Commit Graph

91 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
sylph-decoder
d98c8214cc re: the title's build-in measured in the guest's draw stream -- the flashes are real
The settle-time decode was confirmed only against a SETTLED frame, which shows
the end state is right and says nothing about whether the five flashes ever
happen. This runs the oracle: a draw capture armed before the title exists,
so the window contains the frames in which the screen is built.

The flashes fire in a six-frame window and are absent from all 155 other
sampled frames. `ptlogo_back2eff1` is drawn in exactly two frames at t = 54.0
against a decoded peak of t54-56; `ptlogo1` first appears at t = 42.2 against
a decoded t42. Units-per-frame was taken from the GLOW's period alone, a
different element, so the timings are not circular. The two holders are
continuous from frame 134.

The plate glow's quad carries a per-vertex colour whose alpha IS the element's
fade alpha, so the ramp is read straight out of the guest: observed range
0..80 against a decoded peak of 80, exact and unfitted; period 51.158
presented frames over 20 cycle starts. Fitting the decoded ramp gives RMS
13.16 alpha levels against 38.18 for the same ramp REVERSED -- if the shape
carried no information those would be equal, so the asymmetry is real and
correctly directed. Further controls: symmetric triangle 15.73, flat 31.13.

`ptlogo_back2eff3` was never drawn, and that is expected rather than a miss: a
2-unit flash peak is 0.85 of a presented frame, so catching one is a matter of
phase. A port drawing all five every time shows more sweep than the console.

METHOD.md gains the trap this cost: a 2D draw's identity is its vertex
geometry, not its bound texture. These sprites sample shared pages, and
matching texture dimensions produced a false negative (no flash is ever drawn)
and a false positive (the intro movie's 640x360 YUV planes read as `ptbase2`)
in the same pass.

Also records the top-level restriction on the settle window, which the port
raised and which is verified here: top-level [160,236] width 76, including the
`ptloop` leaves [269,540] width 271 -- an instant past the end of every
top-level element's timeline.

Evidence committed as a derived per-frame series, not the 7 MB raw log.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 19:56:34 +00:00
sylph-decoder
38b80302b7 re: the title's light arc is five transient flashes, not a tone or rotation error
Records the settle-time decode, and corrects two claims it overturns.

docs/re/structures/ui-settle-time.md is the finding: a settled screen is one
instant every element is posed at, the disc names it (the midpoint of the
longest keyframe-free interval), and the title's arc closes from 33.22 to
11.79 with the clipped-pixel count landing on the console's 1459 within 0.5%.
Includes the disc-wide reach -- only 30% of bundles have a window wide enough
to trust -- and a three-way figure.

Withdrawn in ui-rotation-implemented.md:

  * "Flat. No minimum." was not a property of rotation. `at` posed LEAVES ONLY,
    so the scan moved the light sweeps and never touched the top-level flashes.
  * "our renderer does not draw ptlogo1/ptlogo2 at all" is wrong. Both are
    drawn; the four elements the diagnostic named are kind-0x4 ghosts sharing
    their template's name. Hiding the real ones makes the error WORSE by
    +5.20 and +7.47.
  * Its 10.92 baseline is not reproducible -- 14.07 at its own pre-change tag
    and 14.07 today -- so the "1.7% better" verdict rests on an unrecorded
    recipe. Flagged in title-residual-tone-vs-geometry.md too.

METHOD.md gains two traps: a shared CARGO_TARGET_DIR makes a `git worktree`
build silently replace the binary you run next (it cost three renders here,
caught only because a missing flag was a hard error rather than a wrong
number); and an aggregate computed per-element is not a state of the system.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 19:29:12 +00:00
sylph-decoder
258e1e63f7 method: an insensitive observable fails twice, and the second way sends you hunting
The port checked my pivot claim rather than taking it and found the nuance: the
sprite is odd-width, 399, so its true centre is 199.5 against a declared pivot of
200. Half a pixel, far inside the 0.70 and 0.48 px agreement, so it changes
nothing -- but "the pivot IS the centre" is the kind of sentence somebody leans on
for a sub-pixel claim later, so the page now says it is the centre rounded up.

