Q6's last open piece was which state leads to which, and it turned out to
be a plain switch.
state = this+136, compared against 9, dispatched through a jump table at
0x821C6498. The ten words at that address disassemble as lwz r16,N(r28)
instructions and are nothing of the kind -- they are the table. That is
the same "self-reference" I flagged two iterations ago as looking like a
jump table; it is one, and the disassembler was decoding its data.
Three states install a named screen: 0 is TITLE_SCREEN, 2 is TITLE_MENU,
8 is LOADING. Eighteen transitions, every one a literal li/stw pair into
the state field, giving the full graph.
It lines up with the behaviour measured weeks of iterations ago without
either side knowing about the other: boot reaches state 0 and A opens
state 2; B at the main menu returns to the title, and 4 -> 0 is the ONLY
edge back to state 0, reached from 2 -> 4; entering a submenu goes
through LOADING and comes back, which is 4 -> 8 at four separate sites
then 8 -> 2. I have marked that as corroboration and said plainly it is
me matching a graph to observations -- the conditions on the edges are
not decoded, so nothing here proves which input picks which branch.
Still open and written down as such: the condition on each edge, what
states 1/3/5/6/7/9 do, and the fact that state 3 is never a destination
in this function, so something outside sets it.
own corroboration from last iteration
Last iteration I listed a candidate name vocabulary from "upper-case
strings the callers reference", marked it amber because those are not
proven arguments, and named the check: confirm per call site which string
actually lands in r5. Ran the check. It fired.
The first extractor FAILED ITS OWN CONTROL -- a backward scan for
addi r5 recovered 7 of 48 sites and missed both title sites I had already
read by eye, because there the name is built in r27 and reaches r5 via a
later mr. Rewritten as a forward register simulation it reproduces all
three known sites and recovers 46 of 48, giving 28 distinct names.
Two of my own claims die. DIFFICULTY and EXTRA_MENU are NOT arguments at
any site -- they are strings that merely live in the same functions, so
the "independently corroborated by measurement" line I wrote was an
artifact of the loose filter. Only TUTORIAL_MENU survives. And
sub_821CC860 is not a screen factory at all: its real arguments include
BG, BLACK, FADE, FILE, KEY, PAD, SOUND and GAMMA_RGB. It is a generic
name-keyed lookup, mostly config, which the title part happens to call
with its three state names.
The title finding itself is untouched -- sub_821C6458 really does
transition by calling this with TITLE_SCREEN, TITLE_MENU and LOADING.
What is gone is the inference that the 28 names are a screen vocabulary.
Two METHOD lines, both earned here: strings a function references are not
arguments it passes, and a backward scan for a destination register
misses arguments staged through a scratch register.
Continuing Q6's last residual -- the control flow I left unread.
All three state-name sites in sub_821C6458 compile to the same shape:
load the name, then bl 0x821CC860 with it in r5 and 0 in r6, then hand
the result to sub_82187B78. So a transition is lookup-by-string then
install: sub_821CC860(this+88, this+24, "TITLE_SCREEN", 0). Not a numeric
id and not a table index. That also explains something that had been
sitting unexplained -- GP_ADVERTISE_DEMO having zero xrefs -- because at
this level the screen graph is keyed by name rather than by GamePart id.
sub_821CC860 has 28 callers, and the upper-case identifiers in that
neighbourhood split cleanly into screen names and config keys. Three of
the screen names are corroborated by measurements I took before ever
opening this function: DIFFICULTY is what NEW GAME opens, EXTRA_MENU is
the EXTRAS submenu, TUTORIAL_MENU the lesson list. That is the static
side agreeing with the dynamic side on names neither knew about the
other.
Held at amber deliberately. The 35 strings are what those callers
REFERENCE, not proven arguments, and the list plainly mixes screen names
with things like TEXT_FONT and GAMMA_RGB. Confirming it means checking
per call site which string actually lands in r5, and I did not do that.
Still unread: which state leads to which. The three lookups sit in
different branches and TITLE_MENU's is guarded by a cmplwi/bne, but I did
not trace the branch structure, so the ORDER still comes from measurement
rather than from the code.
TITLE_MENU, LOADING
Taking the one residual I had ranked as worth doing: sub_821C6458, which
the previous note left explicitly unread.
It is the title part's screen-state function -- 4460 bytes, has EH,
called from exactly one place, sub_821C7850, which sits beside the
creator the registration site points at. Its string references are
TITLE_SCREEN, TITLE_MENU, LOADING and BASE_INFO. Those are precisely the
states measured off the running game, in the game's own words, and
BASE_INFO is this corpus's own marker for a screen-config lookup rather
than a table read.
That sharpens Q6's negative rather than overturning it. The title part
DOES ask for configuration keyed by TITLE_SCREEN and TITLE_MENU, and
config.ini -- the disc's only config -- has no such sections, only an
empty [SYSTEM] and [LANGUAGE]. So the game asks the question, the shipped
disc does not answer it, and the defaults live in code. The port can
transcribe the state names even though it must author their contents.
Marked amber, not green: this is characterisation from string references
and call counts, not a read of the control flow. Two self-references
inside the function look like jump tables, which is what a state machine
compiles to, but I did not confirm that and nothing here shows which
state leads to which.
One refutation recorded because it looked like a find for several
minutes: the {func, func, ptr} triples at 0x820a3b48 read convincingly as
a state/handler table and are nothing of the kind -- the bytes before
them are the tail of a RegisterToFactory diagnostic string and the data
column is zero-filled descriptors. Static-init records, not dispatch.
located, and two of them reproduce
Continuing Q8 rather than opening anything new. The gap that mattered was
the confirm cue: a menu needs a sound on A, and I had only cursor and
cancel.
The fix was where I was counting from. The first run started counting
streams at the main menu, so the confirm cue had already fired during
boot and showed up as "played before any input". Counting from the TITLE
instead attributes it cleanly: the A that advances title -> main menu
fires the 12288-byte wave at 0x5d6c0, together with the two stereo BGM
stems, which is the menu's music starting.
So move (0x1ec0, 0.533 s), confirm (0x5d6c0, 1.016 s) and back (0x0ec0,
0.344 s) are all located and decodable. Move and back came back with
IDENTICAL head bytes and sizes on a second independent boot, so the
dedup-keyed method is stable and those two are now n=2 rather than n=1.
Two honest limits recorded rather than smoothed over. The A press both
confirms and opens a screen, so its wave could be the cue the vocabulary
calls DECIDE or the one it calls SUB_WIN_OPN -- the port gets the sound
the game plays, not a name. And left/right fired no new stream, which
excludes a DISTINCT invalid cue but cannot exclude them quietly replaying
one of the three already heard, because the probe dedups on head bytes.
Finishing the step I left open last iteration rather than starting
something new. Offsets and packet counts were in hand; what was missing
was proof they are actually waves.
slb_extract_wave.py wraps a (bank, offset, packets, channels, rate) slice
in a synthesized XMA1 RIFF, following the layout the Rust decoder already
uses. The three located cues decode to 0.533 s, 0.344 s and 1.016 s of
mono 48 kHz audio, audible from sample 0, each with the percussive
attack-and-decay envelope of a UI blip. Bitrates come out at 12-15 kB/s,
about half the stereo BGM rate, which is what mono should be.
The control matters more than the results. The SAME wrapper applied to
BGM_001's first wave decodes to 173.808875 s -- identical to the duration
that bank's own on-disc RIFF header produced back when Q10 was answered.
So the header I synthesized is not approximately right, it reproduces a
known-good decode exactly, and the cue durations are trustworthy for the
same reason.
I did not commit the decoded audio. Three commands regenerate it from the
disc, and the corpus's job is measurements and tooling rather than
extracted game assets. The offsets, the packet counts and the tool are
the deliverable.
extracted", and the tool was in the build all along
Two iterations ago I closed Q8 by declaring the SE audio undecodable:
Static.slb has no wave boundaries, there is no XACT container anywhere,
and I said the index "exists only at runtime" as though that put it out
of reach. The disc half of that stands. The conclusion did not.
This build of Canary carries a cvar called xma_param_probe, added by this
project, whose own comment says it logs each XMA stream's parameters and
head bytes so raw sound.pak entries can be matched to real decode params.
It has been sitting in the startup CONFIG DUMP of every log I have read
this session.
Run with it, driving the main menu: a d-pad move spawns a new mono 48 kHz
stream of 4 packets / 8192 bytes, and B spawns a different one of 2
packets / 4096 bytes. Searching their logged head bytes in Static.slb
finds each at exactly one offset -- 0x1ec0 and 0x0ec0 -- and the two are
contiguous, 0x0ec0 + 4096 = 0x1ec0. So the bank is a packed run of whole
2048-byte packets with no delimiters, which is precisely why the seek
scan found nothing: there is nothing to find. A wave is (offset, packet
count) and nothing else.
That splits Q8's binding cleanly. Event -> WAVE is now measured: the port
can have the audio. Event -> cue NAME is still a name match on the
authors' identifiers, and the page says so.
