Theron’s Quest — Keyboard and Mouse Controls

Theron’s Quest (PC Engine) has six movement-panel commands: turn left/right, move forward/backward and step left/right. Firestaff’s Theron route accepts both SDL scancodes and keycodes, so W/A/S/D also work on macOS layouts or input paths that do not populate scancodes.

Theron gameplay runs in Firestaff’s native C/SDL runtime. External emulators are research instruments only and do not run or replace the game in Firestaff.

PC Engine button mapping

The original PC Engine release has no mouse interface. Firestaff adds desktop mouse controls as a host-side convenience. During startup, left-click selects and right-click goes back. During dungeon play, left-click activates one of the twelve visible control-panel actions. Holding right mouse while pressing a direction key applies the manual’s Button II simplified-movement modifier; a right click by itself does not advance a tick. Middle-click is inert. Moving the pointer highlights a panel control. Clicks outside the panel currently do not trigger a game action. Direct clicks in the dungeon view require a state-driven renderer and a Firestaff screen-to-world mapping; they are not original Theron hit regions. Short and long touch gestures send Button I and Button II, respectively.

Startup menu

These are Firestaff’s native-runtime bindings, not a PC Engine timing model. On 2026-10-24, separate SDL key-down events advanced authentic JP media from title through stage select and Soul Room into a loaded dungeon. A continuous 3–5 second hold has not been verified in Firestaff. The retail manual documents Button I as the menu selection control but gives no multi-second timing rule. See DMWeb and Greatstone references and the dated evidence in TODO-theron.md.

In-dungeon

Turn input reports BLOCKED and leaves facing unchanged if the bounded source-actuator event queue cannot reserve the events required by the turn. The runtime receipt does not request a redraw in that case. This is a fail-closed queue-capacity guarantee, not evidence about the original game’s actuator timing or retail queue capacity; see the 2026-10-24 entry in DONE-theron.md.

The native dungeon view also shows a twelve-button Firestaff mouse panel in its lower-right corner. Its first two rows provide TURN L, FORWARD, TURN R, STEP L, BACK, and STEP R. The remaining buttons are NEXT champion, PICKUP, select the next source-backed ITEM, DROP the selected source item, USE the object ahead, and WAIT one tick. These buttons send the same native Theron input tokens as the corresponding keyboard actions. Their captions use the active Theron translation catalog. The panel scales with the game’s presentation size. Japanese and Chinese captions use ASCII romanizations because the native small font does not contain CJK glyphs. Hovering a control highlights it. Pointer movement requests a redraw only when the highlighted control changes.

