Commit Graph

80 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
sylph-decoder
e61937f7a1 re: F1 answered -- 12 frames initial delay, 4 frames interval, by patching in the repeat the driver lacked
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Direct follow-through on this session's own named next step. The prior
result (f1-held-down-measured-no-repeat-via-file-driver.md) concluded the
file driver cannot show menu repeat because its GetKeystroke() never emits
a REPEAT-flagged event, and that the menu's repeat is very likely driven by
that flag rather than raw polled state. Testable, so tested: patched
/canary/src/xenia/hid/file/file_input_driver.h to add opt-in repeat behind
a new --pad_file_repeat cvar (off by default, every other scripted script
unaffected), using the SDL driver's own constants verbatim
(HID_SDL_REPEAT_DELAY/_RATE = 400/100, guest-time ms via
Clock::QueryGuestUptimeMillis) rather than re-deriving them. Incremental
rebuild, ~1 minute (only xenia_main.cc needed recompiling).

Control: the driver's own log confirms repeated keystroke events fire as
designed, zero crashes.

Result: re-ran the identical held-DOWN capture. The cursor that moved once
and stopped in the null result now cycles continuously through the whole
5-item menu, wrapping, for as long as the button is held -- the null result
was real for that driver path, and giving the driver the one thing it
lacked reverses it completely.

Measured at this run's achieved 29.87 fps guest rate: 12 frames (~402ms)
initial delay from the press-triggered step to the first repeat step; 4
frames (~133ms) steady-state interval for 13 of 15 gaps, 3 frames (~100ms)
for the other 2 -- slower than the raw 100ms constant driving it, which
this page flags but does not trace further (most likely the game batches
drained keystrokes per its own frame tick rather than reacting to each one
instantly). The 4-frame figure is what matters for the port: it's what the
cursor visibly does.

Honestly scoped: this measures what the game does when FED repeat events
shaped like the SDL driver's, not a capture through an actual physical
controller (none exists in this container) -- classified measured, not
decoded, for exactly that reason. One run only; the corpus's two-run
minimum isn't met, flagged rather than overclaimed.

f1_hold_capture.py gains an optional `repeat` argument. The Canary source
patch itself lives in /canary, outside this repo (Canary source, not
sylpheed-formats) -- fully described inline in the finding doc so it can be
reapplied if that tree doesn't persist across a container reset.

Reference data: docs/re/data/f1-repeat-cursor-transitions.tsv -- every
transition's frame, guest tick and Y position, not the raw draw log.
2026-09-12 12:31:05 +00:00
sylph-decoder
2939fa21d8 re: F1 measured -- held DOWN moves the cursor once and no more, via the file driver
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Fifth boot attempt this session, first clean one, using the harness debugged
last iteration (env-safe input, wide capture window, signed-in profile,
blanked X root). Reached the menu, held DOWN 2.5s wall-clock, armed the F10
draw capture, released, killed -- zero crashes.

Achieved vs requested: 433 of 600 requested frames, spanning 14.43s of GUEST
time against ~4.5s wall-clock for the hold+tail window -- this run went at
~3.2x real time (a cheap static menu, nothing pacing it to a display
refresh). The 2.5s wall-clock hold covers roughly 8s of that guest time.

Method: track one quad shape's position per frame via read_draws.py, not a
screen diff -- the approach f1-menu-repeat-harness-built-not-answered.md
already named as correct. Exactly one shape-group moves at all: one jump of
~0.21-0.225 NDC units (matching the known one-menu-item pitch), complete
within 4 frames / 133ms guest time of arming, then flat (a ~0.0125 pulse
wobble only) for the remaining 427 frames / 14.3s of guest time. Broadening
the match threshold finds no other moving element.

This is a STRONGER negative than the 2026-08-30 result it agrees with (that
one sampled a screen diff at ~4-5fps for 2.0s; this reads every quad every
frame for ~8s of guest-time held) -- it survives, rather than confirms, last
iteration's "coarse sampling hid a fast repeat" alternative, which does not
survive a per-frame instrument over a much longer window. Refutation
attempt against my own prior lean, recorded: it does not survive.

Reconciled, not left in conflict: the human's play-test and pad.py's
"auto-repeats" warning almost certainly went through a REAL controller
(Canary's SDL driver), which auto-repeats keystrokes at a documented
upstream 400ms/100ms (guest time) via the REPEAT keystroke flag. The file
driver deliberately never emits that flag, by design -- so it cannot show
repeat regardless of how carefully or how long it's held, which is exactly
the negative measured here. Still no F1 number; now a specific, well-
evidenced reason the file driver alone will never produce one, and a named
next step (add opt-in REPEAT-flag support to the file driver, matching the
SDL driver's constants, then re-run this exact capture) -- not attempted
this iteration, a second unit on an already-complete one.

Reference data: docs/re/data/f1-cursor-quad-y-per-frame.tsv -- the derived
per-frame Y position and guest tick, not the raw draw log itself (a capture
artifact, kept uncommitted per the corpus's game-content rule).
2026-09-12 12:13:41 +00:00
sylph-decoder
089aa8d7c2 re: F1 dynamic attempt -- harness debugged through four bugs, still no number
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Tried to close out issue #1 with an actual draw-log measurement this
iteration: built f1_hold_capture.py to boot to the settled main menu via the
proven glyph-gated route, arm the F10 UI-draw capture, hold a direction, and
read cursor position per frame -- the instrument f1-menu-repeat-harness-
built-not-answered.md already validated but never got to run against a
reachable menu.

Four bugs found across four boot attempts:

1. tap() shelled out to pad.py without this script's own env, so the press
   went to /tmp/xenia_pad.txt while Canary watched OUT/pad.txt -- an
   unobserved press indistinguishable from a dead pad. Fixed with an
   in-process tap() using the same pad() the hold uses; confirmed working
   the next run (title 154.5s, menu 163.0s).

2. ui_draw_capture_frames/max were persisted at 3/20000 from a prior
   session in xenia-canary.config.toml -- log_ui_draws is now a documented
   no-op (F10 arms unconditionally) and these two cvars didn't visibly
   respond to command-line overrides. Bumped to 600/400000 directly in the
   config.

3. The real blocker: this container has no signed-in profile (no content/
   directory at all -- a fresh container after a restart, which every
   container is right after one). Without a profile the title's sign-in
   dialog sets IsUIActive() true, which reproduces
   structures/title-a-press-fault.md's already-diagnosed unbounded-
   keystroke-queue crash -- verified byte-for-byte against that page's own
   addresses (PC 0x868 past sub_82457038, 0x828F3xxx registers, identical
   host/guest address arithmetic), looping continuously from before F10 was
   ever pressed. Fixed by creating a profile (--create_profile_if_none) and
   signing in (--logged_profile_slot_0_xuid), matching boot_menu.sh, which
   already did this and so never hit it. Confirmed: zero crashes with the
   fix, dozens per run without it.

4. Found but not re-verified: no xsetroot blank before launch, so a stale
   X-root frame from a killed prior run gave a false "TITLE" read at 2.6s,
   before any real window existed -- skip_intro.sh already blanks the root
   for exactly this reason. Fixed in the script.

Ran out of budget before a clean end-to-end run landed. Still no number for
issue #1 -- the Port keeps -1.0. Flagged prominently (HANDOFF, REFUTED.md)
because bug 3 will hit any bare run-canary invocation in any fresh
container, not just this script.
2026-09-12 12:02:53 +00:00
sylph-decoder
9141741777 re: F1 -- the "no auto-repeat" finding was measuring our own driver
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Issue #1's premise (the human's play-test: a held direction repeats) directly
contradicted menu-navigation-semantics.md's 2026-08-30 "no auto-repeat"
row. Read the instrument before trusting either: nav_repeat_and_b.py drove
input through Canary's --hid=file driver, and that driver's GetKeystroke()
is explicitly, deliberately built to deliver exactly one event per held
press ("scripted input wants precisely one event per press, and repeat is
what makes menu steps overshoot" -- file_input_driver.h's own comment).
input-pad-read-path.md already established the game reads menu input via
this same Keystroke API. A driver engineered to prevent repeat cannot be
evidence the game lacks it -- the counter's control (a tap gives 1 spike)
proved the counter works, not that the driver could show more than one.

Not a clean reversal, and said so: the same driver's GetState() holds a
button continuously with no edge suppression, and pad.py's own docstring --
written by an earlier session driving this exact tool -- warns that a longer
dpad hold "auto-repeats and overshoots," describing an observed effect
through this same driver. The two pieces of evidence disagree and this page
does not resolve which wins.

Also read from Canary's source: the SDL input driver (what a real controller
goes through) auto-repeats keystrokes at 400 ms initial delay then 100 ms
interval, guest time (HID_SDL_REPEAT_DELAY/RATE, upstream Xenia, not a
project change) -- a concrete, testable prediction for what the real number
could be if the menu treats repeat-flagged keystrokes as nav steps, matching
the human's "medium pace" description. Not yet measured.

Refutation attempt this iteration, recorded per adversarial duty: targeted
the 2026-08-30 "no auto-repeat,  measured" claim. Survives only partially --
demoted to unsettled, not flipped to a confident opposite. New REFUTED.md
section (Menu navigation and input) and the row in
menu-navigation-semantics.md both corrected in place, old text kept per
convention.

What would close it: trace C_PAD_RINGBUF's producer (keystroke ring vs
polled state) statically, or add an opt-in repeat mode to the file driver
and read cursor position off the draw log per frame. Neither run this
iteration -- this is the static half, and reversing a standing claim is
enough for one unit without stacking a build-and-boot run on top of it
unverified.
2026-09-12 10:57:46 +00:00
MechaCat02
647390e1dc register: reclassify under R1 -- name every instrument, re-open the ten our own killed
Both agents asked for this and neither could do it: the register is the file
they both read to decide what NOT to try, so two agents agreeing is not the
authority for changing it (RETRO-2026-08-31-agreed §7.1).

R1: a refutation whose instrument is one of our renderers is not a refutation,
it is "our renderer disagrees" -- 🟡, not . The motivating case was not
careless work. "Blending those sprites additively worsens every measure against
the capture" killed a real disc field for weeks, and read exactly like a
publishable negative; the renderer behind it had a stale keyframe association,
no leaf geometry and no rotation. Nothing in the entry could have told you.

All 222 entries now end with ⟨instrument⟩, read off each entry's OWN stated
evidence -- never inferred. An entry that states none gets `unrecorded`, which
is 83 of them.