The same run settled something for Q10 too. Sitting on the main menu, TWO
stereo 48 kHz streams were decoding simultaneously. bgm-two-stems.md said
that observation was what it needed and that this container could not
make it; it can, and a music bank's two waves are now measured as
simultaneous rather than only inferred.
METHOD gets the general lesson, because it cost two iterations: check
what instrumentation the local build already has before declaring a
question blocked on tooling.
ambiguous, the sampling was
Continuing last iteration's amber rather than starting something new. The
fix was already named there: stop using 5-second screenshots and record
the display.
Recorded with ffmpeg x11grab at 10 fps and matched every 0.5 s. Across
the 25 consecutive samples from capture 5.0 s to 17.5 s the S00A playhead
is strictly non-decreasing -- 1.0 through 11.0 s, advancing at
essentially real time -- with scores at or above 0.96 and four of them at
0.999 or 1.000 against a runner-up in the 0.78-0.83 range. S00A is the
top match on 23 of the 27 frames carrying signal. So MS00A -> S00A.wmv is
decoded from the manifest AND measured off the game, and the intro begins
about 4.5 s after A on the save slot.
The previous attempt's failure is worth its own METHOD line, because it
did not look like a sampling problem: it looked like weak evidence for
the wrong film. Sparse sampling produced contrast-23 frames, a playhead
that would not join up, and one frame preferring ADV. Sampling does not
weaken a signal gracefully; it turns it into noise shaped like a
different answer.
One aside recorded and not chased: in the S00A 5.5-10 s window, ADV also
scores 0.97-0.99 at its OWN monotone playhead of 33.5-37.5 s. Two films
matching strongly with two consistent playheads is not noise -- it reads
as the boot movie being a trailer cut from the story cutscenes, which
also explains why the sparse run kept flipping between them.
this container kills long runs
Three results, and the middle one is deliberately not upgraded.
First: NEW GAME -> DIFFICULTY -> NORMAL -> SELECT DATA -> pick a slot ->
a movie plays, with no crash. The previous run's throw at 0x82307128 is
therefore not inherent to the menu path -- the same six presses got
through it -- which fits the incomplete-cache trigger the corpus already
names. n=1 either way, and the note says so. Worth recording because one
observation had already hardened once into "A on NEW GAME hangs", and it
would have hardened again into "the new-game path crashes".
Second: with the path open, the manifest's MS00A -> S00A.wmv finally got
a runtime test, and it did NOT reproduce the quality of the attract-movie
identification. The first four samples give a clean monotonic S00A
playhead of 2, 6, 9, 13 s and the strongest frame matches at 0.916, but
the run as a whole is not one advancing timeline, most frames sit at
contrast 23-37 where this page's own rule says discrimination is poor,
and one high-contrast frame prefers ADV. So it stays amber: consistent
with S00A, corroborating the manifest decode, not confirming it. A clean
answer needs the 30fps x11grab route rather than 5-second screenshots.
Third, and it bounds the rest: the emulator vanished at ~145 s with no
crash line in its own log, last entries routine MEM-WATCH at 1.15 GB RSS.
Second time this session -- the other was ~50 s into a boot. That is an
external kill on a box with ~1 GB free and swap exhausted, not a guest
fault. METHOD and the handoff's residue table both now say dynamic
experiments here have to fit in about two minutes of guest time, which is
why the DELTASABER plates went unseen again: they need a mission load and
the run never got there.
1/60 s, and the 60 Hz reading is excluded
ui-keyframe-time-unit.md named its own re-test and nobody had run it: time
300 submitted frames on the IDLE title, where nothing is streaming from
the ISO. Reaching the title is cheap now that one A skips the intro, so
this cost one boot.
Two clean trials: 300 frames in 10.40 s and 10.60 s, i.e. 28.8 and 28.3
fps. That is the same rate as the 27.6 fps measured during the loading
splash, which is exactly the page's own criterion for "the game is 30 Hz
and the unit is 1/60 s". The 60 Hz alternative is now excluded rather
than disfavoured: it needs the emulator at 47% of real time while sitting
idle on a screen the capture says costs 1526 draws over 300 frames, about
five per frame. Nothing there halves an emulator.
So the durations stand as written -- title 4.2 s, main menu 1.1 s, EXTRAS
0.87 s -- and Q1 leaves the handoff's open-residue table. It stays
MEASURED, not decoded: no field on the disc says sixtieths of a second.
One trap, and it nearly cost the conclusion. My first attempt reported
39.5 fps, which sits between the two hypotheses and would have left the
question open. It was a harness bug: I polled the log for a "done" line
rather than for the COUNT of them increasing, so it matched a capture
that had already completed and timed 0.1 s of nothing. METHOD gets the
general form -- a log-polling probe must compare a count, not test for
presence.
residue in one place
Every MISSION row is answered, so this iteration checked the deliverable
itself rather than opening new scope: an answer that is not reachable
from HANDOFF.md has not been delivered, and I have been editing that page
by surgical replacement for a dozen iterations.
Four things were wrong or stale:
- the Q5 row still said initial focus was 2x TUTORIAL, 1x NEW GAME while
its own bullet said four boots -- I updated the body last time and not
the row;
- the Q2 bullet still described the other four main-menu destinations as
"likely by name -- an inference, not a measurement", which Q4 has since
MEASURED, and it listed GP_MISSION_SELECT as a main-menu destination
when MISSION SELECT lives under EXTRAS;
- the Q1 bullet claimed that if the game presents at 60 Hz "nothing else
on this page changes". That is now false: Q7's declared fade-in lengths
are keyframe-derived and would halve. The same bullet also missed that
the transition capture is a SECOND independent measurement supporting
1 unit = 1/60 s -- the quad is declared black for 12 units, 0.20 s
under the conversion, and the capture measured the plateau at
0.17-0.23 s. Recorded as corroboration, not proof, because the plateau
spans two screens' fades and cannot separate them;
- bgm-two-stems.md linked ../port/MISSION.md from inside structures/,
which resolves nowhere.
Also named the two videos actually in scope, since "3.3 GB of video, two
files are in scope" is not much use without the filenames.
And added a What Is Still Open section. With every row green the residue
was scattered across eight pages; it is now one table with why each item
is stuck. Two entries share a single unblocker -- an emulator whose audio
path can be observed -- and they are the only ones that would change a
port decision.
closing Q8
Last iteration I named Pj_Silph.xgs as the route to the SE cue index, on
the reasoning that XACT keeps cue->wave there. That route is dead, and
the negative is properly bounded: its 533-byte entry is high entropy with
no XGSF magic, +/-8 KB around it has none either, all 1.08 GB of
sound.pak contains zero XGSF, SDBK and WBND, and the executable has no
XACT or .xgs string anywhere. Control run first -- the same scan finds
RIFF in BGM_001 exactly where the bank structure says it should be, so
the scan works and the magic genuinely is not there.
So the .xgs and .slb extensions came from the authoring tool and survived
into shipped data that is not XACT at all. That goes in METHOD as a
general trap: check for the magic before committing to a parser for the
format an extension advertises. Writing an XACT parser would have been
wasted work.
What that leaves for the SE audio is undecodable-with-reach rather than
pending: Static.slb has no wave boundaries, there is no project file, and
none of the sound table's five records carries an offset. The bank is
certainly the right one -- 8 353 472 bytes over 322 cues is 0.84 to 1.01
seconds each at the bitrates the disc uses elsewhere, exactly the shape
of a bank of short effects. Only the index into it is missing, and it
exists only at runtime.
Q8 closes: vocabulary and bank decoded, the event binding a name match on
the authors' own event names, and the audio explicitly something the port
must source or author rather than extract. With this every MISSION row is
answered.
rather than leaving it amber
Q6's second half asked what the game READS to decide the boot order. The
answer is nothing, and the value here is the reach rather than a find.
Four places checked, the order in none of them: config.ini's [SYSTEM] is
empty and it is the disc's only config; the movie manifest carries the
boot-side assets but no transitions; the requested GamePart id was
already shown to exist only as a stack argument in flight, with no
persistent field and no literal store; and the string GP_ADVERTISE_DEMO
has zero xrefs of any kind, so nothing in the code reads the attract
entry of the id table. A transition is a call with an id argument.
Traced as far as it goes cheaply: the RegisterToFactory<0,
GamePart_Title> string is referenced from exactly one site,
sub_8280E148, which also takes the address of sub_821C7D98 -- where a
factory template puts its creator. Marked amber, because that is position
and convention rather than proof, and sub_821C7D98 has zero .rdata
references, which fits a new+ctor thunk and not a state machine. The
substantial function in that neighbourhood is sub_821C6458 and I did not
read it.
So Q6 closes as answered with the driver classified as code rather than
data, which means the port AUTHORS the sequence -- and that is fine,
because the sequence itself is measured end to end and the handoff now
carries it in one line.