And records the general form of the two bugs this exchange produced, which share
one cause. First, a leaf-composition rule was checked against alpha, which moves
about 0.3 levels per keyframe unit, so a one-keyframe association error barely
shifted it and the rule looked confirmed -- while the same span moved x by
1560 px. Second, fitting t from that same alpha manufactured an 11.5 px position
residual that did not exist and sent the consumer hunting a pivot rule to explain
it, because one byte of alpha quantisation is worth 1.5 to 1.9 keyframe units.

Solve on the fastest-moving field and check the slow one, never the reverse. The
second failure is the more expensive: failing to falsify leaves you falsely
reassured, but inventing a residual sends you looking for a mechanism.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 18:25:52 +00:00
sylph-decoder
c5fe6a460c re: initial focus is TUTORIAL x3 / NEW GAME x3, and never anything else
Two more data points for the Q5 instability, from today s drives. A run that
pressed A with no d-pad movement ended in a tutorial mission, correlating +0.960
with the committed capture, so that boot opened on TUTORIAL. A later boot read
NEW GAME from a focus detector on the first menu frame.

Six boots on the same harness now: TUTORIAL three times, NEW GAME three times,
and no other item ever observed. The distribution is not uniform over the five
buttons -- only these two occur -- which is a real constraint on whatever selects
initial focus and something an explanation will have to account for.

Also records in METHOD a bug that cost a seven-minute driven boot: a value was
clamped for readability BEFORE the comparison that used it. A focus detector
printed a degenerate margin, so it was capped at 999; the cap ran before the
vote-sorting step, two different votes compared equal, the stable sort kept the
wrong one, and a correct NEW GAME became an out-of-range index and a refusal. The
measurement was right throughout -- a cosmetic fix changed a decision. Clamp at
the point of display, never upstream of a comparison.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 17:42:03 +00:00
sylph-decoder
2a7ac9f859 re: the tone curve s single exponent is refuted above render 40
Raised by the port and independently reproduced here before being adopted, since
adopting their claims unchecked has misfired twice this session.

Binning matched pixels by render level rather than fitting a scalar, the implied
exponent falls monotonically and crosses 1.0:

  render          16     23     31     39     47     64
  port  (all)   1.26   1.18   1.10   1.03   0.93   0.85
  mine  (flat)  1.303  1.347  1.128  0.912  0.935  1.003

Below the crossing the capture is darker than the render, which is what the page
measured; above it the capture is brighter. A single exponent cannot express a
curve that crosses unity, so the model is valid only in the darks -- which is
exactly the reach the page already stated. The reach line was not a hedge, it was
the finding.

Where the two disagree is recorded and not resolved: the crossing is about 44 by
their binning and 35 to 40 by mine, and the darks read 1.18-1.26 theirs,
1.30-1.35 mine, 1.49 for the page s original patch fit. Three estimators on three
populations, all agreeing on direction and on gamma above 1 in the darks.

A confound in my own reproduction is stated rather than left implicit: whole-image
correlation is only 0.594 because the committed capture and the default render
differ in focus state, which the port measured as 74.1 percent of differing
pixels. My bins include that mismatch, so they are not a clean second opinion.
And a 1280x720 render against a 1279x675 capture needs a resample, which is why
the fit is restricted to flat-neighbourhood pixels.

METHOD gains the general form: a stated reach is a boundary rather than a hedge,
and the fix was printing the curve instead of a scalar, because a scalar hides
its own domain.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 17:20:41 +00:00
sylph-decoder
fbe4ba5526 method: screen_id.py cannot see a plate-less title, and calls DIFFICULTY a menu
Both reproduce on committed reference frames, so this is a defect in a shared
harness tool rather than a one-run anomaly:

  live-title-build4-no-plate.png -> other   (should be title)
  live-title-press-a.png         -> title
  difficulty-screen.png          -> menu    (is not the main menu)

It thresholds on green -- 0.0009 with the PRESS A plate against 0.0002 without --
so it only recognises a title once the plate has faded in. This corpus s own
finding is that the boot title shows build 4 FIRST, plate-less, for about 2.25 s,
which means any harness waiting for `title` from it can sit through a visible
title and report nothing. That is what happened on an S00A drive here: 396 s of
`other` with two spurious `menu` hits, on a run whose audio proved the guest was
healthy throughout. newgame_path.sh, nav_probe.sh and boot_menu.sh all gate on
it.