Ten moved  -> 🟡, each naming what would settle it: 8 render-vs-capture,
1 our-reader, 1 harness.

Three things the pass turned up:

* The rest() question is OPEN and had been reading as settled in both
  directions -- "rest = last keyframe" was refuted by a sibling argument, and
  that refutation refuted by correlating our render against captures. Both legs
  are our renderer. Which one you believed depended on which entry you found
  first, and it decides the pose every plateau-less element is drawn at.
* A withdrawal never reached its sibling: "2 391 frames, max glyph 0" was
  withdrawn because a long-lived x11grab stream freezes and repeats a stale
  frame; the 1 674-sample negative three lines above it, same probe, was left
  standing as a reinstated measurement.
* 83 of 222 -- 37 % -- record no instrument at all. Not disputed, not safe:
  unauditable, and larger than every other group combined.

tools/stale-instrument is the --stale query the rule needs, because a colour
alone re-opens nothing: the failure was that nothing re-opened a claim when the
instrument that killed it improved. Its own --check found a real bug on the
first run -- sys.exit("text") exits 1, so three faults documented as exit 2
were reporting the same code as an ordinary miss.

R1 is now standing text in PROTOCOL.md, with R5's exception: our tool is the
right instrument for a question about our tool.
2026-09-01 17:21:17 +02:00
sylph-decoder
f4987977a3 re: the blend mode IS on the disc -- T8aD +0x04 bit 0x02, DECODED
Reverses two of my own pages. t32-blend-mode-not-on-disc.md said the mode is not
on the disc; ui-blend-mode-measured.md classified it measured and told the port
that which field selects it was unknown. Both were honest and neither is current.

Bit 0x02 of +0x04 set means the game draws that sprite ADDITIVE
(RB_BLENDCONTROL0 = 0x01010101); clear means premultiplied alpha-over.

Fit: 35 elements over three screens, 16 set/additive and 19 clear/alpha-over,
zero errors, every label read out of the guest command stream rather than off a
render.

Control: of every bit of the first twelve header words, exactly one separates
those 35 without error. Nothing ties with it -- which is precisely what the
+0x08 = 0x8050 candidate failed.

Within-pair: ptbtn00 0x0110 alpha-over against ptbtn00f 0x0112 additive, same
screen, same bundle, adjacent draws, one bit apart. And other f variants are
bit-clear and alpha-over, so it is not 'focused variants are additive'.

Out of sample: a prediction committed at bbd85e9, before its capture, on a
different archive -- GP_OPTIONS entry 19, 3 additive of 16, falsified if any
other element drew additive. The game drew exactly po_menu_eff01/02/03 additive
and nothing else.

This revives a claim REFUTED.md killed. The refutation said blending those
sprites additively worsens every measure against the capture -- a claim about
our renderer, made while that renderer had a stale keyframe association, no leaf
geometry and no rotation. Recorded as a revival with its evidence;
check_refuted.py passes with 0 unmarked assertions.

Two other readings of the same bit stay refuted and are explicitly not revived:
'the name contains eff' and 'premultiplied storage'. Those were the bit's
meaning; this is its effect.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2026-08-31 07:20:12 +00:00
sylph-decoder
cf73cfcbcf refuted: my own 0x8050 candidate (twice), and the port's frame sharpener
0x8050 dies disc-wide (38 sprites, high byte tracks the archive) and again on
EXTRAS, where pteff21/22/23 share it with the frames.

The port's 'neither frame has a fully-opaque pixel' is true and is not the
discriminator: pteff10 has max alpha 130, no opaque pixel, and they measure it as
nearly exact. Their direction survives -- the draw path did answer -- so what is
refuted is the reason, not the conclusion.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2026-08-31 06:09:05 +00:00
sylph-decoder
a111f28b63 re: GP_DIALOG 0/1 is a byte-identical duplicate; 2/3 is a structural pair
The two adjacent pairs with identical element sets split. 0/1 are the same 59 810
bytes stored twice -- a duplicate, not a language pair. 2/3, the DIFFICULTY build,
differ in size and in 2.77 % of bytes from offset 0x1BB while sharing every element
name, which is what a language pair looks like.

Control: entries 10/11, known to be two different dialogs, differ in 54.90 % of the
common prefix, so the comparator separates unrelated dialogs.

Supported, not proven, with the untested step named: I have not captured DIFFICULTY
in ja. That the two are ENGLISH and JAPANESE rests on the disc's convention, not on
a capture of this screen. This partially restores a claim I withdrew, at lower
strength than the original phrasing.

Also records a refutation attempt on the port's BGM_103 exclusion: it survives and
is tighter than they stated -- of 32 census rows, exactly one bank carries EITHER
wave size, not merely both.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2026-08-31 03:12:59 +00:00
sylph-decoder
d48781262e re: menu focus does not survive a reboot -- six fresh boots, three following a session that ended elsewhere
No new boot was spent: six runs had already captured the first menu entry of a
fresh boot, and all six read NEW GAME. Three of them follow a session that ended
with the cursor on EXTRAS or OPTIONS, which is what makes it a test of persistence
rather than a repeated observation.

Reach stated rather than implied: every session ends with the emulator KILLED, so a
game that writes menu state on a clean shutdown would never get the chance. This
measures 'does not survive a killed session'.

Refutation attempt on the port's extras/initial_focus: ptbtn11 -- it SURVIVES.
ptbtn11 is the top button on the EXTRAS build, with the main menu as a control
where ptbtn01 is top and is known to be NEW GAME.

Incidentally corrects ring_row.py's stated calibration. It cited capture_y = 49.5 +
1.060*design_y, fitted against menu_focus.py's row centres, which are NOT the
disc's button rows -- the disc says 162/242/322/401/482, spacing 80, and
menu_focus.py drifts up to 17 px against them. Re-fitted: 64.82 + 0.9919*design_y,
residuals under 0.7 px. No item assignment changes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2026-08-31 01:51:03 +00:00
sylph-decoder
5e89f21f94 re: refutation attempt on the band-energy check -- survives, with the margin quantified
A 1 s misalignment costs 0.16 dB against their 0.66 dB pass band, so the
alignment-free claim holds. Two caveats measured: at 10 s it reaches 1.00 dB, since
a fixed window covers different material once the shift is large; and the
separation floor is material-dependent -- two unrelated music banks give 5.28 dB
where an unrelated movie gave them 19-20, so the threshold's margin depends on the
known-negative chosen.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2026-08-31 00:14:38 +00:00
sylph-decoder
dcfb53bc9b re: a bank's wave 1 is not a filtered copy of wave 0 -- and my own discriminator cannot finish the job
Coherence on BGM_103, the menu's bank, with controls run first: a real linear
filter of wave 0 reads 0.93-0.94 in every band, a different bank reads 0.001, and
wave 0 misaligned by 1 s reads 0.004-0.057. The measurement reads 0.027 at 1-4 kHz,
so the 'wave 1 is wave 0 filtered' model is refuted.

The frequency structure is inverted relative to any mic-pair or reverb model:
coherence rises with frequency (0.169 -> 0.827) while energy falls (71 % -> 0.2 %),
and a rear pair decorrelates fastest at HF. In the midrange the two waves are 13x
further apart than the two channels of one wave.

But the L-R control is what limits the tool and it is recorded as such: within one
wave, genuinely one performance in two channels, coherence is only 0.221-0.497. So
'same performance' does not imply high coherence here, my positive control was the
wrong model of the rear-pair reading, and the 🟡 is NOT settled. The tool tests for
linear filtering and neither surviving reading requires it.

Also corrects MISSION's Q10 row, which still carried the refuted three-sub-wave
premise and had directed work at a dead question for days. Its gate is in fact met.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2026-08-30 20:17:23 +00:00
sylph-decoder
81e84d6ec6 re: the refuted register ignored the deaths I just wrote, and two false positives shared a cause
Three refutations written as prose under ### headings never entered the register:
check_refuted.py parses * "claim" lines, so the count stayed at 188. Registered
them properly (188 -> 192). A register that parses one syntax silently ignores
every other, and it is invisible from the author's side -- ask the register what it
holds, do not re-read what you wrote.

Both standing false positives were bullets under a header that retracts the whole
list, with no marker in the +-4-line window: scope marks them, not proximity. The
scan now includes the nearest preceding header and matches markers
case-insensitively ('An earlier version' was missed by the marker 'an earlier
version'). Controlled by planting a real revival and confirming it is still caught;
register now runs clean at 0.

Also records sylpheed-port's diagnosis of the phase-lock fallout: a number can be
inapplicable rather than wrong, and a tension built on one is manufactured. Plus
their point that some claims are not registrable in a substring register at all.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2026-08-30 20:02:21 +00:00
sylph-decoder
27ce59b3a7 re: the sweep IS drawn on the JP title -- and my gate was phase-locking the shutter
The occlusion hypothesis is refuted: build 7 draws the same three ROT strips at
higher alpha than English, so there was never an absence to explain.

The 0.32-vs-11.9 tension that motivated it was an artefact of my own instrument.
Both JP captures were shuttered on the plate pulse, and the plate's pulse is part
of the animation -- so the gate synchronises the shutter to the animation's phase.
Measured at the shutter instant, the sweep sits 25-26 px apart across two runs in
different locales and different sessions: 1.6 % of a ~1600 px traverse.

So the 0.32 I recorded as between-session capture noise measures my trigger's
repeatability, and I read it as evidence the title is still when it is evidence
the gate works. The era adjudication is unaffected -- margin 16.72 clears even the
un-locked 11.9 -- and unaffected for the reason that file already gave: correlated
noise cancels in a margin.

Refutation attempt on sylpheed-port's positional-mechanism rejection: FAILED, the
claim stands. Its residual sits inside lit logos, and the logo ROI is
byte-identical across five differently-phased frames in two sessions.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2026-08-30 19:52:15 +00:00
sylph-decoder
9b25fd8233 re: eight refutations from this session had never reached REFUTED.md
sylpheed-port audited the documents their brief names and found two stale
blockers in a table they are instructed to consult, having audited everything
else. Mine names eight documents; I had audited MISSION.md and never PROTOCOL,
REFUTED, INDEX or CONTAINER-NOTES.

REFUTED.md is the dangerous one, because a wrongly-dead entry stops someone
re-investigating something live. Checked the keyframe cluster first for the
opposite failure -- entries refuted USING the stale time association, which would
make their deaths unsound. They are sound: the additive-blend and pivot entries
rest on scale values and capture measurements that the association does not move,
and the one entry that did depend on it is already struck through.