GameParts exist at all
Q6's second half, advanced but not closed, and the negative is the point.
config.ini is the disc's ONLY config file -- one find over the whole
extract -- and its own Shift-JIS header calls it the "Application /
GamePart initial settings table". Its [SYSTEM] section, which that same
comment says holds what the game and every game part share, is EMPTY. So
the boot order is not in disc-side configuration at all, and that search
space is now closed rather than merely unexplored.
What the file DOES carry is the language: XC_LANGUAGE_* -> eng/jpn/deu/
fra/esp/ita, defaulting to eng. That is the mechanism behind the EN/JP
build pairs in GP_TITLE and the <lang>.pak families -- a question the
corpus had described but never traced to its input.
Then the registry. Pulling every RegisterToFactory diagnostic string
binds 24 of the 29 GamePart ids to a C++ class, and five ids have no
registration site: 1, 2, 16, 18, 28. Id 1 is GP_ADVERTISE_DEMO, which
agrees with what I measured two iterations ago -- the attract loop is the
TITLE replaying ADV.wmv, not a transition into an advertise part. Marked
amber, not green: it is an argument from an error message, not from code.
Two things fall out for Q4: ids 3 and 4 are the same class
(GamePart_SaveLoad, one part with two ids), and the menu buttons' ids now
match the executable's own class names rather than a list of table names.
Still a name match, one level closer to the code.
What is still missing is the transitions themselves, and I say so: the
manifest gives the boot-side assets, config.ini the language, the
registry which parts exist. What decides to advance is in
GamePart_Title's code and that dig has not been started.
Two corpus claims died in one boot, and both were costing us.
Q9's last row: a movie IS skippable with a single A. One tap ~45s into
the boot put the title up at ~57s, against a ~193s no-input baseline
measured over three boots, and Canary's own keystroke counter went 3->4
so exactly one press was delivered. The skipped-to title is fully
functional -- it draws the PRESS A plate and a second A opens the main
menu. What actually breaks the boot is hammering: the 88-press run in the
traps doc. The scripts' "tapping breaks the title" comment is too broad
and costs every scripted boot two and a half minutes.
Q4's last row: A on NEW GAME does not hang. It opens DIFFICULTY
(EASY/NORMAL/HARD/BACK, focus on NORMAL), then SELECT DATA, and only then
does the guest throw -- at PC 0x82307128, which is inside sub_823070B0,
the cache-manager STL erase this corpus already documents and which has
nothing to do with the menu path. The screen sat unchanged for 90s
because it was a menu waiting for input from a loop that never pressed
anything. That is now a METHOD line: a screen that never changes is not
necessarily hung, and the fix is to look at it and press something.
Also METHOD: never run ps -ef in this container -- all three long-lived
processes carry the entire loop prompt as argv.
not
Q8. The cheapest thing nobody had tried was to look at the SE cue names,
and they are semantic: SE_UI_CURSOR (2), SE_UI_DECIDE (3), SE_UI_CANSEL
(4), SE_UI_IMPOSI (5, the error buzz), SE_UI_SUB_WIN_OPN/CLS, and
SE_UI_SPLASH_IN/OUT. That is exactly the move/confirm/back/error
vocabulary the question asks for, named by the authors after the EVENT
rather than the sound. 322 SE cues committed as reference data.
They all live in one bank: BANK_SE is a single field reading Static.slb,
and the disc-wide check agrees -- 0 of the 322 has an entry in FILES, the
5135-path list that names every voice, briefing and BGM bank.
I am calling the binding a NAME MATCH, not a measurement, and the page
says so in the same breath as it gives the table. It is a stronger name
match than Q4's GamePart ids -- these are the authors' own event names --
but nobody has watched the game emit cue 2 on a d-pad press, and this
container is muted against a dummy device so there is no audio path to
watch either.
One new negative, with its reach. Static.slb's 8 353 472 readable bytes
contain zero RIFF, zero seek and zero WAVE, scanned over the whole
buffer. The boundary marker that works for all 7 620 other banks is
absent, so the cue is named, the bank is named, and the wave inside it is
not locatable. The UI sound effects cannot be exported yet, and that is a
gap in the assets rather than in the naming. The named next step is
Pj_Silph.xgs -- the XACT project SETTINGS points at, which IS in
sound.pak at TOC 9454, though its 533 bytes carry no XGSF magic and its
region's phase says they are probably the previous bank's tail.
new-game intro has a name
Q9, answered twice over -- once from the disc and once from frames I had
already captured and not used.
The movie manifest's first eight slots are the whole boot-side flow, and
the slot key is the role: LOGO1-4 -> logo1-4.wmv (not on the disc, which
is why the splash is a screen), ADVERTISE_MOVIE -> ADV.wmv, STAFF_ROLL ->
the credits reel, MS00A -> S00A.wmv, MS01A -> S01A.wmv. So the new-game
intro is S00A.wmv, decoded -- which is the half I could not test at
runtime, because A on NEW GAME hangs the emulator.
And there is no separate boot-intro slot: ADV.wmv IS the advertise movie,
the boot just plays it first. Confirmed independently by matching 19
attract frames against five candidates -- 15 hit ADV with a playhead that
advances monotonically at the sampling rate and ends at 137 s, its full
length, with the title back on the next sample. So the attract movie
plays to its end; nothing cuts it short.
That corrects me. Two iterations ago I recorded the attract movie as
"~85 s, so probably not ADV.wmv" -- arithmetic on a start I never
observed, since sampling began 39 s in. REFUTED and METHOD both take it,
along with the matcher's real failure mode: a near-black frame has no
signature, and its runner-up is not evidence.
Skippability I did NOT settle, and the corpus contradicts itself: one
page says A skips a movie every time, while the boot harness deliberately
never taps during one because it breaks the title. Named the one-boot
test rather than picking a side.
question expected
One iteration, as the mission gates it, and no Ready Room work started.
The two criteria it named both pass. It is NOT 3D: the corpus already
holds a capture of the running screen and it is a flat six-item menu in
the same visual language as the title. And unrecoverable paths do not
mean unrenderable screens -- content enumeration finds 60 builds in the
1106 entries.
What kills it is something the question did not ask. GP_READY_ROOM.pak
does not appear to hold the Ready Room's own menu at all. Two signals
agree: the four largest builds composite to briefing panels -- a planet
readout, unit markers, direction arrows -- and, much harder, the 902
bundles declare 317 distinct element names of which NONE matches any of
the six labels on the screen (takeoff, brief, hangar, pilot, option,
mission, ready all return nothing). The pak is the briefing /
tactical-map content behind the BRIEFINGS item. If this is ever picked
up, the first job is finding where the menu lives -- GP_BUNK.pak is the
obvious place -- not naming this pak's keys.
The probe also reaches back into something already delivered: kind ==
0x3002 finds ZERO buttons across all 902 bundles here, while GP_TITLE has
16. 0x3002 is one member of a 0x3000 family with sub-bits, and this pak
uses 0x3000/0x3004/0x300c/0x3008. Nothing in the milestone changes --
every screen in scope is GP_TITLE -- but the handoff now says not to ship
that equality as a general button test.
not something to concatenate
Q10, and it starts by withdrawing the question's own premise. BGM_001 is
not three sub-waves of 10 KB / 4.47 MB / 4.67 MB: the 10 KB is the bank
header. A bank is exactly TWO waves, and across all 32 BGM banks on the
disc the two always have the SAME duration -- equal to 0.01 s over
lengths from 37 s to 277 s. That alone kills intro+loop and kills two
halves of one piece, both of which require unequal lengths.
Four banks appear to break the rule and do not: BGM_106-109 are the known
leading-region straddle, and the giveaway is that the entry named
BGM_107.slb contains BANK id=1108. The seek packet counts pin each join
exactly, so they realign to the same two-equal-waves shape rather than
being dropped as noise. That trap goes in METHOD.
Then the roles, by decoding both waves to PCM. They are
sample-synchronous: transient-envelope correlation searched over +/-5 s
peaks at lag +0.00 s, and both waves stop at the same millisecond,
167.663 s. Two stems of one performance, meant to sound at once. Wave 1
is quieter, has almost no bass and is far more L/R-decorrelated, which
reads as a surround-rear pair or a second intensity layer -- I cannot
separate those two from the file, and say so: ChannelMask is 0x0002 on
both, and this game's channel metadata is already documented as
meaningless.
Two things the port needs that are NOT on the disc, both marked as
authored: the track is not a seamless loop (BGM_001 fades out and is
followed by 6.15 s of silence, no loop-point field found), and nothing
names which bank the menu plays -- all 32 BGM cues are numeric.
its timing is on the disc
Q7. Every title-side screen carries a full-screen black .prm quad that
paints last, and its keyframe group IS the transition: black at T0, clear
by T1, clear until T2, then back to black on exit. Read with the corpus's
start-of-a-ramp rule and Q1's time unit that gives 0.87s for EXTRAS,
0.97s for the main menu, 4.08s for the title -- from the file, not from a
stopwatch.
