen with NEW GAME, LOAD GAME, the title logo, and the original copyright line.

This proves the following narrow boundary:

System Card + US CUE/Track 02
        -> real Mednafen PCE input
        -> BIOS Run handoff
        -> CD Track 02 sector reads
        -> authentic Theron's Quest title/menu frame

Firestaff CUE launch boundary

Verified: 2026-08-13. A hash-verified retail MODE1/2048 CUE no longer falls into Firestaff’s obsolete TRACK02 CAPTURE REQUIRED page. The normal M12 → M11 handoff resolves the CUE to its declared Track 02 ISO and opens the source-backed Theron title gate. The same boundary is covered by the opt-in real-media launcher regression and by `firestaff –game theron –data-dir