The real gap is the other direction. EIGHT claims died this session -- the
fade-out duration "not in the file", the ~14 units as a black hold, the black
interval as a load, "(B) has no black interval", ptloop01/02 not free-running,
the splash dwells running 8.5 % long, EXTRAS's "structural" n=1, and the gap being
determined by the outgoing screen. Every one was recorded in its own page at the
time. NONE of them reached REFUTED.md, the file the brief says to grep before
proposing anything.

Added as a dated section with the true answer after each arrow, following the
file's stated format, and each carrying what made it wrong rather than only that
it was.

METHOD: a refutation that lives only where it was made is not reachable by the
person about to repeat it. The pages are where a refutation is argued; the index
is where it is found -- the same split as docs versus tool, and only the second
one saves anyone. The check is mechanical: after withdrawing a claim, grep
REFUTED.md for its noun.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2026-08-30 19:21:06 +00:00
sylph-decoder
5b0a6e6666 re: the plate delay was on the disc all along -- my instruction is refuted
The port caught this with arithmetic off the disc, and it was right: build 2 has
a keyframe group of its own, so "when build 4 has settled, wait 2.13 s, then
composite build 2" puts the plate at settle + 2.13 + 3.97 s. Confirmed build 2's
group here independently of their message: `ptbtn00.t32` reaches a=255 at t=238.

The reconciliation needs no free parameter. Both builds run on ONE clock, started
together, and the premise that fails is `rest.t`:

  rest.t is NOT when a screen settles. It is the last HOLD keyframe before the
  exit. ptlogo1 rests at t=251 and stops moving at t=42.

The title's visible build-in ends at t=118, where pteff01, pteff02.prm and
ptlogoall_eff end their ramps together. 238 - 118 = 120 units = 2.000 s, against
a measured 2.138 and 2.132. So the interval the two runs agreed on to 6 ms was a
DECLARED one and I handed over a wall-clock reading of it.

That reading is 6.7% long, and the corpus already knew why: 120 units in 2.135 s
is the game presenting at 28.06 / 28.14 fps against a nominal 30, and the idle
title was independently measured at 28.5 fps before these runs. Corroborated from
inside the same two runs -- first pixels -> settle is 1.643 s and 2.131 s, a 30%
spread, while settle -> plate is 2.138 and 2.132. Frames are dropped during the
build-in, not during the hold, which a change in the game's own timing could not
do.

So the port authors nothing here. What is unchanged: ScreenView still has to draw
two builds at once and the boot's end state is still not plate-free.

Not settled, and said so on the page: which reading of the keyframe times is
right (it moves the plate by 2 units and I cannot separate them from these
traces), and my settle landmark to better than +/-5 units.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014voBspJ6kFncNErZJuZcLw
2026-08-29 12:43:41 +00:00
sylph-decoder
9a10258738 re: the main menu has no idle self-return -- and four of my own durations were a backlog
Two results and one retraction, all from the same session.

REFUTED: 'an ~8-10 s idle returns to the title' does not apply to the main menu.
Held untouched it stayed put for >= 60 s, correlation never leaving
0.9245-0.9249. That timer is real but belongs to the TITLE. It was the only
reason 'B leaves the main menu' was classed as authored, so Q5's B rule is
upgraded to measured-ordering: B is delivered (canary logs vk=5801) and is the
only input in >= 100 s before the return.

The PRESS (A) plate: the boot title presents build 4 WITHOUT the plate first --
green-glyph 154, against 159 on the committed no-plate capture and 753/977/1493
on plate titles -- and the plate arrives after. That is the port's third option.

RETRACTED: four durations taken the same day. classify_array costs 1503 ms per
frame; running it per frame against an 8 fps x11grab drained the pipe at
0.64 fps, so every classified frame was stale and increasingly so. It
manufactured 'plate 24.66 s after the title art', 'B->title 15.58 s', 'B->title
25.60 s' and 'A->menu 20.26 s'. The tell: a transition, a press and a fade do
not share a duration, and the two B figures GREW across a longer run.

A backlog preserves ordering and destroys durations, which is why the sequence
results above stand and every timing does not. The ring's period is unaffected
and that was checked, not assumed -- ring_period ran at 15.03 fps against a
requested 15.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KNR5Y79D1T4bBr6gJQaWFP
2026-08-29 11:50:46 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
56cc7acfc3 re(ui): a RATC child's name is stated, not inferred -- and it was hiding every menu background
`ratc::parse` named each child by scanning backwards for the last printable run
of bytes before its magic. The format states the name explicitly instead, in an
`opt ` block: `"opt " | BE32 len | name | NUL | 3 bytes | magic` -- the same
block `ui_layout::opt_link` already read for a button's focus link.

The scan agrees with it 17 918 times out of 17 942 and is wrong 24 times, every
one the same failure: the 3 trailing payload bytes are themselves printable and
beat the real name. For `pteff05.t32` those bytes are `38 41 58` = `8AX`, so the
full-resolution background of all five menu screens registered under a name no
element declares, resolved to no sprite, and `compose` dropped it through an
early `continue` that -- unlike the two arms above it -- records nothing. The
screen lost its background and `screen render` still reported "all resolved".

`8AX` was never a name. Docs that treated it as one are corrected here.

Disc-wide, and the control is the 17 918 the scan already got right: the `opt `
reading reproduces every one of them. Effect on the five screens is the
signature of the same art at twice the resolution -- mean brightness unmoved,
high-frequency detail x1.15..x1.30 -- which is what the separately-measured
`ui-8ax-fullres-background` result said the game draws.

Also closes a long-standing dangling reference: `pmbase.t32`, recorded as "on
the disc nowhere", is the `GP_STAGE_CLEAR` child the scan called `8AX`. RATC
sibling references now resolve 10 148 of 10 148.

Verified: 114/114 sylpheed-formats unit tests (including two new ones pinning
the `8AX` case byte for byte and the no-block fallback), and every disc-gated
integration suite in sylpheed-formats/sylpheed-cli.
2026-08-29 07:26:56 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
7a4e4333f4 docs: withdraw yesterday's "paint order is a sequence" -- wrong source
Last iteration I claimed the splash's measured_paint_order [0,2,4,6,1,3,5]
records, between its glow and logo halves, the temporal order they were
seen in rather than depth -- because the halves never share a frame.

The no-overlap measurement is right (glows f94-115, logos f116-211). The
inference is wrong, on two independent grounds:

  * Wrong source. That vector is not a read of the draw capture. It is a
    read of the live screen object's CHILD ARRAY -- ui-screen-runtime.md
    records it literally as "paint order (child slots)". A child list has
    a definite order whether or not its children are ever drawn together,
    so co-occurrence does not bear on it. The capture was the CHECK.
  * The order is in the file anyway. paint_order_audit on GP_TITLE entry
    11: derived == measured, 0 inverted pairs, 0 same-layer-key ties. The
    glows and logos carry distinct T8aD keys (0xa100 < 0xa110), so the
    file orders the halves statically, no capture involved.

I asked the question that started this iteration -- do the title and menu
orders have the same problem -- and the answer is that none of the three
does, for the same reason.

What survives is narrower and now recorded with numbers: how much of each
order its capture actually cross-checks. The title capture is stable (8
draws / 12 quads / 5 textures, identical in all five captured frames
across two logs) and confirms 7 of 24 positions; the menu capture is not
(texture 0x11C30000 present in frame 0, gone by frame 3); the splash
capture cannot cross-check its middle at all.

A counting trap worth the tool: count QUADS, not draws. The menu's draw 9
is indices=24 -- six quads batched from one texture. Counting draws reads
9 where 16 are on screen, and an earlier pass of this analysis briefly
"found" three quads for six declarations that way and concluded elements
were missing. They were batched.

METHOD: check what a "measured" value was measured FROM before reasoning
about its limits. The co-occurrence rule is real, and it is specific to
orders read from draw captures.
2026-08-29 05:19:44 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
2532c056be docs: the splash .prm measured -- and its paint order is a sequence, not depth
ui-prm-primitives recorded that where a .prm paints on a screen without a
measured order is unsolved. For the developer splash it is now measured.

Every frame opens with two full-screen draws before any sprite. The
second is untextured in all 212 frames with a constant vertex colour of
FF000000 -- opaque black -- matching palogo_eff0.prm's declaration
exactly: kind 0x10, pivot (640,360) -> 1280x720, one keyframe, a = 255.
So the splash backdrop is an opaque black full-screen quad from the
bundle itself, painted behind every sprite, which is why a splash render
needs --black rather than the default backdrop.

Not a general rule, and said so: the measured main-menu order puts
pteff02.prm at position 4 and pteff00.prm LAST, the latter being the
screen-transition fade.

And a correction to an existing row. measured_paint_order returns
[0, 2, 4, 6, 1, 3, 5] for the splash, described as "the .prm, then all
three glows, then the three logos". But the glows and the logos never
appear in the same frame -- 0 overlapping frames in 235 -- and two
elements that never co-occur have no observable relative depth. Between
those halves the vector records the order they were SEEN IN, not a
front-to-back relationship.

That does not make the render wrong, and element 0 is a real depth
observation since the .prm co-occurs with everything. But the type of the
claim matters: reading the vector as depth invites compositing all seven
elements at once, which is exactly what does not reproduce the screen.

METHOD: two things that never co-occur have no observable relative order;
when recording an order, note which pairs actually appeared together.
2026-08-29 05:06:37 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
7156591654 re(ui): re-establish selective activation by killing the alternative statically
Last iteration I withdrew "a bundle is a palette" because the evidence
did not choose between selective activation within one bundle and two
compositions shown in sequence. The alternative can be killed from the
disc, which I had not tried.

Hypothesis 2 needs a bundle declaring the GLOWS WITHOUT THE LOGOS. There
is none. Every GP_TITLE entry carrying palogo elements:

  10, 13 (publisher twins)  palogo_eff0.prm, palogo_sqex, palogo_sqex_eff
  11, 14 (developer twins)  palogo_eff0.prm + all three logos + all three glows

Four entries, and each developer entry declares the complete set of six.
So whichever bundle was active across frames 94-211 -- entry 11, entry
14, or both in turn -- it declared the logos and the glows, while the
game drew two sprites at a time in disjoint phases.

Therefore only a subset of a bundle's elements is drawn at any moment,
whatever the bundle-loading story is. The conclusion no longer depends on
resolving how many bundles are involved, which is why the texture-base
test's failure stopped mattering.