The disc-wide check is per-pak all-or-nothing rather than the 41% the
headline count suggests, and GP_TITLE's 6 of 12 is the useful row: the
six builds carrying a fade quad are exactly the six SCREENS, and the six
without are exactly the six overlays. GP_DIALOG is 0 of 133. That is
independent corroboration of the overlay finding from two iterations ago.
One piece is NOT on the disc and says so: the fade-OUT length. The fourth
keyframe has no time slot, because a group's last block stops four bytes
short. Measured instead, at 30fps, ~0.4s and the same both directions.
And a warning I earned: the luminance rise after a transition is NOT the
quad's ramp. The incoming screen's own elements animate in after the quad
has cleared -- 1.47s observed against a declared 0.97s. Time the fade
from where the frame is pure black.
Rig: screenshot samples at 0.5 Hz and cannot see a 0.4s fade at all,
which is why an earlier burst called this an instant cut. ffmpeg x11grab
at 30fps instead; both go in METHOD.
method lines withdrawn
Q5, measured off two boots: up/down move one item and WRAP at both ends
on the 5-item main menu and the 3-item EXTRAS alike; left/right do
nothing; B goes up one level and restores focus to the item you came
from (4/4); B on the main menu returns to the title; B on the title does
nothing. The menu opens on TUTORIAL -- the middle item -- 2/2, though a
third recorded run implies NEW GAME, so that one is reproducible rather
than invariant and says so.
Q4 by driving: LOAD GAME opens the save-slot list, TUTORIAL the lesson
list, OPTIONS the settings menu, EXTRAS build 6, MISSION SELECT the stage
list. NEW GAME is not tested -- A on it hangs the emulator and this
iteration needed the session. The GamePart ID behind each is NOT
measured: it is the entry of the decoded id table whose name matches the
screen I saw, and the page says so rather than wearing the badge.
And the withdrawal. Last iteration I wrote that these menus drop d-pad
presses shorter than ~0.3s. They do not. Once wrap is measured, every
press count I had is exactly right -- four presses moved four steps
THROUGH the bottom, which lands one above where a non-wrapping menu
would. I invented hardware flakiness instead of testing the ends of the
list. METHOD keeps the withdrawal rather than deleting the line.
Also: label brightness is not a cursor oracle here -- the background art
outshines the highlight on some rows. menu_focus.py reads the focus ring
instead, 254 vs <82, no tuning.
The handoff had Q3 as "runtime-solved only". It is not: the layer key at
+0x0A of the T8aD sprite header, stable-sorted, is a file-derivable paint
order, already checked against five measured orders and already driving
the compositor for every build on the disc. That answer had simply never
reached the page the port agent reads.
The new evidence is EXTRAS -- the first screen composited from the rule
alone and scored against a framebuffer capture the rule had never seen.
0.9620 at zero shift, against a same-tooling control of 0.9657 on the
screen the rule was fitted to.
Written down with its limit rather than its headline: align_to_capture
correlates edges, and a paint-order change moves blends, not edges, by
=<45/255 on a few per cent of pixels. So the score is evidence for
placement and only CONSISTENT with the order. The sharp A/B needs a
rebuild and is named in the doc instead of being claimed.
Q2. The archive is eight screens shipped twice, English and Japanese --
not the "build 4 title, 5 main menu, 6/8/9 submenus" the handoff claimed.
Build 8 is the JAPANESE main menu; 6 and 9 are the EN and JP EXTRAS, and
EXTRAS is the only submenu GP_TITLE holds. The PRESS (A) BUTTON plate is
its own build (2/3), composited over the title art and faded in a beat
later, not a state of build 4.
Confirmed by booting to the main menu and walking it: title, PRESS (A),
main menu and EXTRAS each match their render element for element. Builds
0/1 and 10/11 -- a DELTASABER / SYLPHEED A.I. plate -- were looked for in
the whole boot filmstrip, every title-side screen and the attract loop,
and appear in none of them; the reach of that negative is written down
rather than filled in with a guess.
Two rig traps went into METHOD: the menus drop d-pad presses shorter than
~0.3 s, and a grab 2.5 s after a transition can catch a screen mid-fade
-- which nearly wrote "the returned title has no plate" into the corpus.
Q1 of the menu port, measured against the running game rather than reasoned
about. The developer-logo splash is the cheap target: it is the first thing the
guest draws and its bundle declares short, unambiguous ramps.
Two results, both frame-exact and both emulator-speed-independent (frame numbers
are VdSwap counts, the guest's own frames):
* the ramp is LINEAR. A declared 15-unit fade lands on round(255*k/15) for all
seven of its samples with zero error, k stepping 2,4,6,8,10,12,14. No ease
can reproduce a constant step of 34 at both ends.
* the animation clock advances 2.000 time units per submitted frame, over six
consecutive intervals with no residual, with 1 unit as the quantum
underneath (one frame in the fade-out advances by 1).
The conversion to seconds is one step further and is flagged as such: 300 frames
took 10.87 s = 27.6 present-frames/second, which reads as a 30 Hz title at 92 %
under the emulator and gives 1 unit = 1/60 s -- the title build 4.2 s, the main
menu build 1.1 s. That reading is not proven, because the rate was measured
while the guest was still streaming from the ISO; the page names the one test
that would settle it and says what changes if it goes the other way.
Committed beside it: the raw draw capture and the per-frame quad CSV, so the
numbers can be re-derived without a disc or an emulator.
BGM_001.slb is three sub-waves (10 KB, 4.47 MB, 4.67 MB) and the decoder
concatenates them into one 347 s track. That is a default nobody chose, not a
decision: two near-equal halves could be intro + loop, two variations, or two
halves of one piece, and a menu that loops its music needs to know which.
Found while wiring the Audio Library up to the shared banks. Recorded in
HANDOFF.md as a trap too, so the port does not build looping on top of the
concatenated track before the question is answered.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Corrects the split I got wrong in 965c3f7. The container is for reverse
engineering, now focused on the menu port; a SEPARATE agent builds the port from
its investigation results. My previous version had the container agent writing
the exporter and the Godot project, which is not the intent.
This lands on the research/engineering line that was already in the estimate:
the container agent takes the research half, the port agent the engineering half.
docs/port/MISSION.md is now a list of open QUESTIONS (Q1-Q9) rather than build
milestones, ordered by what blocks the port earliest -- the keyframe time unit,
which build is which screen state, paint order for the six screens, button ->
GamePart, navigation semantics, the boot sequence driver, transitions, menu
audio bindings, and video binding. Each is done when a written result with
evidence exists, not when something compiles. S1, the Ready Room probe, stays
gated at one iteration and a go/no-go.
Most of these are BEHAVIOUR questions -- timing, transitions, what a d-pad press
does at the end of a list -- so the mission and the loop prompt both push hard
on measuring the oracle rather than reasoning from the file.
docs/port/FORMAT.md is deleted. The export schema is the port agent's design and
was not mine to specify. It is replaced by docs/port/HANDOFF.md, the single page
the port agent reads: a status table, what is already settled and can be relied
on today, and the facts that will trip the port up (the WMV3/WMA Pro intro, the
Static.slb size over-declaration, the voice-vs-music downmix, JNGL_001).
The derived/authored idea survives as the thing it always was -- a finding, not
a design. Every answer must be classified DECODED, MEASURED or UNDECODABLE-with-
reach, and never a fourth thing, because measured and undecodable both mean the
port agent is authoring that value and has to know it. Labelling a guess as a
decode would put it into the port wearing the badge of a measurement.
Reverts the Godot install from the RE container, its AGENT.md section, and the
export/ gitignore entry -- none of that belongs on this side of the wall.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sets a new mission: boot the real disc through developer splash -> intro video
-> title -> main menu -> submenus in Godot 4, interactively, with no gameplay,
no 3D and no emulator.
docs/port/MISSION.md defines it -- eight gated milestones, each finished by an
ARTIFACT rather than by compiling, plus the Ready Room as an explicitly gated
stretch goal with a one-iteration probe that decides go/no-go. GP_READY_ROOM is
1106 entries with 6 recoverable names and is ISL-scripted, so it is either a
week or a quarter, and the agent must not start it on its own authority.
Architecture, per the user's decision: the Godot project is INDEPENDENT of the
Rust viewer and never reads a disc format. An offline Rust exporter converts the
disc into open formats; Godot reads only those. No GDExtension, no Rust in the
Godot project, and sylpheed-viewer is off limits -- it stays the human's
verification tool with its static-data rule intact.
docs/port/FORMAT.md specifies the open format, versioned, because modding is the
port's second goal and that makes the layout a deliverable rather than a temp
directory: JSON over XML (Godot parses JSON natively; its XMLParser is SAX),
names never hashes, provenance in every generated file, and unknowns listed
rather than guessed.
The discipline the whole thing rests on is the derived/authored split. `export/`
is regenerated wholesale and never hand-edited; `authored/` is hand-written and
survives a re-export. Three things this milestone needs are NOT on the disc in
any decoded form -- which button does what, paint order, and menu sound cues --
so they live in `authored/` with a stated `why`. Deleting an authored entry
because the exporter can now emit it IS the measure of progress.