The zncc-against-committed-frames classifier used for the settle-time screen log
has neither defect, controlling 6/6 with both movie frames and difficulty-screen
as negatives -- but only at a 0.85 threshold. At 0.60 it also called
difficulty-screen a menu at 0.632, so the threshold is doing real work and has to
be controlled rather than chosen.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 17:14:03 +00:00
sylph-decoder
3a5f215179 re: withdraw a wrong explanation of the BGM_001 duration gap
I wrote that BGM_001 s declared 173.821 s disagreed with a decoded 167.663 s,
and explained the gap as declared covering the encoded stream including trailing
silence while decoded is where the audio stops. The port decoded it fully: the
bank yields 173.809 s of PCM. There is no disagreement -- 167.663 s is where the
music fades out, measured from the audio, and the stream continues silent to its
declared end inside that same decode.

So the declared-rate method is better than this page claimed, and is now
cross-checked on three banks against independent decodes: BGM_103 87.750 vs
87.744, BGM_102 37.487 vs 37.482, BGM_001 173.821 vs 173.809 -- agreement 5 to
12 ms.

The conclusion survives unchanged and is the useful half: trust it for lengths,
not for musical boundaries. A declared length includes whatever silence the
encode carries, so it is not a loop point.

Also records in METHOD a defect shape the port hit three times in one pipeline,
each invisible to every check except a level: normalising by how many inputs
there are rather than how many carry signal. A silent chunk in a voice sum, a
silent channel in a mono fold, and a silent sub-wave -- the 10240-byte bank
header wrapped to 10300 B -- counted as a third stem in a music sum, which put
every real stem at 1/3 instead of 1/2 and cost 3.52 dB on all menu music for two
iterations. This corpus s census said two waves and the exporter s divisor said
three; the count that disagrees with a census is the one that is wrong.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 16:20:49 +00:00
sylph-decoder
a8a828644a notes: run-canary is silent by default, which records perfect silence
Both of these cost time in one session and both are the kind that look like
success.

run-canary line 82 is SDL_AUDIODRIVER=${SDL_AUDIODRIVER:-dummy}, and its own
header explains why: --apu=nop stalls the guest in the intro movie, so the SDL
driver against a dummy device is what lets the title advance. But the comment s
premise -- "there is no PulseAudio here" -- stopped being true when
tools/audio-capture landed, since that starts a daemon on demand. So a capture
through the null sink records pure silence, of the right length, behind a run
that looks perfectly healthy. The override is
PULSE_SINK=cap SDL_AUDIODRIVER=pulseaudio run-canary, and the live check is
pactl list sink-inputs: empty means Canary never attached and the sink sits at
IDLE. audio-capture s own -inf peak warning is the backstop, but it only fires
after the whole run.

Separately, pkill -f and pgrep -f match the caller s OWN command line. Hit twice
here: pkill -9 -f adv_audio_cap.sh killed the shell running it, and an
until ! pgrep -f "probe.py --run" loop never exited because the loop s own
command line contained the pattern -- which looks exactly like the job hanging.
Kill by process name with ps -o pid= -C instead.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 15:52:05 +00:00
sylph-decoder
9f34829776 method: the specific observation and the general rule read identically
Five corrections across two agents in two days share one shape, and it is worth
naming as a family rather than fixing one at a time. None was carelessness about
the measurement -- every underlying observation was true of the asset actually
looked at. The failure is reaching for the general form in the same breath as the
specific one, where the two are indistinguishable on the page and the general one
is what the next reader uses.