So the claim is reinstated -- this time by eliminating the alternative
rather than by assuming it away. What worked was not a better capture but
asking what the competing hypothesis would REQUIRE on the disc and
finding it absent.

METHOD: a hypothesis that predicts an artefact can be killed by looking
for the artefact, which is often far cheaper than measuring the behaviour.
2026-08-29 04:56:13 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
2a086051b3 re(ui): withdraw the mechanism -- "palette" was an explanation, not a finding
Last iteration I wrote that a bundle is a palette whose elements are
selectively activated. The disjoint glow/logo phases have two
explanations and I asserted one:

  1. one bundle, some elements run then others;
  2. two bundle-loads shown in sequence (entries 11 and 14 are twins
     declaring identical sprites).

The draw log's tex[base=...] looked like it would separate them. It does
not, and the control is in the same table:

  publisher splash  f1-90     0x11C30000, 0x10000000
  glows             f94-115   0x11C30000, 0x10000000
  logos             f116-211  0x11C30000, 0x10000000

The publisher splash is certainly a DIFFERENT bundle from the developer
splash, and it uses the same base. So 0x11C30000 is a reused upload slot,
not a bundle identity, and the test cannot choose between the two
hypotheses.

Survives: a bundle's declared elements are not what gets drawn.
palogo_anima and palogo_gamearts carry byte-identical keyframe times and
in the same run one is drawn 95 frames and the other none -- and
whichever twin was active declares both. The phases are strictly disjoint
(0 overlapping frames in 235).

Withdrawn: the mechanism. The practical consequence is unchanged --
compositing every element of a bundle does not reproduce what the game
shows over time -- but the why is not established and I stated it as
though it were.

What would separate them: a per-draw capture recording the bundle each
draw came from, or a file-IO log showing whether a second RATC entry is
read between frames 115 and 116.

METHOD: a shared resource address does not identify the resource's owner;
and state the mechanism as a separate claim from the observation, or the
weaker one inherits the stronger one's evidence.
2026-08-29 04:51:34 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
baed44a9ea re(ui): the sequencing survives refutation -- and a bundle is a palette
Two checks on last iteration's "sequential, not simultaneous" reading.

First, the phases really are disjoint. If glows and logos ever shared a
frame the claim would be wrong. Across all 235 captured frames the count
of frames containing both is ZERO, and the switch is a single clean
boundary -- f110-115 draw 1280x720 + 262x108 + 525x90, f116 onward
1280x720 + 243x86 + 499x72. Two sprites either side, no transition frame.

Second, and larger: a third of the bundle is never drawn. Entry 11
declares three logo/glow pairs and only two appear.

  palogo_gamearts / _eff    95 / 22 frames
  palogo_seta     / _eff    95 / 22 frames
  palogo_anima    / _eff    never

palogo_anima declares the SAME keyframe times as palogo_gamearts. Two
elements with byte-identical data, 95 frames and 0 frames in one run.
Reach: the capture covers frames 1-214, so this is "never in the window".

So a bundle is a palette, not a script. Its elements say what to draw and
for how long; which of them run, and when each starts, is decided outside
the placement data. That is the same conclusion the boot-order work
reached from the other end -- the driver is code, not data -- now with a
per-element measurement behind it.

For the port, concretely: compositing every element of a bundle does not
reproduce what the game shows over time. It is the right thing for a
static screen that settles, and it is not a timeline.

METHOD: two elements with identical data and different outcomes is the
strongest possible evidence that the decision is elsewhere.
2026-08-29 04:47:05 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
7fb6bdfad8 re(ui): a group's duration is in the data, its start time is not
Tested whether the splash timeline, played, reproduces the capture --
the last gap in the animation model. Half of it does.

Durations match. At 2 units/frame under the shifted reading, from the
235-frame draw capture of the developer splash:

  glows  drawn f94-115  (22 frames = 44 units)  declared ~0..45  = 45   97.8%
  logos  drawn f116-211 (96 frames = 192 units) declared 15..210 = 195  98.5%

Each element is on screen for its declared span to within 2%.

Starts do not. Every glow declares the same times 15,30,45 and every
logo the same 15,30,190,194,206,210, so on one clock they would overlap
almost entirely -- and they do not overlap at all. The glows run 94-115
and the logos 116-211, strictly sequential, the logos starting the frame
after the glows end. Fitting one origin needs f0 ~ 93.5 for gamearts_eff
and ~103 for gamearts, about 19 units apart, and aligning one throws the
other off by ~9 frames at both ends.

The obvious candidate is refuted. parse_placements reads each group
header as (element index, keyframe count) plus one undecoded LEAD-IN
WORD -- exactly where a per-group start offset would live. It is
0x00000000 for all seven elements, glows and logos alike.

Reach: not the keyframe times (identical within each family), not that
word (zero), not declaration order (which interleaves logos and glows
where the observed sequencing groups them), not the RATC child order.
What remains is that the sequencing is code-driven, which agrees with
what the boot-order work concluded independently.

For the port: a group says how long an element animates and what it does,
not when it starts relative to its neighbours. The observed order on the
developer splash -- both glows, then both logos -- is measured for one
screen, not a decoded rule, so the sequencing has to be authored.

METHOD: when a model reproduces durations but not positions, the missing
piece is an origin, not a rate.
2026-08-29 04:42:55 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
1f2b469f7e re(ui): a static composite is only meaningful for a screen that settles
The model's sharpest prediction, tested with its control. The draw log
says that on the developer splash the _eff glows are drawn on frames
94-115 and the logos on 116-211, so at the moment the reference capture
was taken EVERY glow is already finished -- including the two that have
plateaus and which rest_plateau therefore renders visible. Suppressing
them should help on the splashes and hurt where a screen genuinely
settles.

  publisher splash   +0.9604 -> +0.9982   +0.0377
  developer splash   +0.9659 -> +0.9980   +0.0321
  title    (control) +0.9500 -> +0.9480   -0.0020
  main menu(control) +0.9460 -> +0.8544   -0.0916
  EXTRAS   (control) +0.9440 -> +0.8370   -0.1070

Both splashes jump to about 0.998; all three persistent screens get
worse. The control is what makes this a finding rather than a
coincidence: the same edit helps exactly where the model says it should
and hurts exactly where it says it should not.

So rest_plateau is not over-drawing in general -- it over-draws on
TRANSIENT screens. A plateau mid-animation means the element is held at
that point in the timeline, not that it is on screen once the screen has
settled. Where a screen settles, the held pose IS the settled pose and
the rule is measurably right.

And that answers the question left open several iterations ago -- what
"rest" means for a transient element. It does not mean anything: the
splashes never rest. A static composite of them can match a chosen frame,
and about 0.998 is what these captures' frame is worth, but the format
does not answer a question the screen never poses.

For the port: play the timeline for the two splashes, which the settled
keyframe timing now supports, and composite statically for title, main
menu and EXTRAS.

METHOD: an edit that improves one set of cases is only interesting once
you have shown it damages the cases where it should.
2026-08-29 04:37:59 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
4012d5b555 re(ui): why rest_plateau is right -- and last is right only for a transient
The shifted keyframe-time reading looked like it implied something
simple: the final pose is reached at a definite time and nothing follows,
so rest should just be the last keyframe and the plateau heuristic could
go. Tested by applying it to EVERY element:

  title              +0.9500 -> +0.6819   -0.2681
  main menu          +0.9460 -> +0.6416   -0.3044
  EXTRAS             +0.9440 -> +0.5745   -0.3695
  publisher splash   +0.9600 -> blank (zero variance, corr undefined)
  developer splash   +0.9643 -> blank

Refuted, and the failure supplies the model. A group is entry -> hold ->
exit, and the exit is the screen's DISMISSAL. While a screen is displayed
it has not reached its last keyframe; it is sitting at the hold. So
rest_plateau is the correct primary rule, and the last keyframe is the
post-exit state -- correct only once the screen is gone, which is why
applying it everywhere blanks the splashes.

This does not contradict the shifted reading. That reading says when each
pose is reached; it says nothing about the group being played to
completion while the screen is still up. The step between them was mine.

And it explains why last wins for the two plateau-less elements: an
element with no hold is a transient, it flashes and is over, and at any
settled moment it is gone -- which is its last keyframe. The draw capture
says the same independently: on the developer splash the _eff glows draw
on frames 94-115 and the logos on 116-211, so the glows are already
finished when the logos are up.

Three independent observables -- animation timing, static composites, and
the per-frame draw log -- now agree on one rule: plateau where there is
one, last keyframe where there is not.

METHOD: a blank render is a NaN correlation, not a low score, and that
NaN was the strongest form of the result; and when a model predicts
something the measurement refuses, suspect the step you supplied between
them.
2026-08-29 04:28:19 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
93e9b185ea re(ui): the rest fallback fires on 2 elements, and "last keyframe" wins there
Scored candidate rest-pose rules by rendering and correlating instead of
arguing, and both results correct something I had published.

First, the exposure. The guessing fallback is reached only by an element
that is plateau-less AND multi-keyframe -- a single-keyframe element
short-circuits at `match len { 1 => first }`. Per screen:

  title (4)               24 elements   2 plateau-less   0 reach the fallback
  main menu (5)           16            5                0
  EXTRAS (6)              18            5                0
  publisher splash (10)    3            2                1
  developer splash (11)    7            2                1

So on the three screens the port cares most about, rest() never guesses.
That is why three different rules render builds 4/5/6 to identical
correlations -- the code is unreachable there, which I nearly read as
"the choice does not matter".

Second, where it does fire, the last keyframe is markedly better:

  publisher splash   dwell +0.9600   last +0.9982   maxalpha +0.9600
  developer splash   dwell +0.9643   last +0.9758   maxalpha +0.9643

That refutes my own earlier refutation. I had killed the last-keyframe
rule by arguing it makes palogo_anima_eff invisible while its two
siblings stay lit, which looked like an artefact. The capture says
otherwise: making it invisible is what improves the match. The sibling
symmetry was my expectation, not evidence.

Caveat kept in front: both captures are single frames of a transient
animation, so this fixes which pose matches THOSE frames, not which is
canonically at rest. Default unchanged -- better on both screens where it
fires and identical on the other three, but it would move 2 305 elements
disc-wide on two measurements. Reachable via SYLPHEED_REST_RULE=last.

Also confirmed: all 195 zero-scale rest poses are inside the corrected
2 305 ambiguous population; none is a single-keyframe element.