`export/` is gitignored: it is generated from the user's own disc and this stays
a clean-room repo.
Container: adds a pinned Godot 4 (windowed under Xvfb for screenshots, plus a
headless wrapper). ffmpeg already carries libtheora, which is the video target --
Godot 4 plays only Ogg Theora natively and the disc's ADV.wmv is WMV3/WMA Pro.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A reference page covering the four layers (disc media, IPFB archives, container
formats, domain chains) and the three hashes that join them: name_hash for
archive TOC keys (case-insensitive), tag_hash for IDXD records and fields
(case-sensitive), ixud_hash for localised text.
Counts were measured on the retail extract for this page rather than copied
forward from the corpus -- 41 archives, 26443 entries, 166 xpr, 97 wmv -- and
where they overlap with docs/re they reproduce it independently (104 cutscene
slots / 101 movies / 99 / 99 / 22).
It gives the dangling references their own section, because they are properties
of the shipped disc and a port has to survive them: pmbase.t32, SUBTITLE_S12B,
the four boot logos, GP_TEST, the six 2D paks at exactly 0% named, and the 42
provably unrecoverable ISL symbol keys.
Also published as an artifact for reading.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The library enumerator kept only names containing VOICE or \Briefing\, and read
eng\sounds.tbl unconditionally. So the Explorer could reach 4382 of the 9519
banks in sound.pak: no music, no jingles, no sound effects, and no Japanese
voice at all -- roughly half the disc's audio had no route to the UI.
`slb::list_audio_entries` now returns every named bank with the category its
path implies (Music / Jingles / Sound effects / Radio / Dialogue / Movie voice /
Briefing). `list_voice_clips` is that, restricted to the spoken categories, so
its existing test still guards the old behaviour. The 36 root banks carry no
language component and appear whichever table is read; the window gets an
English/Japanese switch that re-reads the other sounds.tbl, since the table name
IS the selector.
Two defects the decode found, both recorded in
docs/re/structures/sound-pak-contents.md:
* `Static.slb` -- the SFX bank -- declares 616768 bytes more than sound.p04
holds. Not our extraction: p04 matches the ISO's own directory record, and a
sweep of every pak on the disc finds this one entry over-running and no other.
It is the highest-offset entry, so its comp_size is an allocation size. A
short read is now allowed for the tail entry ONLY; any other overrun stays an
error, because clamping it would hide real damage behind a half-decoded asset.
The bank went from unreadable to 514 s of audio.
* the left-channel downmix was applied to everything. Right for voice (mono
content however stored), wrong for music (a real stereo mix, half of it
discarded). The caller now decides from the category.
35 of the 36 shared banks decode; JNGL_001 does not, and says so in the player
instead of the panel silently closing. Its payload is not a whole number of XMA1
packets from any known data offset, so it is likely not a plain headerless
stream -- written up rather than papered over.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Commit 56deb56 ("Merge branch 'auto/idxd-unnamed-keys'") shipped INDEX.md with
live conflict markers. My check was worthless in a way worth naming: I ran
git add docs/re/INDEX.md ; git status --short | grep -E '^(UU|AA)'
in that order. Staging a conflicted file is exactly what marks it resolved, so
the grep found nothing and reported "no unmerged" -- the control passed BECAUSE
of the action it was meant to gate. Both halves of the hunk then went into the
tree verbatim, leaving two competing IDXD rows.
Resolved as a union, which is what it always was:
* HEAD's "IDXD object/table" row -- the 2026-08-25 record/index-region decode
-- supersedes the branch's older one-line version of the same row;
* the branch's "IDXD nameless field keys" row is new and is kept.
The autonomous agent's loop prompt had grown to ~9 000 words of accumulated
findings, refutations and traps. That is a symptom, not a style: it was doing
the job the corpus should do, in the one place that dies with the container.
Three concrete failures followed from it, and each gets a structural fix rather
than a louder instruction.
1. IT REPEATED WORK IT HAD ALREADY DONE.
The "do not revive" list and the method traps existed ONLY in the prompt, so
nothing pointed a fresh iteration at them. Extracted verbatim into two
tracked files:
docs/re/REFUTED.md 105 claims tested and dead, grouped by subject so a
grep for your noun finds the neighbourhood
docs/re/METHOD.md the traps already paid for -- controls, inference,
searching, reading data, runtime
Both are linked from INDEX.md, and the loop prompt now opens by requiring
them to be read. This is the fix for "re-derived something already known":
the knowledge is now where the next iteration looks, not in a context window.
2. IT FORGOT TO ARM THE NEXT WAKEUP.
The prompt tried to solve this by shouting at itself in the first line. The
real fix is to stop asking: `loose` now defaults to a FIXED interval (45m),
so the harness owns the cadence and a forgotten ScheduleWakeup cannot end the
run. SYLPH_LOOP_INTERVAL= (empty) restores self-pacing.
3. IT COULD NOT PUBLISH, SO THE WORK ONLY EXISTED IN THE CONTAINER.
New `push-work`, plus a read-only credentials mount
(SYLPH_GIT_CREDENTIALS, default ~/.sylph-git-credentials). It pushes the
CURRENT branch only, refuses anything that is not auto/*, and never
force-pushes -- so the consolidated line stays a human's decision and a
confused iteration cannot rewrite history. The loop prompt now requires a
push on every iteration that commits, rather than at the end of some longer
arc, which is exactly when a container dies.
The prompt itself drops from ~9 000 words to 85 lines and, more importantly,
stops accumulating: findings go in the corpus, and the prompt points at it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Read 0x821A0AD0, the debriefing, end to end, resolving every call and string in
code order. The word-B bit-setter sub_8219F2E8 is its FIRST call, before anything
else; the function makes 44 calls and references exactly two strings, DEBRIEFING
and BASE_INFO.
No Time and no Points anywhere on this path - not in the debriefing, not in the
bit-setter. Section 5.3's expectation that clearing a challenge stage records its
metric alongside the bit is not supported by the code that clears it. The reach of
that negative: the debriefing function and its directly-called bit-setter, both
read whole; it does not rule out a store deeper inside one of the other 43
callees.
0x8219F670 turns out to be an online-state predicate: 88 bytes, no strings, reads
the singleton, tests bit 1 of [0]+60, and if set passes [0]+64 to 0x824A9C90 and
returns whether the result is 2. A connection or sign-in check, not a record
store.
The useful find is 0x8219F460, 368 bytes and self-recursive, which drains a ring
based at r29+320 with element base +4, capacity +8, head +12 and count +16. Those
are the corpus's documented message-bus offsets exactly - BACKLOG records
sub_82175C20(bus+4, &msg) as a ring-buffer append with capacity +8, head +12,
count +16 - and sub_82175C20 is the very notifier section 5.6 found the word-B
writer calling with bit + 64. So the open question "ring-buffer PUSH, no handler"
now has a candidate drainer with a byte-for-byte matching field layout, reached
from the debriefing.
What is NOT shown is that these are the same ring instance. The push targets
bus+4, this drain targets r29+320. Matching offsets prove a shared container
shape, not a shared object, and the identity needs the two base pointers tied
together.
All seventeen artefacts byte-identical.
Section 5.5 narrowed the search to 21 functions but could not name one, because
the scan assumed the copy destination was an r1-relative stack local. It is not.
Reading the known word-A writer instead of guessing its shape shows a frame
register: bl singleton, addi r3,r31,96 (dest), addi r4,r11,80 (src = obj+80), bl
copier, stw r10,96(r31). That one wrong assumption made the first scan return 0
for all 21, the known-good included - the third filter this week killed by its own
control.
With the real shape - addi r3,rF,K before the copier, then stores at K+d on rF -
word B sits at d = 1956-80 = 1876, and exactly one of the 21 hits: sub_8219F2E8,
copy dest r31+560, storing 2436(r31), and 560+1876 = 2436. Control: the word-A
writer 0x821C1630 stores at relative +0, i.e. word A.
The proof is the bias. Word B's writer computes addi r11,r11,-24 then 1 <<
(index-24) before or-ing into the copy; word A's writer shifts by the raw stage
number with no bias. That reproduces section 5.1's read-side rule - n >= 24 means
bit (n-24) of word B - on the write side, so word B's bits 0-5 are challenge
stages 24-29, the same six that 5.4's MISSION_ID names. The two writers are exact
complements.
It has exactly one real caller, 0x821A0B1C inside 0x821A0AD0, whose strings are
BASE_INFO and DEBRIEFING - so clearing a challenge mission is recorded from the
debriefing screen.
A second bitfield falls out of the same function: it reads the copy at +1880
(2440(r31) = obj+1960, the word after B), re-reads obj+1960 after the setter, xors
old against new, and loops the 32 result bits calling 0x82175C20 with bit + 64. So
obj+1960 is a second 32-bit progress bitfield with ids 64-95, whose newly-set bits
are announced one at a time - an unlock-notification loop.