Three were the port s and two were mine, and the entry names both sides:

  the two chunks are two stems of one performance -- true of a music bank,
    written as a fact about voice, where one of the two is digital silence
  the extra bytes are a duplicated channel, not fidelity -- true of ADV, and the
    size ratio it implies runs 0.0778 to 2.9163 across the disc
  everything the sequencer paces off rest.t is late -- true of the title, and
    false of the screens actually checked
  a three-stream cue is a movie cue -- mine, and BIRD_224 is neither
  take the highest-rate, highest-gain stream -- mine, and on ADV those two
    criteria select different streams

The counter is the same every time: run the census before writing the rule.
Where the census cannot be run, write the specific sentence and say it is
specific.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 15:40:11 +00:00
sylph-decoder
6011512334 method: the plate glyph counter false-positives on the attract movie by 13x
Found while controlling the timing probe before a settle_time run, not by
reasoning about it.

title_timing_probe.py s plate detector thresholds a green-glyph pixel count at
400, and its control checks two committed movie frames that both score 0. A real
boot disagrees: in one 100 s attract window, 17 frames scored at or above 400
and the peak was 5393. The attract movie has green content in the plate region.

The probe is not wrong -- its state machine refuses to look at the glyph until
the content classifier has already labelled the frame title_noplate or
title_plate, so the false positives never reach the drive. But it is safe
because of that gate, not because the threshold discriminates, and the
distinction matters for anyone reusing glyph() on its own.

Recorded with the general form: a two-frame control over a three-and-a-half
minute movie is not a control over that movie.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 15:17:08 +00:00
sylph-decoder
fb0755d190 handoff: say which index space a build number is in -- 10/11 meant two different screens
The port challenged HANDOFF's loading-screen row and was right. The Q2 row said
"0/1 and 10/11 are the LOADING screen"; the dated section above it says
"entries 0, 1, 12, 15". Both are true, in different index spaces, and the page
did not say which.

Verified against the bytes rather than the table:

  screen list       GP_TITLE.pak -> 12 builds, ordinals 0..11
  screen list --all GP_TITLE.pak -> 16 builds, ordinals 0..15

Only under --all does the ordinal equal the pak entry. Without it ordinal 10 is
entry 12 and ordinal 11 is entry 15. `screen info --all --build 10` shows
palogo_sqex; --build 11 shows palogo_gamearts / seta / anima; 12 and 15 show
pgloading_*. So in ENTRY space 10/11 are the publisher and developer splashes,
which is exactly the screen the wrong reading would have renamed.

It would have validated silently: the port's screen_names.json is keyed by
entry. Q2 row corrected to entry space and marked; the trap is in METHOD under
"Mechanics that have bitten", with the rule that a number leaving this
repository says "entry N", never "build N".

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 14:47:30 +00:00
sylph-decoder
fe49c70da1 re: the boot shows the publisher first -- the TSV that says otherwise attached late
The port flagged docs/re/data/boot-timeline-2026-08-29.tsv, whose label column
runs splash_dev before splash_pub, as a possible boot-order bug in its tree.

Three cold boots, t=0 at launch, no pad input, and the frames looked at rather
than only correlated: SQUARE ENIX 3.05-7.34 / 1.18-5.78 / 1.19-5.56 s, then a
~0.25 s black hold, then GAME ARTS/SETA/studio anima. Publisher first, 3/3.

The TSV is not wrong about any frame; its t=0 is ~7.7 s into the guest's boot,
so the publisher splash had been and gone before the stream opened. The tell is
in the file: its first twelve rows are byte-identical to four decimals -- one
held frame sampled twelve times -- and those exact numbers reappear in my run 1
at 8.42-10.94 s.

Second trap, new: ADV.wmv opens with its own SQUARE ENIX card, bloomed and below
centre, scoring 0.59-0.75 against live-splash-publisher.png. The classifier
fires splash_pub twice per boot and the second one is a movie frame. The real
splash holds perfectly still and scores 0.93-0.94.

And the dwells are DECODED, not measured: the publisher declares 240 units
(4.000 s) and the developer 195 (3.250 s), against measured 4.30/4.60/4.37 and
3.51/3.50/3.37. Measured over declared is 1.085 on average across six spans --
a 30 Hz timeline at 27.6 fps, which is the presentation rate this corpus has
measured independently three times. The port authors nothing here.

