SCI: PEPPER: Franklin's puzzle box doesn't appear to be solvable (bug or feature?)

[eriktorbjorn]

In Act 4 of the game, you will come across Benjamin Franklin's puzzle box, which is just a fancy 15 puzzle. The initial scramble appears to be non-random, because it always looks like this:

It matches this YouTube playthrough, which appears to have been made with DOSBox: ​https://youtu.be/CpASiXJhrcM?list=PLwprFgobvKXbqEr9DSq0TNSnfT5Tu9YZU&t=635

So ScummVM is probably doing it correctly. Turning this into a traditional 15 puzzle, this is what it would look like:

10  7 15  5
 9 12  4  2
13  8  6 14
 1  3 11

This also seems consistent with ​https://github.com/sluicebox/sci-scripts/blob/65c4100d1ba073e89290554f51acbe78777e3c95/pepper-dos-1.000/src/rm116.sc#L225

Unfortunately, this is not a solvable 15 puzzle, unless you use the "Help" button. Is that really the solution, or is there more to this than meets the eye? If it is an original bug, should ScummVM (perhaps optionally) do something about it?