Against 5.3's own prediction: neither sub_8219F2E8 nor its caller references Time
or Points, 0 for both. 5.3 expected word B's writer to also store the stage's
Time/Points record. It does not - this is the bit-setter only, and the record
store is still unlocated.
All seventeen artefacts byte-identical.
Section 5.3 left word B (+1956) with no known writer. Three routes ran this turn:
one produced a population, two were refuted, and the field is still unwritten.
The offset route has power here, unlike +184. +1956 is a large unusual offset with
9 stores and 28 loads image-wide, against +80's 5403 and 6923. Control: the known
reader 0x821898C4 sits in the gate's list-builder 0x82189870, exactly where 5.1
puts it. But none of the 9 stores turns out to be a progress write - filtering by
whether the storing function reaches the progress object gives 0 of 8 distinct
functions, and the 9th stores through r1, the stack pointer, so it is a local.
+1956 is simply an offset several unrelated structures also use.
The obvious filter is dead, and it fails its own control. Testing "does the
function reference the singleton global 0x828F48B0 or call 0x821707C0" against the
KNOWN word-A writer returns no contact, because that path reaches the progress
object through the copier and never through the global. A filter that rejects the
known-good answer proves nothing about the others.
What did work: progress is only ever changed copy-modify-store, so every writer
must call both the copier 0x82175110 and the setter 0x8216FF70. Measured, 21
functions call the setter, 21 call the copier, and 21 call both - the two caller
sets are the same set. That is the complete progress-write population and it is
small enough to read exhaustively. Control: the word-A writer is among them as
0x821C1630 (BASE_INFO + DIFFICULTY), and 5.2's store 0x821C1820 lies inside it -
the doc's 0x821C09D8-0x821C29F0 is the enclosing method, 0x821C1630 the function.
No member of the 21 stores to +1956 directly. Their only large store offsets are
into this - 1004, 1980, 2040, 2100, 2199, 2436 - with 1004 being 5.2's own
this+1004 & 0x20000 guard. So word B is written through the stack copy, at
localbase + 1876, which no offset scan can pick out.
One false friend worth recording: two of the 21 reference Points, which looks
exactly like the challenge record-storing path 5.3 predicts. It is not - their full
string sets are Dependency, MissionObjective, Points, WEAPON, WEAPONS, i.e. the
arsenal development economy, and neither references Time. There are two Points
vocabularies, development points and the leaderboard metric.
Next candidate, not yet checked: 0x8218EFE0 is the one progress writer whose
strings are BASE_EXTRA and DIFFICULTY - the only member of the 21 carrying the
EXTRA vocabulary.
All seventeen artefacts byte-identical.
challenge-mission-gate.md section 5.3 left a marked 🟡 on the exact pairing and named
the right route: read the record's binary index section rather than the string pool.
Running that with the corpus's own reader settles all six missions at once.
TimeAttack MISSION_ID 24 REQUIREMENT 16 RECORD_TYPE Time
ScoreAttack MISSION_ID 25 REQUIREMENT 24 RECORD_TYPE Points
Extra01 MISSION_ID 26 REQUIREMENT 25 RECORD_TYPE Points
Extra02 MISSION_ID 27 REQUIREMENT 26 RECORD_TYPE Time
Extra03 MISSION_ID 28 REQUIREMENT 27 RECORD_TYPE Time
Extra04 MISSION_ID 29 REQUIREMENT 28 RECORD_TYPE Points
Control: the table appears in 6 pak entries, all in tables.pak, and all six are the
same table byte for byte - one per language, i.e. one user under the per-pak copy
rule. Zero variants.
Three things fall out, none of them assumed. MISSION_ID is the stage number: the six
IDs are 24-29 in slot order, exactly the six challenge stages S24-S29, bijectively -
so the "four Extra0n modes against five _EXn stages" worry dissolves, because _EXn is
a unit-variant suffix that indexes nothing here. REQUIREMENT is a strict chain, 16,
24, 25, 26, 27, 28, each mission requiring the previous one's stage with TimeAttack
anchored on stage 16, the final story mission; 5.3 inferred a chain from the shape of
the string pool, and it is now exact and branchless. RECORD_TYPE is the leaderboard
metric and it is per-stage, not per-name: 3 Time (S24, S27, S28) and 3 Points (S25,
S26, S29), so the tempting reading that the Extra0n family shares one metric is
wrong - Extra01 and Extra04 are Points while Extra02 and Extra03 are Time.
Withdrawn from 5.3: the string-pool reading listed the numeric tokens as 16, 25, 26,
27, 29 with 24 and 28 deduped away. The real REQUIREMENT set is 16, 24, 25, 26, 27,
28 - 29 is a MISSION_ID, never a requirement. A value pulled from a deduped pool by
adjacency got one member wrong; the indexed read has no such failure mode.
Left as an association rather than a proof: RECORD_TYPE takes exactly the two values
Points and Time, and result-screens names two ranking screens POINT_RANKING and
CLEAR_TIME_RANKING, but no code path has been shown selecting one screen from that
field.
All seventeen artefacts byte-identical.
Item (a): mine the screen population found last iteration. Resolving every one's
key list via the string-xref join over its own body gives 298 distinct keys and a
three-way split: 95 = 9 corpus-known + 48 new with a readable key list + 38 bare,
where "bare" means BASE_INFO and nothing else. The bare 38 are the honest limit
of the instrument - a screen whose only catalogued string is BASE_INFO cannot be
named this way.
The control turned the finding into a law. Only 9 of the 19 loaders the corpus
documents appear among the 95, and which nine is not arbitrary. The nine that
reference BASE_INFO all read a SCREEN's own configuration: debriefing, career,
save, medals, evaluation list, gamma, POINT_RANKING, CLEAR_TIME_RANKING, hangar.
The ten that do not all read a DATA TABLE: unit definitions, weapon datasheet,
AIParams, stage settings, chatter, PlayerParams, ControlTweak, the PG* HUD
roster, material slots, and the leaderboard. 9/9 and 10/10, both off-diagonals
empty. The leaderboard falling on the table side is a check rather than an
exception - its own doc records that all 18 of its names are tables.pak names, so
it is a table reader that happens to paint a screen. That exclusion is what last
commit's "universal screen marker" claim was missing.
48 new screens are named by their most distinctive keys, including the title
screen (sub_821C4EB0: TITLE_SCREEN/TITLE_MENU/LOADING), the ready room
(sub_821D6D28: SCRIPT_ID/SCRIPT_PATH, confirmed independently by its own error
string silph::GamePart_ReadyRoom::Impl::PrepareScript), movie subtitles, the
three menu modes STANDARD/EXTRA/TUTORIAL, the speaker window, loadout and gallery
views, mission select, and an equip screen carrying the game's own typo
EQUIIP_LIMITATION.
One caution worth recording: a high key count is not a rich screen. The two
27-key entries sub_82297550 and sub_822A2F00 resolve to pure coordinate pairs
(1080,163 / 734,502 / 1164,403) - a layout table, not configuration. Read the
values before trusting the rank.
Still open: the 38 bare screens, and whether the EX_ in EX_MENU_DISABLE_SKIP and
EX_LETTERS is the same EXTRA mode word as +184.
All seventeen artefacts byte-identical.
Item (a): can the vtable scan name the corpus's anonymous classes?
The route I proposed last turn - "the RTTI behind those two anon classes" - does
not exist. Of all 1150 catalogued vtables, 1150 carry an ANON_ class name, 0 have
rtti_present set, and 0 have a non-empty base_classes_json. Not one named class,
not one RTTI flag, not one base-class edge in the whole table. Withdrawn as
unrunnable; the ANON_Class_XXXXXXXX labels are synthesised, not recovered.
The sibling methods cannot name a class either: slots 0, 2, 3 and 4 of both EX_
classes reference zero strings. Every naming datum sits in slot 1, the method the
corpus already had.
Re-verified at the true addresses (0x820A9760 and 0x820A9350) that sub_822814D8
and sub_8227A3A0 are each slot 1 uniquely, and sub_82286BC8 is in no vtable.
What the shape DID give: both classes are 5-slot with an exactly-88-byte slot 0.
83 vtables have 5 slots, 16 also have the 88-byte slot 0, 13 of those have a
catalogued slot 1, and 10 build a key list. Ranked by key count the two known
screens sit at the top and the rest name themselves - a medals screen
(MEDALS/ACHIEVED_MEDALS/NEW_MEDAL), an evaluation list (EVALUATION_LIST plus
eval_%02d_eval / eval_%02d_points), the gamma screen (GAMMA_RGB/GAMMA_WB),
POINT_RANKING, CLEAR_TIME_RANKING, and three bare ones.
POINT_RANKING and CLEAR_TIME_RANKING being two separate screens is a direct lead
for the open item "which challenge stage is which leaderboard mode": the
leaderboard is ranked two ways and each way has its own class.