Instrument control run first: 11/11 content, 4/4 plate, the two splash
references rejecting each other at 0.035.

docs/re/boot-order-and-splash-dwell.md

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Nsxw1A9JseUw99Yw1ZRQzY
2026-08-29 14:15:28 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
1eb36c2b9d re(media): the disc ships movies in TWO audio profiles, and 28 of them are 5.1
Probed all 97 movies. 28 are wmapro 48 kHz 6-channel 5.1 -- ADV.wmv and every
S*.wmv story cutscene; the other 69 are wmav2 48 kHz stereo, every RT*.wmv and
hokyu_*.wmv. The split is cinematics vs in-mission radio chatter.

Both movies the menu milestone needs, ADV.wmv (the boot/attract intro) and
S00A.wmv (the new-game intro), are in the SURROUND group.

Why it matters: one ffmpeg command over dat/movie/ produces two different kinds
of result and records neither. The 69 stereo files pass through unchanged; the 28
surround files get downmixed 5.1 -> stereo by ffmpeg's DEFAULT matrix, folding
centre-channel dialogue into L/R at a weighting nobody chose and which is not
stable across ffmpeg versions. That is a content decision inherited by accident,
so it should be stated explicitly and recorded beside the command.

Credit where due: found by the human while checking a transcode, verified
independently here and widened from one file to the whole disc.

Two METHOD entries from the same episode, both about measurement rather than
format: don't probe a file another process is still writing (a half-written
transcode reported 33 s against a 137 s source, no error, nearly a filed bug),
and a difference-signal RMS is meaningless before cross-correlation alignment
(-34.2 dB against a -25.3 dB source looks like failure and is inconclusive).
2026-08-29 08:57:56 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
9501879b28 docs(method): time the disc mesh suite -- 22 minutes of silence is not a hang
Two runs were killed this session for looking stuck. Measured: 1 318 s serial,
no output while it runs. Also records that `build-reborn test` forces
--workspace and silently ignores a `-p`, so scoping needs the cargo
passthrough (`build-reborn t -p <crate>`).
2026-08-29 07:49:18 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
1a82ade187 re(ui): the 60 nameless RATC children are frames, not children -- .tan decoded
Closes the reach caveat the `opt ` name fix left behind: 60 of 18 002 RATC
children carry no `opt ` block, and it was not established whether they lack one
or sit past our 128-byte window.

Neither. They are not children. `examples/ratc_optless_children.rs` re-runs
`ratc::parse`'s own guards over the disc and reports which one fired: all 60 are
"tag beyond the window", none is rejected by length, gap or charset, none is
child #0, and all 60 live in six bundles of one archive. Within a bundle the
distances back to the nearest tag are an exact arithmetic progression, step
60 600 -- ten different records finding the SAME tag, because there is only one.

Reading a bundle directly: children 1..10 are equal-size T8aD blocks under a
single `opt ` name, `pb_f15_eg_anm.tan`. `.tan` is a FRAME SEQUENCE. One block
declares the resource; its payload is a run of T8aD frames.

Disc-wide, over all 18 718 `opt ` names in all 33 paks: a RATC bundle names
exactly six kinds of resource -- `.t32` 14 756, `.rat` 3 311, `.prm` 367,
`.tbm` 224, `.sbo` 54, `.tan` 6. Six `.tan`, ten frames each = 60, the entire
population with nothing left over. The negative is closed, not narrowed.

Consequence recorded but deliberately not fixed: `ratc::parse` over-reports
there, listing a `.tan`'s frames as anonymous children. Nothing in the menu
milestone reads a `.tan` -- it occurs only in GP_READY_ROOM, which S1 ruled
out -- so no screen the port draws changes.

