What changed
The guide remains at his fixed location farther up-left outside the morgue across all eight original courtyard entrances. His overlay uses the original game's submitted camera position, including its signed scroll movement, instead of updating from a snapshot every 140 milliseconds.
Accept the free Matchbox, choose Later, and continue playing. A separate Use Matchbox button remains available away from the guide while Jake owns it. It works in safe original field scenes, and waits while original menus, conversations, fades or room transitions are active.
Press G to talk in the courtyard, or M to open the unlocked Matchbox and its return dialogue. A controller assigned to Player 1 uses its configured SNES L and R together to open the enhancement; mapped A confirms, B cancels, and mapped directions select a choice. This reads the existing device assignment and button or axis mappings, including nonstandard mappings, without replacing them.
Portrait scenes pause the game, release frontend inputs and temporarily gate the existing controller adapter. Held keys or controller buttons must be released before normal play resumes. A controller first seen with buttons held cannot immediately open or confirm a scene.
Entering the hidden room records the exact original entry ID of the area you left. Return uses the original room loader and that same entry, preserving distinct entrances. It returns to the area's original entrance spawn, rather than the exact tile where Jake was standing.
Optional guide metadata now uses version 2 with a validated returnEntry. Existing version 1 guide metadata and the original snapshot envelope remain supported. An older hidden-room snapshot without a recorded origin explicitly offers a return to the morgue courtyard.
Paused snapshot restores retain their imported guide metadata until the queued original state has resumed and settled. Title-screen or loading RAM and temporary reader failures cannot terminate the guide's animation loop.
The street guide remains an optional browser enhancement with recovered character artwork and newly authored English dialogue; he is not an inserted original cartridge actor. The unchanged bounded bridge still permits only the existing Matchbox-owner and room-request bytes. ROM, core, bridge, walkthrough, music, recovered artwork and the original save-envelope format are unchanged.
Verification
Actual browser checks with the pinned original Japanese game covered the portrait offer, giving an initially unowned Matchbox, choosing Later, using M independently, entering hidden room 210 and returning to courtyard entry 1. A version 2 hidden-room snapshot retained its return origin after reloading.
An existing version 1 interior snapshot at entry 3, with Jake in dynamic entity slot 0x42, supported the independent shortcut to room 210 and return to entry 3. The original Start menu blocked use. Walking away through an ordinary courtyard exit retained the independent Use Matchbox control. In the accepted-guide flow, sixty ordinary leftward SNES frames naturally moved Jake through a courtyard exit to entry 232: the guide was hidden, independent Use remained enabled, and M entered room 210 and returned to that same entry 232. The 390 × 844 page kept Use accessible without horizontal overflow.
Eighteen private tests run the production guide, original bitmap font, bounded transaction bridge and verified live-RAM reader against synthetic current-state envelopes. They cover nonstandard configured controllers, axis mappings, assignment isolation, held-input release, independent use and exact-entry returns, old metadata, paused queued loads, camera bounds, per-frame reads and recovery from initial title RAM.
Eight independent source-helper tests and direct production comparisons covered 520 positive and negative field-guard vectors and 321 native projection frames. The submitted-camera calculation matched the original PPU scroll on all 321 captured frames.
Five pinned-core round trips from entries 58, 69, 13, 14 and 419 to room 210 and back preserved each exact entry. Each trip compared 701 original entity-state records together with the tested statistics, story and party fields. The original ROM and six-byte bridge allowlist remain unchanged.
Exact release checks retain all 20 earlier Shadowrun articles and 13 frozen source records, the original 47-file runtime and 250-file native reconstruction/archive, and all 38 music 1.0 files. Thirty audio assets are checked against their published full-body receipt and fresh headers, without replacing or re-rendering the soundtrack.
Limits
This is an enhancement to the original Japanese game through SNES emulation. The separate editable JavaScript recreation remains incomplete.
Configured-controller behavior has automated coverage. These checks do not establish physical controller, wireless reconnection or universal HID compatibility for this update; browser access to a connected gamepad and a Player 1 assignment are still required.
The complete Japanese campaign and every field room have not been played through. Use requires a verified safe field scene, ownership of the Matchbox and the accepted guide shortcut. Return uses the original area's entrance spawn, not an exact-position rewind.
Guide unlock and return information are optional enhancement metadata. Older snapshots without an origin cannot recover a previous location that was never recorded. This update retains the established native new-game behavior rather than adding a new unlock-reset policy.