But the obvious follow-on claim - that BASE_INFO marks this family - is false,
and the control says so. BASE_INFO is a single string at 0x820A20EC referenced by
95 functions: 10 inside the family, 85 outside, including sub_82286BC8 (the save
screen, in no vtable at all) and sub_822AE628 (the hangar loader). So the
direction inverts: BASE_INFO is the universal first key of every screen key list,
a 95-function population, while the 5-slot/88-byte shape is only a weak filter
that catches 10 of them plus 6 non-screens. Enumerate screens by BASE_INFO, not
by vtable shape.
All seventeen artefacts byte-identical.
The protective sweep after last commit's refutation. The question was which
existing claims the ind_call cross product voids. Answer: none of the ones the
corpus makes.
Every caller-count claim in the corpus verifies against call edges, with zero
ind_call contamination:
title-crash-stl-tree sub_82457780 "one caller" call=1 ind_call=0
isl-trigger-queue sub_8226EAB8 "16 callers" call=16 ind_call=0
isl-coroutine-spawner sub_822737C8 "seven callers" call=7 ind_call=0
challenge-mission-gate 0x82175110 "22 callers" call=22 ind_call=0
4 of 4 exact, and not one of the four carries a single ind_call edge.
There is a structural reason for that rather than luck. Partitioning the two
target populations: 1710 targets have ind_call edges, 12170 have call edges, 103
have BOTH, 1607 are ind_call-only, 12067 are call-only. And all 1710 ind_call
targets are vtable entries - 1710 of 1710, zero partials - against a control
where only 273 of the 12170 call targets are. So ind_call fires only on virtual
methods, and 1607 of them have no direct caller at all, which is exactly why the
two EX_ screens came back empty on call and flooded on ind_call.
The residual risk is narrow and nameable: the 103 targets carrying both kinds,
where a caller count taken without a kind filter would be inflated by about 633.
Everywhere else the two populations are disjoint, so a call-based count is safe
and an ind_call-based one is meaningless.
Rule for future work: always filter kind='call'; and when a function has no call
edges, that is a fact about it - it is a virtual method - not a gap to be filled
from ind_call.
All seventeen artefacts byte-identical.
Chasing what supplies the EX_ mode word. Two routes, both measured to have no
power, plus one structural fact that did come out.
The offset route is dead. stw ..., 184(rN) occurs 301 times in the image, lwz
from +184 occurs 351 times, and 115 functions touch both +144 and +184. +184 is
an ordinary small offset shared by many unrelated classes - the same shape the
corpus already recorded as failing three times. Nothing narrows to a writer.
The bigger result is an instrument refutation with corpus-wide reach. Asking
xrefs for the callers of the two screens returns 633 sources for EACH, and the
two lists are IDENTICAL, which cannot be right. Measuring the relation itself:
ind_call rows 1827297
distinct targets 1710
distinct sources 6992
targets with EXACTLY 633 sources 236
236 different functions sharing an identical source count is the signature of an
unresolved-indirect-call cross product, not of a call graph. Any reading that
treats an ind_call edge as "X calls Y" is void, here and anywhere else in the
corpus it may have been used.
The control shows the other kinds are sound: sub_82286BC8 has exactly one
caller, kind call. And both EX_ screens have ZERO non-ind_call edges - they are
reached only through function pointers, which is why the direct graph is empty
for them.
What did come out: scanning the entries of all 1150 catalogued vtables in the
flat .pe, both EX_ screens are slot 1 of their own class - sub_822814D8 in
ANON_Class_271D5F25 and sub_8227A3A0 in ANON_Class_CAA8AD62 - while sub_82286BC8
is in no catalogued vtable at all. So the 2/0/0/1 partition from the previous
commit reflects a structural difference rather than a coincidence: the two
screens that select on the mode word are vtable methods of their own classes and
the one that does not select is not a vtable method.
Still not settled: what writes +184. Both the offset sweep and the call graph are
exhausted for it. A route with actual power would be the RTTI behind those two
anonymous classes, or a runtime watch on the field - not another static offset
search.
All seventeen artefacts byte-identical.
result-screens.md left this explicitly open: "the selection has not been shown".
It is shown now. Both screens that reference EX_ names carry the same
five-instruction idiom immediately before the choice - sub_822814D8 at 0x822815b4
and sub_8227A3A0 at 0x8227a408:
lwz r11, 4(rX) the owning object
lwz r11, 184(r11) a mode word at +184
addi r11, r11, -3
cntlzw r11, r11
rlwinm r11, r11, 27, 31, 31 r11 = 1 iff [+184] == 3
cmpli cr6, 0, r11, 0x0
bc 12, 4*cr6+eq, <plain> not 3 -> STAGE_RESULT / OVERVIEW
else -> EX_STAGE_RESULT / EX_OVERVIEW
cntlzw of zero is 32, and rotating left 27 lifts bit 5 into bit 31, so the
sequence is a branchless equals-3 test. The equal-to-zero branch takes the plain
name, so EX_ is chosen exactly when the word is 3.
A partition over the three key-list loaders the corpus already names:
loads +184 does not
references EX_ names 2 0
does not 0 1
sub_822814D8 and sub_8227A3A0 both load it; sub_82286BC8, which references no EX_
name, has no +184 access at all. Both off-diagonal cells are empty.
3 is the game's own EXTRA. challenge-mission-gate already established the
vocabulary for this constant at a three-way switch: == 3 is EXTRA, == 5 or 6 is
CHALLENGE, otherwise FILE. So the prefix reads literally - EX_ is the EXTRA
variant.
That REFINES the doc's tentative reading rather than confirming it. The section
proposed "EX_ = the challenge-mission debriefing" by analogy with _EXn on asset
names; the measured constant is EXTRA, which in the game's own three-way
vocabulary is a DIFFERENT kind from CHALLENGE (5/6).
Boundary of what was measured: the EXTRA = 3 constant is established at +144 of
the stage-loader class, while the word tested here is at +184 of [object + 4].
Same constant and the same EX/EXTRA naming, but two different offsets in what may
be two different objects - that the two fields are the same field is NOT shown,
only that both compare a mode word against 3.
All seventeen artefacts byte-identical.
The obvious follow-up to last commit's wep_85 finding: the weapon packages number
00 to 84 with 26 holes, so are those holes cut weapons too? Partitioning every
number 00-85 by package-present x named-anywhere-in-the-parsed-pak-data:
named in data not named
package present 59 0
package absent 1 26
59 + 0 + 1 + 26 = 86, the numbers 00 through 85.
The 26 gaps are simply unused numbers, not unshipped weapons - nothing in the
data names them at all. The one occupied cell is the one already known: wep_85,
named 16 times, with no package. It is an isolated cut, not a pattern, which
refutes the natural expectation that finding one cut weapon means finding a
family of them.
The other zero is worth as much: 0 shipped packages are never named. Every
rou_f001_wep_NN.xpr on the disc is referenced by the data, so the package set and
the weapon vocabulary agree in both directions but for that single entry.
Running the identical test on the craft family gives a clean negative. Every
rou_f### number appearing inside an .xpr against every number named in the parsed
data: 16 in both, 0 named-but-unshipped, 0 shipped-but-unnamed. The 16 are
f001-f004, f101, f102, f104-f106, f201, f202, f301-f303, f401, f402 - the
hundreds digit groups them into five families with holes inside each (no f103, no
f203). No craft was cut.
So across both families the disc ships exactly what it declares, with the single
exception of that one weapon.
All seventeen artefacts byte-identical.
EF_IDX_ proved that prefixes exist, so the residual deserved the same treatment
across every package rather than one. Censusing prefixes over all 36
effect-carrying .xpr gives seven in use:
EF_IDX_ 223 names
mdl_ 45
EF_IDX_mdl_ 45
VolumeLine_ 10
GN_ 10
GN__ 6
bare the rest
Testing all nine unlocated names against all seven prefixes: 0 of 9 resolve.
That zero has force where the earlier disc-wide zero did not, and for the stated
reason - the control shows each prefix genuinely carries names the same search
reads (223, 45, 45, 10, 10, 6), so the instrument demonstrably works on the
population it is being asked about. The nine are bound by a datasheet field and
shipped in no package.
Two of them turn out to belong to one cut asset. eff_m010_wep_85 and
eff_m011_wep_85 name a weapon, and the weapon is real in the data:
Weapon_DSaber_P_wep_85_Beam with 24 uses, its Shell_, WeaponCannonName_ and
WeaponShellName_ siblings, and GameModel_eff_m010_wep_85 / _m011_ declaring the
two effects. But the weapon packages stop at 84 - hidden/resource3d/ holds 59
rou_f001_wep_NN.xpr files numbering 00 to 84 with gaps, and no wep_85. So wep_85
is a declared-but-unshipped weapon and its two effects go missing with it.
This does not contradict "every weapon is placed - 131 = 105+22+0+4". That
partition is declared x MOUNTED IN A LOADOUT, which is a different question from
whether a package ships.
Seven remain with no account: eff_e0044, eff_f0002, eff_f0002_barn, eff_h308,
eff_j002_e01, eff_j002_e02, eff_n0071. The .xpr route is now exhausted for them
under every prefix the disc uses; a different container or a runtime generator is
what is left.