Also a METHOD entry for this container OOM-killing `slb_leading_segment_disc`
under default test parallelism (SIGKILL, no assertion; 8/8 pass with
--test-threads=1).
2026-08-29 07:39:09 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
0ed33bcd38 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
04a3ae1389 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
a7257c96d6 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
0db76bcc57 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
be937e3d5d 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
c4b5752713 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
29d59cdb06 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
a46a922bc8 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
e63efabcfb 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
7347db24df 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
5b218e6887 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
4bdb830671 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
00431a7a8a 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
21771fc765 docs: the verification gate cannot terminate, and I left two runs going 4h
Two findings from checking whether last iteration's partial green had
finished. It had not, and the reason matters for anyone using the gate.

build-reborn test contains twin_pairs_do_not_share_a_buffer, which
decodes every .xpr in hidden/resource3d -- 166 files, 1.4 GB -- through
the full Xbg7Model anchoring path, and is NOT #[ignore]d. Its sibling in
the same file walks the same 166 files and IS ignored as known-failing,
which makes the binary's cost easy to underestimate. Measured: one
instance accumulated 3h26m of CPU at 89% without finishing.

So every "green run" reported in this corpus from a workspace or
sylpheed-formats test is necessarily PARTIAL unless it says the suite
terminated -- including the ones I reported this session. The honest form
is the suite count and elapsed state, not the word "green". Not proposing
to #[ignore] or subsample it: that changes what the suite asserts and is
the project's call, not an audit side-effect.

And the mess is mine. Two cargo test -p sylpheed-formats runs launched
detached in earlier iterations never exited, because they were sitting in
that test:

  pid 103375  4h12m elapsed  child mesh_consistency_disc  3h26m CPU  89.3%
  pid  99965  4h39m elapsed  child pak_idxd_disc          1h16m CPU  93.8%

Load average 14.18 on 12 cores. Killed, after checking the legitimately
running workspace suite and leaving it alone; load fell to 9.68.

What this does NOT explain, because it is tempting: the session's
emulator troubles. screenshot cost 0.49 s with both runaways live and the
emulator stopped, against 10.8 s measured earlier with the emulator
running. The 92x figure really was emulator contention; the runaways were
a background tax on top. The black surface and the unreachable title
stand as measured, with their own controls.

METHOD: a detached job you never check can outlive many iterations --
setsid was added so a timeout could not kill them, which also means
nothing does; and know whether your verification gate can terminate.
2026-08-29 03:45:14 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
ae24845d52 docs: check that the docs' headline figures match their committed data
Nothing had ever verified that a number written in prose matches the
reference data file committed beside it. The figure is written once from
a run; the prose is edited around it afterwards and the data file is
regenerated independently, so drift is silent.

All 19 headline figures across four censuses -- the eff-bit census, the
plateau census, the top-level rotation census and the eff-bit alpha test
-- currently agree with their data files.

The checker had to be numeric, and the first attempt is the reason it is
a script rather than a grep: comparing strings reported almost every
figure as a mismatch, because the data files write 14709 where the docs
write "14 709" with a thin space, and the docs round 33.66 to 33.7. A
consistency check that fails on formatting trains you to ignore it, so
the tolerance is explicit: exact against the data, within 0.05 against
the doc to allow rounding.

Also ran the full disc-gated workspace suite (build-reborn test, which
wires SYLPHEED_DISC -- without it the disc tests self-skip and green
means almost nothing), covering this session's three decoder changes:
rotation_deg on Keyframe, the scale-0 fix in blit/fill_quad, and the
flags field on T8adImage. 122 passed / 0 failed across the four suites
that had completed; the long disc-gated integration tests
(records_roundtrip_disc, first_header_word_is_record0_hash) were still
running and are not counted here.
2026-08-29 03:42:13 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
cdc3186a80 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
2740cbef55 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
4ef0e30788 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
f2ff24d9f6 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
5b51c734fc re: GPU trace attempt produced nothing -- and the config dump is not the flags
Tried to turn the gamma-ramp inference into a direct observation.
canary's trace_gpu_stream records gamma ramps as their own command type
(kGammaRamp, index 11 in TraceCommandType), so a boot trace should show
the write. Two bounded runs produced NO trace file at all -- nothing under
the prefix, no .xtr anywhere, no scratch/gpu/.