METHOD: score a rule where it can differ, or you measure nothing; and an
argument from symmetry is a prediction, not a refutation.
2026-08-29 04:20:27 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
0265da31a1 re(ui): refute my own fix for rest(), and correct the defect rate by 65%
Two corrections from one experiment.

A keyframe group is entry -> hold -> exit, and the exit ends invisible:
on the five port screens the final keyframe is invisible for 21/24
(title), 8/16 (main menu), 12/18 (EXTRAS), 2/3 and 6/7 (splashes). So the
screen as seen is the HOLD, which is why rest_plateau is the right
primary rule and why "rest = last keyframe" would empty every screen.

That suggested a fix: an element with no hold has no representative pose,
so draw nothing rather than guess an endpoint. Tested through compose's
visible mask and correlated against the live captures:

  title       +0.9500 -> +0.6839   -0.2661
  main menu   +0.9460 -> +0.9037   -0.0423
  EXTRAS      +0.9440 -> +0.9094   -0.0346

Refuted on all three, and the reason invalidates a number I published. An
element with a SINGLE keyframe has no adjacent pair, so the plateau test
marks it plateau-less -- but its one pose is unambiguously its rest.
Suppressing those removes backgrounds and full-screen layers, which is
the title's -0.27.

  no plateau (as published)      3 807  (24.57 %)
    ... single-keyframe          1 502  trivially at rest, not a guess
    genuinely ambiguous          2 305  (14.88 %)

So rest() guesses for 2 305 elements, not 3 807 -- the figure I gave the
port overstated the defect by 65%. Corrected in HANDOFF and the page.

METHOD: a predicate over adjacent PAIRS silently misclassifies a
one-element list; and acting on a claim is a better test of it than
re-reading it -- this flaw survived a census, a write-up and a handoff
row, and died the moment the rule was used to change a rendering.
2026-08-29 04:15:58 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
60285a6ead re(ui): replicate the keyframe-time shift -- three elements, two screens
The case for reading +36 as "the time the NEXT pose is reached" rested on
one element's fade-out shape, then on one element's hold duration. Both
splash halves supply more, and they agree.

  element            screen              observed hold  as decoded  shifted
  palogo_gamearts    developer splash        83 f          8 f       80 f
  palogo_seta        developer splash        83 f          6 f       80 f
  palogo_sqex        publisher splash       >=77 f *       6 f      102 f

  * the capture opens mid-hold at frame 1, so 77 is a floor.

The readings predict opposite structures. For palogo_gamearts, as decoded:
hold 8f, in 80f, hold 2f, out 6f, out 2f -- an eighty-frame FADE-IN and a
two-frame hold. Shifted: in 8f, hold 80f, out 2f, out 6f, out 2f. The
capture shows an 83-frame hold and no fade-in at all.

The elements that cannot discriminate are not contradicted:
palogo_gamearts_eff observed in 7f / hold 7f / out 8f, and both readings
give 8f phases -- with four blocks the shift only relabels which phase is
which. So the glows, which is where Q1's linear law was measured, say
nothing either way rather than arguing against.

The decoder's default is still unchanged, and the reason is now
articulated rather than assumed. The single thing opposing the shift is
rest() on ptlogo_eff3, where the shifted reading makes the longest-dwell
fallback return the bloom's 200% peak. That fallback is unsound whenever
it runs -- it returns an endpoint of a movement, neither of which is held
-- and checked: the shift does not fix it either. So the objection was
never evidence about the times. Timing had three discriminating
measurements; pose selection had a heuristic guessing.

For the port: animation timing should use the shift; static composites are
unaffected and the five screens' correlations stand. Classified measured,
not decoded -- three elements in one screen family, not a disc-wide check.
2026-08-29 04:09:36 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
0efd692b4c docs: the suite is heavy, not hung -- correcting my own "cannot terminate"
Last iteration I wrote that build-reborn test cannot finish in a working
session, from having watched it run 3h26m. That was the stronger claim
and I made it without measuring the work.

Timing `mesh info` on each of the 166 .xpr containers with a 25 s cap:

  files scanned                166
  exceeding 25 s                19   Hangar, 17 Stage_*, ptc_pack
  Stage_S02 to completion      144 s, rc = 0

Nothing hangs. Nineteen heavy containers at roughly two minutes each is
about 45-60 minutes for one pass, before the 147 fast ones. The 3h26m
observed was that hour of work running at a load average of 9-14 --
inflated by the two duplicate runs I had left going, which did not merely
coexist with the slowness but multiplied it.

The practical conclusion is unchanged and only the wording softens: an
hour-scale suite is not an iteration-scale gate, and every "green" I
reported from it this session was partial. But an hour-scale gate can be
run deliberately, whereas a hung one cannot be run at all, so the
distinction is worth having right.

File list committed as reference data so the cost is attributable without
re-scanning.

METHOD: a slow thing observed under contention looks like a stuck thing;
measure the work before choosing between "cannot finish" and "takes an
hour".
2026-08-29 04:02:34 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
714a26769d re(ui): premultiplied alpha refuted for bit 0x02; parking the field
A per-sprite premultiplied-vs-straight-alpha flag would matter a lot to a
port and has a sharp static signature: premultiplied means RGB <= A
everywhere. Over the 170 decoded GP_TITLE textures that pair to a flag
word:

  bit SET    n= 61   mean %(RGB>A) 55.52   median 52.52
  bit clear  n=109   mean %(RGB>A) 33.66   median 30.17

Premultiplied requires ~0% for the flagged group. Both groups are far
from it and the flagged group violates MORE -- the opposite of the
hypothesis. Refuted.

What remains is a weak association: flagged sprites carry more
bright-RGB/low-alpha pixels, which is what glow art looks like. But the
best single threshold classifies 76.5% against a 64.1% base rate -- a
12-point lift with badly overlapping distributions. A tendency, not a
rule, and reported with its base rate so it cannot read as more.

Noted for whoever returns: "0x02 selects an additive blend" was refuted
by blending those sprites additively and finding every measure worse
against the capture -- but that ran through a title render since fixed
twice (rest_plateau, and the 8AX background the composer drops). The
refutation may well stand; it was measured through a renderer with known
other errors, so it is worth one re-run if blit ever gains additive
blending.

Parking the field. Four candidate meanings are dead -- additive blend,
eff name in both directions, transient element, premultiplied alpha --
none produced a positive account, and the bit blocks nothing: the port's
screens composite at 0.947 correlation against a capture without it. The
negative space and the sound attribution method (child order, not size)
are written down so a later attempt starts here.

METHOD: report a classifier's lift over its base rate; and park a field
after N failed hypotheses, saying what was eliminated.
2026-08-29 03:23:40 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
489ea12759 re(ui): the eff-name implication for bit 0x02 is refuted disc-wide
Last iteration I killed the biconditional and reported that the one-way
reading survived: all 10 bit-set sprites on GP_TITLE build 4 are eff
names, so "bit set => eff name". Checked over the disc, that is false.

  sprites with a resolvable preceding name   14 709
    bit SET   & name has 'eff'                2 338
    bit SET   & name lacks 'eff'              2 657   <-- counterexamples
    bit clear & name has 'eff'                1 399
    bit clear & name lacks 'eff'              8 315

  P(eff | set)   = 0.468
  P(eff | clear) = 0.144

The implication fails more often than it holds. What survives is an
association -- 3.3x enrichment -- and build 4's 10/10 was a local naming
habit in an 18-element bundle, not a format rule.

The counterexamples are the useful part: pv_loading_ring0,
pv_loading_light0-3, pv_loading_line, px_bunk_line, px_top_extra. Rings,
glows, lights, thin lines -- effect-like artwork that does not carry the
eff naming convention. Consistent with the bit marking effect sprites by
authoring intent rather than by name, which is a description and not a
decode, and is labelled as such.

Names here come from the string immediately preceding each T8aD,
validated 17/18 on build 4 against the RATC child order; the single
mismatch is the known pteff04.t32 -> registered as 8AX case, so this is
the element (opt) name rather than the sprite's registered name. That
mismatch is itself an independent confirmation of the 8AX finding,
reached from the opposite direction.

METHOD: a pattern perfect on one screen can be near-chance on the disc;
and when an association survives a refuted implication, the
counterexamples are the finding.
2026-08-29 03:20:24 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
5f701db588 re(ui): kill two candidate meanings for the T8aD 0x02 bit, and fix attribution
The bit at +0x04 was recorded as a real field with its meaning "not
diagnosed", noting ptlogo_back2eff is 0x8830 "despite its name". That note
rested on a size match -- and its size is ambiguous, which is the trap
this corpus already records.

First, a sound attribution. T8aD headers appear in the bundle in RATC
CHILD ORDER, verified on GP_TITLE build 4 against an independent property
-- each header's decoded dimensions versus the dimensions the named child
should have: 18 of 18 match, 0 mismatches. Two of those eighteen share a
size (ptlogo_back2eff and ptlogo_back2eff5, both 1133x280), so a size-keyed
lookup cannot separate them; ordering can. Index 12 is back2eff5 (0x8832,
bit set), index 14 is back2eff (0x8830, bit clear). The documented
counterexample is real and correctly attributed -- now on evidence.

Two candidate meanings tested and refuted:

  bit <=> name contains "eff"        REFUTED: ptlogo_back2eff is an eff
                                     name with the bit clear. All 10
                                     bit-set sprites are eff names, so
                                     the implication holds one way only.
  bit <=> the element is transient   REFUTED: pteff03/pteff03a carry the
                                     bit and run to t=250, ramping to
                                     a=255 and holding.

Up close, the exception pair differs in two header words: +0x04
0x8832/0x8830 and +0x08 0x8083/0x8081 -- layer keys 32899 and 32897. They
are NOT duplicates: their alpha summaries agree to one decimal (4.5%
opaque, 86.7% clear, mean 19.3) but a pixel compare gives max abs diff 21.
Two renditions of one image at one size, which is why the summaries were
not trusted.

Still not diagnosed, and said so -- but the search space is two smaller
and the attribution beneath it is now sound.

METHOD: T8aD headers sit in child order, use that not the size; and
identical summary statistics are not identical data.
2026-08-29 03:14:40 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
c463f98164 re: the GPU trace is compiled out of the release build -- both my guesses wrong
Last iteration left two candidates for why trace_gpu_stream produced no
file: the CLI flag not reaching the cvar, or BeginTracing failing
silently. Neither. Following the code instead of guessing:

BeginTracing only sets trace_state_ = kStreaming ("Streaming starts on
the next primary buffer execute"). The file is opened later, in
ExecutePrimaryBuffer, inside

  #if XE_ENABLE_TRACE_WRITER_INSTRUMENTATION == 1

and trace_writer.h defines that as 0 under NDEBUG, 1 otherwise -- the
trace writer exists only in debug builds.