All seventeen artefacts byte-identical.
Censusing ptc_pack's own naming vocabulary turned up a third variant of the
prefix trap, and this one had been corrupting a number the corpus carried.
268 of ptc_pack's names do not start with eff_ at all. They start with EF_IDX_,
as in EF_IDX_eff_d001_f. A regex anchored at eff_ chops that prefix off and
merges distinct names, which is exactly where the earlier figure of 532 came
from. Enumerating maximal [A-Za-z0-9_] runs gives 727. The two earlier traps were
a STORED name being longer (rot_n001_break) and a BOUND name being a prefix
(eff_f0002 inside eff_f0002_barnhaze); this is the third - a prefix the pattern
cannot see at all, because its anchor sits in the middle of the real name.
Looking each bound name up bare AND under EF_IDX_ resolves 25 of the 34 that were
unlocated. The map is now 128 of 137, and the residual is 9, small enough to
print: eff_e0044, eff_f0002, eff_f0002_barn, eff_h308, eff_j002_e01,
eff_j002_e02, eff_m010_wep_85, eff_m011_wep_85, eff_n0071. All 17 eff_l### are
among the recovered.
This withdraws my own previous correction. I had recorded Base.xpr (53) as
holding more bound effects than ptc_pack (46), and struck out "ptc_pack is the
effect library". With the prefixed keys counted ptc_pack holds 71 - it IS the
larger library, and the 46 was an undercount from the same truncating pattern.
Two shared libraries remains right; which one is bigger does not.
The suffix vocabulary: 106 distinct tokens over the 727 names - IDX 223 (the
prefix above), _f 137, _e 119, _root 87, _col 54, _mdl 45, _break 43, _ring 38,
_ALL 17, _haze 14, _thunder 10. That census counts ALL tokens rather than
trailing ones, which is precisely how the EF_IDX_ PREFIX surfaced inside what I
had first labelled a suffix list - the mislabel found the bug.
Testing the structural candidates the way _hangar was tested, does the suffixed
name have a bare parent:
_ALL 17 names 17 of 17
_root 87 64 of 87
_break 30 15 of 30
_e 74 0 of 74
_f 61 0 of 61
_root is strictly terminal - 87 of 87, and it never appears mid-name. The
compound shapes put it outermost: _e_root 19, _f_root 18, _break_root 13, bare
_root 30. So the order is <stem>_[<faction>|<break>]_root and _root reads as a
hierarchy marker rather than a variant - though 64 of 87 having a bare parent
means it is not simply the parent of an existing node, and _break at 15 of 30 is
likewise not a plain destroyed-twin-of-everything.
_e/_f never have a bare parent, 0 of 135. That is independent asset-side
confirmation of the faction law: an effect is authored per faction and there is
no faction-neutral original for either side to derive from.
effect-homes.txt changes 5/30 and every line pairs: five values changed (103->128,
34->9, ptc_pack 46->71 and its sort position, the residual header, 3-digit
80->105 of 110) plus 25 pure deletions, exactly the 25 recovered names. All are
3-digit, so the 4-digit line is unchanged at 23 of 27. The other sixteen
artefacts are byte-identical.
The previous commit measured _e/_f on one pak and only through the effect
binders. Widening the sweep to EVERY string field of every unit object in ALL
SIX GP_MAIN_GAME_* paks:
value _e value _f
UN_e### 198 0
UN_f### 0 366
564 of 564 agree and the mismatch residual is empty. The law is not confined to
one field either - it holds separately, at 100%, in each of four:
LowerHPFxModel 252 of 252
ShieldHitEffectName 210 of 210
ShieldRecoverEffectName 84 of 84
ExplosionFxModel 18 of 18
The two shield fields were not in the earlier measurement at all, so the law
reaches further than the *FxModel family that suggested it.
Scope stated exactly, because "general" would overclaim: this is a law about
EFFECTS, not about assets in general. The sweep covered every field, and every
_e/_f-suffixed value a unit binds turns out to live in those four effect fields.
No model, motion or SE value carries the suffix at all, so the faction pairing is
NOT shown for those kinds - there was simply nothing to test.
UN_n### (TTRL) binds no _e/_f value in any of the six paks: 12 objects, = 2
users, with nothing on either side. That confirms over the whole population what
was only a single-pak observation before.
Also corrects the ID grammar and reconciles a count. The earlier section reported
42 + 26 + 2 = 70 unit objects using a regex that required UN_<letter>###_<FACTION>_;
the looser UN_<letter>###_ finds 71. The extra one is UN_e910_core_ADAN_GeneratorCore,
which inserts a sub-kind token BEFORE the faction tag. So the grammar is
UN_<letter>###_[<subkind>_]<FACTION>_<name>, and both counts were right for their
own pattern.
All seventeen artefacts byte-identical.
Chasing the 17 unlocated eff_l### turned up their shape first: they come in
_e/_f PAIRS - eff_l101_e + eff_l101_f, and the same for l102, l104, l105, l106,
l201, plus _e-only l010/l011/l107/l108 and _f-only l002.
Partitioning every eff_<letter><digits>_<e|f> binding by the ID letter of the
OWNING unit (one GP_MAIN_GAME_* pak = one user):
effect _e effect _f
UN_e### 33 0
UN_f### 0 61
94 of 94 agree and both off-diagonal cells are empty. The control reads the
factions straight off the IDs: UN_e### -> ADAN (42 objects), UN_f### -> TCAF
(26), UN_n### -> TTRL (2, tutorial, binding neither). So an effect ending _e
belongs to an ADAN ship and one ending _f to a TCAF ship - the same visual is
authored twice, once per faction, which is exactly why eff_l### arrives in pairs.
What the 34 unlocated ARE is now also clear, even though where they live is not.
They are one job, not a scatter: Generic binds 32 of the 34, Explosion 19,
Shell 9, Level_0 and Weapon 2 each. The binder fields rank LowerHPFxModel 252,
HitFxModel 144, then JetFxModel_00N and AfterBurnerFxModel_00N. They sit in the
six GP_MAIN_GAME_* paks at 130 bindings each plus 32 in DefTables.pak. Since
LowerHPFxModel is the damaged-ship effect, the residual is largely the
per-faction battle-damage and hit visuals. None of the 34 is a record name and
only one is a field name, so they are asset references.
Stated plainly: they remain unlocated AS ASSETS. Knowing the family and its
naming law does not say where the geometry lives - the .xpr route is exhausted
for them and the parsed pak payloads hold references, not meshes.
Also fixes a defect in the artefact shipped last commit. effect-homes.txt came
back with two equal-count lines swapped: Counter.most_common() breaks ties by
insertion order, so the package listing was not deterministic. Now sorted by
(-count, name) and verified to regenerate byte-identical twice running. This is
the corpus's own rule - any map built by iterating a set or Counter needs
sorted() - and the new tool had violated it.
The other sixteen artefacts are byte-identical; effect-homes.txt changes only in
the tie-break ordering of the five 1-count rows, with every line pairing.
Enumerating eff_* names per .xpr across all 166 packages and matching the bound
names EXACTLY gives a real home for 103 of the 137, up from the 71 ptc_pack
alone accounted for. Only 36 packages carry an effect name at all, and two
dominate:
Base.xpr 53
ptc_pack.xpr 46
Stage_S28.xpr 2
five rou_f001_wep_NN.xpr 1 each
So there are TWO shared effect libraries, not one - and ptc_pack.xpr is the only
*_pack bundle on the disc, so no third shared library is hiding. By digit-width:
3-digit 80 resolved of 110, 4-digit 23 of 27. The previous iteration's split
survives and sharpens - the four-digit series really does live outside ptc_pack
(that zero stands), and now we can say where: Base.xpr.
Correction to the previous commit. It reported eff_f0002 and eff_f0002_barn as
present in Base.xpr. Both were SUBSTRING artefacts: what the file actually holds
is eff_f0002_barnhaze, one longer resource name that grep -l eff_f0002 and
grep -l eff_f0002_barn each match inside. Neither bound name is there. This is
the corpus's own paid-for prefix lesson arriving from the other direction - last
time it was rot_n001 vs rot_n001_break with the stored name longer; here the
BOUND name was the prefix. The new map is exact-keyed and does not have this
failure mode, so the earlier positive is withdrawn.
34 names remain unlocated, dominated by a family the last pass did not single
out: eff_l### with 17 of the 34, then h 4, s 4, j 2, m 2, t 1, and four
four-digit names - eff_e0044, eff_f0002, eff_f0002_barn, eff_n0071.
Scope note worth keeping: the j 22 / t 14 clustering reported last time was the
residual against ptc_pack ALONE; against all packages those families are largely
accounted for and l is what is left. Both numbers are right for their own
population, which is exactly why a residual has to say what it was measured
against.
New artefact with its regenerator: tools/re-capture/effect_homes.py ->
docs/re/data/effect-homes.txt, which lists all 34 by name. All sixteen existing
artefacts byte-identical.