Notes

• During loaded gameplay, arrows and A/D issue the source-backed side-step commands $06/$04; Q/E, Home/End and keypad 4/6 turn. Keypad 5 and keypad 8 move forward, with held keypad 8 sampled continuously instead of relying on SDL key-repeat events. Startup menu arrows retain their navigation behavior. This matches Firestaff’s ordinary DM1 dungeon keyboard layout while preserving Theron’s native command tokens.
• SDL keyboard input routes the same supported loaded-dungeon commands as the native mouse panel: Tab cycles champion, G picks up, I selects the next source-backed item, P drops it, U uses the facing object, and Space/Return or the PC Engine Button I binding Z waits. These keys enter the Theron input facade directly; they do not rely on the boot-probe-only key mapper.
• The native mouse panel provides all six Theron movement actions and the implemented champion, item, use and wait actions. The retail manual’s Button II chord is available as right-mouse plus Left/Right Arrow or A/D; it turns instead of side-stepping. A standalone right click does not advance a dungeon tick; in a loaded dungeon it is consumed only as the modifier, while Escape remains the desktop Back command. An SDL event-loop regression verifies that Button II plus Right turns, then that Right after release side-steps. A native SDL mouse sequence through the visible host panel also turns twice and advances across a source-backed tile, using authenticated USA Track 02. Existing US and Japanese Rev. 1 Track 02 runtime tests also exercise the panel’s turn and movement commands against each region’s loaded dungeon state. The Japanese test asserts both click receipts and the resulting party pose. These checks cover Firestaff’s host panel, not original PCE mouse support or direct world-space clicks. The normal SDL-loop regression also uses the panel to pick up the authentic level-0 SANDALS, reselect that source-backed item and drop it; three consecutive TRV2 Debug runs verify the mapped pointer receipts and resulting party state against USA Track 02. The SDL-loop regression also clicks TURN L, STEP R then STEP L over a source-backed open passage, NEXT and WAIT; the return pose and mapped action receipts are checked against authentic USA Track 02.
• The host-panel bounds are Firestaff UI and do not reuse DM1’s C007..C116 pointer tables. The original movement-panel captures identify six internal PCE cursor samples, not desktop hitboxes or host coordinates: turn-left $7B/$8F, forward $8A/$8F, turn-right $98/$8F, step-left $7B/$A5, backward $8A/$A5, and step-right $98/$A5. The samples informed the movement-control order only. Native state-driven Theron graphics and complete visual parity remain open; the overlay does not replace that renderer work. The turn and forward point captures are recorded in theron-original-turn-command-capture-2026-08-21.md and theron-original-forward-command-capture-2026-08-21.md. Do not substitute DM1 hit regions or guessed coordinates.
• DM1-like mouse parity remains open: Theron’s native dungeon view does not yet draw its original cursor, and clicks outside the Firestaff panel do not target the game world. The $D515/$D588 interval candidate must be joined through the live pointer descriptor, hover result and Button-I command consumer before source-derived hit testing can be enabled. The viewport must also update from native game state for clicks to provide visible, end-to-end gameplay. See the current evidence and remaining capture gate in TODO-theron.md.
• Run and Select have no keyboard binding (no gameplay use currently).
• Gamepad input follows the SDL3 gamepad mapping (D-pad, A/B buttons) where the selected input mode permits gamepad events.
• Pickup uses the authenticated Track 02 object occurrence and property row on source-backed levels. A successful pickup selects the exact source-backed inventory slot; P can return only that slot to the party’s validated square. Changing champion clears the selection. I selects the next source-backed slot for the active champion, so a carried occurrence can be selected again after resume; compact item IDs without provenance are skipped. DROP without a selected source slot remains unavailable. Use operates an existing door in the facing cell; a locked source-level door remains closed until the original T900 key consumer is recovered.
• F12 = screenshot (engine-global).
• Theron currently has no usable Firestaff save command in the dungeon: Ctrl+S and F5 report THERON SAVE HANDOFF NOT READY, and F9 cannot restore a Theron runtime. This is intentional until the authenticated between-dungeon T080 save writer/restore handoff is connected. The older Firestaff .tqsv container remains fixture/tooling data and is neither advertised nor accepted by the production Continue route.

Historical external reference-capture notes

The following notes describe an external research setup only. It is not used to run Theron in Firestaff.

The recommended macOS profile assigns PCE Button I to Z and Button II to X. This avoids keyboard-layout-dependent punctuation. Comma and period are valid only when the active mednafen.cfg explicitly assigns their SDL scancodes to gamepad.i and gamepad.ii; they are not universal aliases. The Firestaff capture helper resolves the host key from that profile instead of assuming a character key.

Mednafen’s emulated keyboard input must also be grabbed before these keys can reach the PCE pad. Most Mac keyboards have no Menu key, so the Theron macOS profile binds command.toggle_grab to SDL scancode 10: press Ctrl+Shift+G once after the game window is focused. With grabbing enabled, comma is SDL scancode 54 and period is 55; they work as Button I/II only when the profile assigns those scancodes to the corresponding PCE buttons. If punctuation still does not arrive, use the layout-stable fallback: Z is Button I and X is Button II. The capture helper type-checks before posting Quartz events, so a broken helper cannot silently make either binding look unresponsive.

The PCE wire-state masks used by the replay helper follow Mednafen’s device vector order (I, II, SELECT, RUN, UP, RIGHT, DOWN, LEFT), not the numeric ConfigOrder values shown in Mednafen’s source.

Firestaff runtime panel

Theron’s Quest supports the shared F10 graphics and cheats panel during runtime. PRES, FILT and FX update the host presentation immediately. CH contains only the verified shared cheat switch and slower/normal/faster live scheduler. Navigate with arrows and Enter or mouse clicks; press Esc to close.