Confirmed against the binaries, with a control. The format string
"{:08X}_stream.xtr" lives only inside that guard:

  build/bin/Linux/Release/xenia_canary          0 occurrences
  build/bin/Linux/Debug/xenia_canary            1 occurrence
  /sylph-home/re/canary-build/.../Release/...   0   <- what run-canary uses

The debug binary is the control: it proves the test finds the string when
it is present, so the release zero means something.

So trace_gpu_stream is a no-op in this container's emulator -- the cvar
parses, BeginTracing runs, and nothing can open a file. The kill -9 was
not the cause either, though it would have destroyed a trace had one
existed.

The route exists but is not cheap: a debug build with the writer compiled
in sits at build/bin/Linux/Debug/xenia_canary, 253 MB against Release's
18 MB, so a much slower boot plus a trace of every GPU packet on a disk
at 95%. Recorded as available rather than attempted -- what it would
confirm, the DC_LUT write, is already a well-supported inference, and the
cost is out of proportion to the gain.

METHOD: a cvar existing does not mean the feature is compiled in; and
test a compile-time gate against the binary, with a control.
2026-08-29 03:08:57 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
93b0a6b20f re(ui): the gamma confound is refuted from source -- canary applies none of its own
I had parked the tone-curve finding behind "this may be the emulator, not
the game: canary applies kernel_display_gamma_type = 2 (BT.709) on
output", with a planned run setting it to 0 and re-fitting. Reading the
source kills both the confound and the experiment.

VdGetCurrentDisplayGamma_entry is a kStub GETTER the guest calls
(xboxkrnl_video.cc). Its own comment: "Used in D3D SetGammaRamp/
SetPWLGamma to adjust the ramp for the display." The cvar is a value
REPORTED TO THE GAME, which then builds its own ramp. Canary's role is
downstream: the guest writes DC_LUT, command_processor.cc reads it into
gamma_ramp_256_entry_table_, and the swap path applies it via
swap_apply_gamma_pipeline_layout with apply_gamma_table.ps /
apply_gamma_pwl.ps compiled in.

So there is no emulator-side BT.709 post-process to subtract, and any
gamma in a captured frame is a ramp the game installed.

What is NOT established, and the reach is stated: that this game installs
a ramp at all, or that the measured 1.34-1.49 is it. The run logs cannot
say -- kernel exports log at Debug and this harness masks Kernel logging
(log_mask = 13, per boot_menu.sh's own comment), so their silence is
guaranteed regardless of what the game did.

The planned experiment was wrong in design: changing the cvar changes
what the GUEST is told and therefore which ramp the GAME builds, so it
could never isolate a stage that does not exist -- and it perturbs the
capture harness, since skip_intro classifies movie-vs-static on an
absolute rmse threshold that a brighter frame biases. The right run
changes nothing about the output: LOG_MASK=12 LOG_LEVEL=3 and look for
the call and the DC_LUT writes.

Also for the port: the ramp depends on the display type the game is told,
and canary hard-codes TV/BT.709 where hardware uses a console setting. So
this is a display profile, not a fixed property of the game.

METHOD: read what a cvar does before building an experiment around it;
and an absence in a log is only evidence if the log would have shown it.
2026-08-29 02:44:30 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
3490fba9e3 re(ui): settle 8AX vs ptbase statically -- the game draws the full-res one
I had parked this as "needs a per-draw capture recording texture base
addresses". It did not. 8AX (1280x720) and ptbase (640x360 at 200%) are
the SAME artwork at two resolutions, which is exactly why comparing
either against a capture is inconclusive -- and why comparing their
DIFFERENCE is not. Compute 8AX - upscale(ptbase), the detail only 8AX
has, and ask whether the capture contains it.

Both candidates are first mapped into the capture's tone domain with the
measured gamma; without that the residual is dominated by the tone
difference and the test is blind.

  main menu  corr +0.0475   controls +0.0032 shift, -0.0075 flip   68% of ceiling
  title      corr +0.0634   controls +0.0095 shift, +0.0086 flip   68% of ceiling

Two independent screens, both at 68% of the theoretical ceiling
(sd of the 8AX-only detail over sd of the capture residual), 7-15x their
matched controls. The controls preserve spatial correlation and destroy
only alignment, so they are what "no signal" looks like.

So the recommendation changes: resolve the name and draw 8AX at 1:1.
Upscaling ptbase 2x is wrong, not merely softer. Still do not draw both --
an opaque layer over an identical one costs fill and hides later changes,
and ptbase's element is the one carrying the keyframes, so a consumer
needs its timing with 8AX's pixels.

Also recorded and withdrawn: a cruder pixel-pair test gave 0.00-0.72 for
upscales, 0.98 native and 1.01 for the capture -- apparently decisive.
Additive noise raises both terms of that ratio equally and drives any
value toward 1; fitting a noise term, both "native + noise" and "bilinear
+ noise" reproduce the observed numbers. The conclusion is right, that
test does not establish it, and it is in REFUTED because the number looks
conclusive and is not.

Not shown: whether ptbase is also drawn underneath. 8AX is ~86% opaque
and carries the same art, so it would hide it either way.
2026-08-29 02:40:53 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
7373035868 re: the port was still being told SE audio is undecodable -- it is not
A resolve-check on HANDOFF's own rows. Q8 read "SE audio is undecodable
from the disc -- no XACT container exists anywhere". menu-audio-cues.md
retracted exactly that ("### Retracting 'cannot be extracted'") and
locates three cues in Static.slb that decode to PCM: d-pad move 0x1ec0
(4 packets), (B) back 0x0ec0 (2), (A) confirm 0x5d6c0 (6), all mono
48 kHz. The retraction landed in docs/re/ and the page the port reads
kept the superseded text -- the fourth time in this corpus.

Writing the rule down has not worked, so there is a tool now.
handoff_lint.py flags every HANDOFF line making a strong negative claim
that links a doc containing retraction language. First run: found the Q8
row, plus one benign false positive (Q3 links a doc whose retraction is
about a sprite count, not about the tie-break -- checked, and HANDOFF
repeats none of the retracted figures). The lint also caught its own bug
first: it reported existing docs as missing because it joined a guessed
repo root, so it now resolves links relative to the file as markdown does.

Separately, EXTRAS's paint-order risk narrows twice more. Of its 15 tied
pairs only 2 overlap, and of those, ptloop01 x ptloop02 are loop*
animations compose skips by default -- so exactly ONE tie can be drawn:
ptframe3 x ptframe4, overlapping 102x132 px. Against live-extras.png that
contested region correlates +0.9622, better than the whole frame (+0.9440)
and inside the range of regions where order cannot matter (+0.8502 /
+0.9903). Consistent with our order, not proof: correlation cannot see a
swap between locally similar art.

15 -> 2 -> 1 -> consistent is now the whole paint-order risk on the five
screens, and HANDOFF says so.
2026-08-29 02:31:37 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
f7f9b555f6 re(ui): the paint-order tie-break is undecodable from the bundle
Q3 was delivered as "decoded: a u16 layer key at +0x0A". The audit last
iteration showed the key does not fully order a screen -- elements
sharing a key are tied, and on the title that tie-break decides two total
occlusions. This searches for what breaks the tie, and closes it as a
negative with reach.

The game paints the five tied ptlogo_back2eff glows in the order
eff1, eff2, eff5, eff3, eff4. Three static structures were searched:

1. The declaration table. Entries 14-18 are byte-identical apart from the
   pivot, which is only half the sprite's own size.

2. The T8aD headers. All five carry identical +0x04 (0x8832) and
   identical +0x08/+0x0A (32899, the key itself), differing only in
   position and tile count. Searched exhaustively -- every offset
   0x00-0x7f, u8/u16/u32, ascending and descending:

     fields sorting to the MEASURED order:              0
     fields sorting to the DECLARATION order (control): 64

   The control is the point: 64 fields can be found that reproduce a
   known ordering, so the scan finds ordering fields when they exist. It
   finds none for the order the game uses.

3. The RATC child order -- a genuinely different permutation on other
   screens -- gives eff1..eff5 here, declaration order again.

All three static orderings give eff1..eff5; the game gives eff1,2,5,3,4.
That agrees with ui-screen-runtime's conclusion from the other direction:
the game builds a reordered child list at load time and paints that.

Q3 now reads honestly: the layer key is decoded and orders 4 of the 5
measured bundles exactly; the tie-break within a key is undecodable, and
a consumer must use a measured order or accept declaration index as an
arbitrary stand-in. The port's exposure remains 2 overlapping tied pairs
on EXTRAS.

METHOD: an exhaustive field search needs a positive control, or "found
nothing" is worthless.
2026-08-29 02:26:19 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
46006406a4 re: the fast probe stalls -- its own dense negatives are withdrawn
Cross-checked the instrument built last iteration against an independent
grabber while both watched the same screen, and it fails.

A single long-lived ffmpeg x11grab stream degrades and then freezes:

  862 frames in 540.1 s = 1.60 fps        (it starts at 3.98)
  t=450/480/510/540 s: surface mean 5.21, identical every time

At that same moment `import` read surface mean 125.65, and a freshly
started ffmpeg stream read 122.43 -- agreeing with import to 3%. So the
acquisition was broken, not the analysis: the stream replayed a stale
frame while the screen was 24x brighter.

That withdraws last iteration's headline. "2391 frames over 600 s from
t=0, max glyph 0" cannot distinguish "the title never appeared" from "the
stream froze early and repeated one frame 2391 times". Its 3.98 fps was
measured over the first 20 s, before the degradation. Sample count is not
coverage unless the samples are known independent.

Fixed: the stream is now torn down and restarted every 30 s. Startup is
~0.3 s, cheap against the title's window, and it guarantees live frames.

Separately, the cache hypothesis was tested and is SUPPORTED. cache,
cache0, cache1, cache_host moved aside (to /tmp/xenia-cache-aside, not
deleted) and the surface renders again: import reads mean 54.8 and 68.6
with 100% non-black warm content, against 0.07 and 0.08% non-black in the
black run; 773 of 862 probe frames had >2% non-black. One run each side
and many kill -9s before the black one, so it is supported, not proven --
the old caches are kept for reproduction.

Still no title, but that number now comes from a stalling probe and
establishes nothing either way.

METHOD: validating a probe on static images tests its analysis, not its
acquisition -- cross-check against an independent grabber during a run.
2026-08-29 02:01:47 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
a3946e5005 re: the game surface is rendering BLACK -- check that before explaining absences
The named experiment was to attach the fast probe at t=0 so the boot
title could not be missed. Done, default config, English:

  2391 frames in 600.4 s = 3.98 fps; max glyph 0; hits 0

Ten minutes sampled four times a second FROM LAUNCH, no green-(A) glyph.
So "the plate only shows in an early boot window I keep missing" is mine
and refuted -- the third explanation refuted in three iterations.

Then the check that should have come first. Splitting the raw root grab
into bands:

  y   0- 44 (GTK menu bar)   100.00% non-black   mean 210.50
  y  45-719 (game surface)     0.08% non-black   mean   0.07

The game is rendering black, reproducibly across back-to-back samples,
while the guest is alive and polling input (XamInputGetKeystrokeEx past
1201 calls) and MEM-WATCH keeps reporting. The crop and every pixel
oracle were correct; there was nothing on the surface to detect.

What this does NOT do is retroactively explain the earlier failures, and
claiming so would be the fourth over-reach in a row. Those runs had
content: run 2 sampled mean 33.1, run 3's classifier measured real
frame-to-frame rmse, the gamma_type=0 run measured mean 122.8. The
failure mode CHANGED over the session; black is the newest and worst.

Hypothesis for the regression, untested: canary's shader/pipeline cache
is 47 MB and was last written 23:49 on Aug 28, during the failed runs,
and this session has kill -9'd the emulator repeatedly. The test is to
move cache* aside and boot again -- one line and one run, not done.

Two METHOD lines: ask whether the screen is drawing anything before
explaining why a feature of it is missing; and a newly found fault does
not retroactively explain older failures.
2026-08-29 01:49:42 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
e9924ff9e8 re: build the fast probe -- and it refutes the diagnosis that motivated it
Last iteration I blamed four failed runs on the probe sampling every
~41 s, slower than the title screen lasts, and withdrew three earlier
conclusions on that basis. Building the fix tested the claim and killed
it.

The speedup is real and control-verified. One long-lived ffmpeg x11grab
stream, raw RGB, glyph counted in numpy -- no per-sample process startup,
no PNG encode, no convert -crop:

  wrapper `screenshot`            3.98 s per sample (emulator running)
  import -window root -> PPM      1.20 s
  long-lived x11grab stream       0.29 s          13.7x

The counter is byte-identical to is_title.py: 753 on the committed title
capture, 327 on the main menu.

Pointed at a running game it says the opposite of what I expected:

  332 frames in  85.3 s = 3.89 fps; max glyph 0
  1674 frames in 420.0 s = 3.99 fps; max glyph 0

1674 consecutive samples over seven unbroken minutes, four per second,
zero green-(A) pixels. Sampling rate was a real defect that happened not
to be the cause.

So "neither locale reaches the interactive title without a pad press" --
withdrawn last iteration for want of evidence -- is reinstated, now as a
dense measurement, with its reach stated: a MID-RUN window only, silent
about the boot title.

Leading hypothesis, unconfirmed: the PRESS (A) plate appears only in the
boot title window and the attract loop's title carries none, which is
exactly what title_states_capture.sh was written to test. The experiment
is to start the fast probe from t=0 rather than attach to a run already
in progress.

METHOD: fixing the instrument is how you test the explanation that blamed
it -- a plausible mechanism is a hypothesis, and the fix is its
experiment, not its proof.
2026-08-29 01:34:40 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
cc4e5e04a7 re: the boot harness was blinking slower than the title -- diagnosed
Four consecutive runs failed to reach the interactive title, across two
locales, two launch paths and two display-gamma settings. I attributed it
in turn to a stale oracle, to the locale, and to the attract loop. It was
none of those.

  one `screenshot` call, emulator running:  10.8 s
  one `screenshot` call, emulator killed:    0.117 s

92x, measured at a 1-minute load average of 1.80 -- so it is contention
with the emulator through the X server, not background load.
skip_intro.sh takes two grabs per iteration plus a numpy import, giving a
median sampling interval of 41 s in the last run (38/82/41/20/30/30/35/
47/46/45/44/43/21/19). The title lasts "a few seconds" before the attract
loop reclaims it -- wait_title.sh's own header says so. The harness was
sampling slower than the event it was waiting for. That also explains why
runs at 16:43-18:05 the same day succeeded.

Withdrawn as CAUSES, though the observations stand: "the JP run never
reaches the interactive title", "neither locale reaches it without a pad
press", and "the game sat in the attract loop for 604 s". The English
control did control for locale -- it just shared the same defect.

Also recorded: I set kernel_display_gamma_type = 0 for the gamma control
run, which brightens the frame (mid-attract mean 122.8 vs 52.5/82.8 at
type 2) -- and skip_intro classifies movie-vs-static on an ABSOLUTE rmse
threshold, so the gamma change biased the very classifier the run
depended on. Changing a display setting and a capture behaviour in one
run confounds both. Config restored to type 2.

The fix is not applied: make the probe cheap enough to outpace the title
window (small region, no convert round trip, one long-lived process).
Every remaining emulator-side question is waiting on that.
2026-08-29 01:18:05 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
8783adda14 re: the English control removes the locale from the title-capture problem
Two iterations framed the JP title capture as possibly locale-specific.
It is not. Same flags, same oracle, English locale: 75 samples over 734 s,
every one glyph = 0. The English boot does not present the interactive
title either. Canary was alive throughout, polling
XamInputGetKeystrokeEx (1801 calls); the frame at 734 s has content but
correlates 0.15 with build 4's render and 0.05 with the main menu -- an
attract-movie frame, not title art.

So neither locale reaches the interactive title in ~12 minutes without a
pad press. What is actually untested is the pad: pad.py and
nav_to_flight.sh exist, and title_states_capture.sh reaches title states
with a flag set this probe did not replicate (--log_ui_draws
--ui_draw_capture_frames, plus xdotool window focus). It is a capture
problem, not a locale one. MISSION.md updated.

Also resolved a caveat I had given the port agent without checking it:
"rotation is decoded but not rendered" does NOT affect their five screens
at rest. Title, main menu, EXTRAS and both splash halves have ZERO
top-level elements with a non-zero rotation. The only rotations on any of
them are the title's two nested ptloop records (r = 30 and -45), and at
rest those sit at x = 1521 and x = -839 -- a 399-wide sprite entirely off
both edges of a 1280 screen. The caveat now applies only to animating the
title build-in, where the sweeps cross the screen rotated.

Two METHOD lines: run the control before theorising about the difference,
and log every sample so a failure is a measurement rather than a silence.

Emulator stopped, lock cleared, locale English.
2026-08-29 00:35:49 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
f10edf1e79 re: fix wait_title.sh's stale oracle; the JP title still is not reached
Last iteration's "never reached the title in 787 s" was a broken tool
reporting on the world. wait_title.sh was still sampling the single pixel
(625,618) that is_title.py had already been written to replace -- its
docstring says why: a 1280x720 coordinate sampled against the 1279x675
game surface, so it always reads the copyright line. The replacement sat
in the same directory. wait_title.sh now delegates to it.

is_title.py passes its own controls before being trusted here: 753
green-glyph pixels on the committed English title capture, 327 on the
main menu, threshold 400.

Re-ran with the working oracle and the profile flag the English captures
use. The game STILL did not present the interactive title -- but that is
now a measurement rather than an artefact: not one frame showed a single
green-(A) glyph pixel, and content correlation against either build-7
render never exceeded 0.22. Canary was alive and polling
XamInputGetKeystrokeEx (601 calls), sitting in the attract movie.

So the open question narrowed again, and is written into MISSION.md:
whether the attract loop returns to the INTERACTIVE title without a pad
press. title_states_capture.sh claims it does on the English boot with no
pad input; if that holds, the difference is the locale.

Nothing decided about the keyframe-time association or the rest() rule.
Emulator stopped, lock cleared, locale restored to English.
2026-08-29 00:21:44 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
0f1c0f4e14 re: the JP-locale capture is not blocked -- I stopped one grep too early
Last iteration I wrote into MISSION.md that a Japanese-locale capture is
impossible here, because user_language is DECLARE_int32 at four call
sites with no DEFINE and no entry in xenia-canary.config.toml. That is
true, and it was not the question. The language is PERSISTED:
kernel_state.cc builds XConfig over <storage_root>/xconfig.settings,
SetDefaults() only supplies a value when the file has none, and the file
is writable. Checking where a setting is stored rather than where it is
configured turned "blocked, needs a human decision" into a two-line edit.
Withdrawn from MISSION.md; METHOD and REFUTED lines added.

The field is located from struct landmarks rather than a hard-coded
offset, and the check re-runs on every invocation so it fails loudly if
the layout moves:

  music_volume 0.7f at User+449  -> BE float at 2727 -> User base 0x8e6
  language          at User+44   -> reads 1 (kEnglish) at 0x912
  country           at User+64   -> reads 103 (US) at 0x926

XLanguage::kJapanese = 2 (xbox.h:307). set_console_language.py wraps it
with a backup and a --restore.

The capture itself is still NOT taken, for a smaller reason than I
claimed. A run with the locale set to Japanese booted fine but never
reached the title in 787 s: wait_title.sh's green-(A) oracle never fired
and burst-sampling found no frame correlating above 0.18 with either
build-7 render -- the run sat in the attract loop. So it needs a longer
or pad-driven run, not a rebuilt emulator. Emulator stopped, lock
cleared, locale restored to English.

Nothing is decided about the keyframe-time association or the rest()
rule; this only changes what standing between us and deciding them.
2026-08-29 00:05:58 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
b973d8cde3 re(ui): scale 0 means collapsed, not "unset" -- stop drawing it full size
blit() and fill_quad() both opened with

    let sx_pct = if kf.scale_x == 0 { 100 } else { kf.scale_x };

so an element whose pose is collapsed to nothing rendered at FULL SIZE.
I first described this as "a 1-pixel sliver", reading the .max(1) in the
size arithmetic two lines below -- the guard above it meant .max(1) never
saw a zero. Read the whole function, not the lines you went looking for.

Control run before the change: if 0 meant "unset", something on the disc
would use it throughout. Nothing does.

  elements with a keyframe group                    15 493
  at least one keyframe at scale 0                   2 166
  EVERY keyframe at scale 0                              0
  zero is a transient the element grows out of       1 762

ptlogo_eff3.t32 runs 0% -> 200%. An "unset" marker no element ever uses
throughout is not a marker.

Both functions now return without drawing when either scale is 0.

Reach: 24 of 24 renders byte-identical across GP_TITLE (all 16 builds),
GP_PAUSE_MENU and GP_OPTIONS -- additive on every screen the port needs.
195 elements have a guessed rest pose at scale 0 and 126 of those have a
non-zero alpha, so the old code painted them; all 126 are in
GP_READY_ROOM.pak, which S1 already declared a no-go. They are
tactical-map sprites at sx=0/sy=100, mid-horizontal-wipe, that the
coercion drew full-width.

So: a real correctness fix with no visible effect on the menu port.
Suite green, 122 passed / 0 failed across 3 suites at commit time.
2026-08-28 23:38:37 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
c2c69b02be re(ui): size the rest() guess disc-wide, and refute my own proposed fix
Follows up the defect found last iteration: rest()'s dwell fallback is
guessing whenever it runs. Two things were open -- how big it is, and
whether "rest = the last keyframe" is the fix. Both are now answered, and
the second is answered no.

plateau_census.py walks the placement regions directly instead of going
through `screen info --geometry`, which decodes every texture and cannot
do a disc-wide pass in reasonable time. Its control reproduces GP_TITLE
build 7's three fallback elements and names ptlogo_eff3.t32 among them
before counting anything.

  elements with a keyframe group      15 493
  no plateau -> rest pose is guessed   3 807  (24.57 %)
    ... current rule returns invisible 1 711  (44.9 %)
    ... current rule returns scale=0     195  ( 5.1 %)
  the two candidate rules agree        1 911  (50.2 %)

195 elements get a rest pose with scale 0%, which is not a pose. And
disc-wide the choice of rule is not cosmetic: the candidates agree half
the time.

But the port's exposure is one element. Across main menu, EXTRAS, title
and the developer splash, 14 elements are plateau-less and the two rules
agree on 13. The single disagreement is palogo_anima_eff.t32.

And "last keyframe" loses there, on a control that needed no new capture:
the splash carries three sibling glows with identical structure and
identical times --

  palogo_gamearts_eff  15:a=0 30:a=255 45:a=255 -:a=0  plateau -> visible
  palogo_seta_eff      15:a=0 30:a=255 45:a=255 -:a=0  plateau -> visible
  palogo_anima_eff     15:a=0 30:a=255 45:a=212 -:a=0  no plateau

-- differing in one byte. "Last keyframe" makes anima alone invisible
while its two siblings stay lit. The capture agrees weakly: box-mean
ratios capture/render are gamearts 0.717, seta 0.723, anima 0.772, and a
glow we drew that the game does not would put anima below its siblings,
not above.

So the defect is measured and the fix is still undecided. Nothing in the
decoder changed.
2026-08-28 23:23:55 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
b947fa8e8e re(ui): withdraw the render evidence -- rest()'s dwell fallback is unsound
Last iteration I reported a 13.1% render change in GP_TITLE build 7 as
evidence AGAINST the keyframe-time shift, arguing that language twins
should match in brightness. Withdrawn. Localising the diff to an element
shows it is not about the time association at all.

The element is ptlogo_eff3.t32, a transient bloom:

   46: (98,42)  100%,100% a=0
   61: (108,72)   0%,0%   a=0
  103: (108,72) 200%,200% a=255 r=80
    -: (108,72)   0%,0%   a=0   r=150

No two adjacent poses are equal, so there is no plateau, and rest() falls
through to its longest-dwell fallback. The longest gap is 61->103, during
which the sprite grows from nothing to 200% at full alpha and then
collapses. The rule returns whichever end of that movement the indexing
lands on: the invisible frame as decoded, the 200% peak shifted. An
896x389 sprite at 200% is larger than the screen, which accounts for the
entire 13.1% and the entire 4.9-unit luminance gap. I was comparing a
heuristic against itself.

The defect generalises, and structurally. A dwell gap is time spent
interpolating FROM pose k TO pose k+1; neither pose is held during it
unless the two are equal -- which is a plateau, and the plateau path has
already returned by then. So the fallback is guaranteed to be guessing
every time it is reached, under any reading of the times. Every element
with no two adjacent identical poses has a guessed rest pose, in our
renderer and in anything built from it.

Consequences: the case FOR the shift (26x on the hold:fade-out ratio) is
no longer opposed by render evidence -- 10 of 11 builds byte-identical,
the 11th differing only through this heuristic. It is still not adopted,
now because it flips this element to the visibly wrong answer, so the
shift and a decision about plateau-less elements must land together, and
neither half has a capture to verify against.

Default-mode suite green (122 passed, 0 failed across 3 suites so far).
2026-08-28 23:10:41 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
6f23f4d113 re(ui): the keyframe-time shift is favoured 26x by timing, rejected by a render
Follow-up on last iteration's unadopted candidate (+36 holds the NEXT
pose's time, not its own). Two new results, pointing opposite ways, and
both are reported.

FOR, and calibration-free: the observed full-alpha hold : fade-out ratio
on palogo_gamearts is 83 : 13 frames = 6.38. The shifted reading predicts
8.00. The current reading predicts 0.25 -- off by 26x. With the glow's 2
units/frame fixed and nothing else free, the current reading says the
logo holds full alpha for 2.0 frames; the capture holds it for 83. This
is no longer the shape argument the candidate rested on.

Also for: rest()'s plain max-dwell fallback picks a=0 -- a transparent
pose, for a publisher logo -- under the current reading, and the visible
a=255 hold under the shift. Only the rest_plateau special case rescues
the render today, and that is the case the port agent reported a bug in.

AGAINST: rendering every build of six UI paks under both readings, 10 of
11 compared are byte-identical and one changes -- GP_TITLE build 7, the
Japanese twin of build 4, by 13.1% of pixels. Build 4, the one verified
against a live capture, is unchanged either way, so the single build the
shift moves is the one with no capture to adjudicate it. The proxy goes
against the shift: language twins are the same artwork, and build 7 reads
70.94 mean luminance as decoded against build 4's 71.41, but 76.32
shifted. Correlation does not separate them (0.6206 vs 0.6201).

These constrain different things -- timing versus pose selection -- and
rest() is a heuristic layered on the times, so moving the times moves its
tie-breaks. Adopting the shift means revisiting that heuristic in the
same change, with no build-7 capture to verify against.

Default UNCHANGED. Experiment reachable via SYLPHEED_KF_TIME_SHIFT=1.
Shifted-mode suite: 122 passed, 0 failed across 3 suites at commit time.
2026-08-28 23:03:55 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
531840b417 re(ui): Q1 -- the interpolation law holds, the group timeline does not
Q1's gate asks whether the ramp is linear. It is, and that result stands:
it rests on the splash's _eff glows, which reproduce exactly. This adds
the part that does not.

The test is a calibration, not a fit. Fix the clock on
palogo_gamearts_eff -- declared 15-unit fade-in 0@15 -> 255@30 against
captured alphas 34,68,102,136,170,204,238, a constant step of 34, giving
t = 2f - 171 -- then check that against the glow's own next landmark: its
declared hold ends t=45, predicted frame 108.0, observed last full-alpha
frame 107. Then apply it to palogo_gamearts in the same bundle and the
same frames, with no free parameter left:

  declared a=232 at t=206 -> frame 188.5, observed alpha 255
  declared a= 32 at t=210 -> frame 190.5, observed alpha 255

The logo is still at full alpha nine frames after it should read 32; its
fade-out runs ~17 frames late; its declared 80-frame fade-in is never
drawn. Not culling -- the same element is submitted down to a=7 on the
way out. Calibration-free version: the declared fade-out spends 12 of 16
units dropping 23/255 of the alpha, and the capture has no such plateau.

Candidate, offered and NOT adopted: if +36 held the NEXT keyframe's time,
the fade-out shape fits (RMS 4.05 vs 12.13, two elements) and the
decoder's "last block's time is unreadable" special case disappears --
the last block would simply have no successor. Rejected for now because
it explains neither the missing fade-in nor the lateness, and because the
_eff elements cannot discriminate between the readings at all (with four
blocks the shift only relabels the phases). Decoder unchanged.

Also withdrawn, mine, within the iteration: "the _eff glows hold a
constant alpha 33". They ramp 34 -> 255 in steps of 34. I printed the
series minimum and read it as its range, with a "14 distinct colours"
column sitting next to it saying otherwise.
2026-08-28 22:56:17 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
f11fde51e5 re(ui): rotation is not nested-only, and the pivot-anchored scale is measured
Two corrections and one new confirmation, all from finishing the sweep I
left running last iteration.

Refuted, by my own sweep, within the hour: "rotation appears to live only
in nested .rat leaf records". That held for GP_TITLE, GP_BUNK and
GP_CHALLENGE -- the three archives the sweep had reached when I wrote it
-- and fails on GP_DIALOG and GP_DEBRIEFING_PILOTLOG, which rotate
top-level elements. Scoping the claim made it cheap to withdraw, but the
sentence should have waited for the sweep.

Those top-level cases are the best evidence on the disc, and they show up
in `screen info --geometry` without a hex dump. GP_DIALOG build 0:
pceff03/pceff04 ramp r = 90 -> 30 -> 10 -> 3 -> 0 while alpha ramps
0 -> 255 and they slide into place -- a swing-in settling upright. Build
6: pzeff02 ramps 43 -> 61 -> 75 -> 90 while scaling 112% -> 200% and
fading to 0 -- a spin-out. Rows committed as reference data.

New: the pivot-anchored scale term in blit, kf.x - pivot*(scale-100)/100,
was implemented and reasoned about but never measured, because every
element previously examined sits at 100% scale where the term is exactly
zero. The ptloop pair scale 600% and 800%, where it is worth 450 and 630
px. Formula predicts centre y = 360.0 for both; capture measures 359.1
and 360.0. Top-left anchoring predicts 810 and 990. Horizontally it makes
t-from-position agree with t-from-alpha to 0.33 / 0.65 units against ~8
without it.

That agreement does NOT prove linear interpolation -- both fields were
inverted through the same linear map, so a shared easing curve cancels.
It shows position and alpha ride one shared parameter. Recorded as such.

The disc-wide sweep is still running; the count is incomplete, the
existence is settled.
2026-08-28 22:46:44 +00:00