Bounded deliberately: the disk is at 95% (50 GiB free) and a trace of all
GPU packets during boot includes video decode, so the runner carried its
own watchdog that killed the emulator the moment output passed a 2 GiB
cap. It never fired -- there was nothing to cap -- and disk stayed at 95%
throughout. Bounding from inside cost nothing and removed any need to
gamble on how coarsely I could poll.

What the attempt did establish. BeginTracing() runs at GPU init when the
cvar is set (graphics_system.cc:237), but EndTracing() runs only from
GraphicsSystem::Shutdown() -- so the kill -9 this session has used
routinely can never finalise a trace. The second run was stopped with
SIGTERM and exited cleanly; still no file, so that is not the whole
story. Two candidates remain unseparated: the CLI flag not reaching the
cvar, or BeginTracing failing silently. The next run removes the
ambiguity by setting trace_gpu_stream in the config FILE instead.

And a trap I nearly fell into. The startup config dump showed
trace_gpu_stream = false after I passed --trace_gpu_stream=true, which
reads as "flag ignored". It is not evidence either way: the gamma run
passed --log_mask=12 --log_level=3, its dump printed log_mask = 0 and
log_level = 2, and Kernel Debug logging was demonstrably ON -- that run
is where VdGetCurrentDisplayGamma was captured. The dump reflects the
config file and can neither confirm nor refute a command-line override.
(It does not undo the earlier user_language conclusion: absence of a NAME
from the dump still shows a cvar is unregistered.)

The gamma-ramp write therefore remains an inference, unchanged.
2026-08-29 03:05:03 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
81625e8f29 re(ui): close the gamma chain from canary's defaults -- the game writes a ramp
Continues the previous iteration, where the game was measured calling
VdGetCurrentDisplayGamma at video init. The remaining link -- does it then
WRITE the ramp -- is a GPU register operation (XE_GPU_REG_DC_LUT_RW_INDEX
in CommandProcessor::WriteRegister), unlogged and invisible to kernel
logging. Two facts from the source close it without instrumenting.

1. The swap-path gamma stage is a PURE LUT. apply_gamma_table.xesli is
   the whole transform: index by input*255, fetch from a 256-entry ramp
   buffer, output. No sRGB encode, no second transfer function.

2. The table DEFAULTS TO IDENTITY. CommandProcessor::Initialize fills it
   with value = i * 0x3FF / 0xFF, and its own comment says the linear
   default is "what games set when starting with the sRGB (return value 1)
   VdGetCurrentDisplayGamma". An unwritten ramp is a no-op.

So the only transform is a LUT, the LUT is identity unless written, the
game queries the display gamma at init, and the capture differs from our
composite by gamma 1.34-1.49 -- which identity cannot produce. The guest
wrote a non-identity ramp.

Labelled an inference, with its weak joint named: it assumes our
composite reproduces the PRE-RAMP framebuffer, which it does not exactly.
What carries it is the shape -- a systematic ~1.4 fitted on flat patches
across three screens is not a compositor bug. The obvious alternative, a
fixed sRGB stage in the presenter, fits neither direction: an encode
(^0.45) brightens and we measured darkening; a decode (^2.2) darkens far
more than 1.4.

Direct observation remains available and cheap, and needs the emulator
only to boot: a GPU trace records gamma ramps as their own command type,
or one log line at the DC_LUT register write would settle it outright.
Not done.

METHOD: a default value is evidence; and name the weak joint of an
inference in the same breath as the conclusion.
2026-08-29 02:53:45 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
5b783e276b re(ui): the game does query the display gamma -- measured, with its control
Last iteration's corrected experiment, run. Boot with --log_mask=12
--log_level=3 (Kernel logging on, Cpu/Gpu off), which changes nothing
about the output and so cannot perturb the capture harness the way the
gamma-cvar experiment would have.

VdGetCurrentDisplayGamma is called once, at video init:

  d> VdGetSystemCommandBuffer(701CF830, 701CF804)
  d> VdGetCurrentDisplayGamma(701CE1F8(00000000), 701CE1F0(0))
  d> VdSetDisplayMode(40000000)
  d> VdGetCurrentDisplayInformation(701CF110)

The control is in the same log: 359 VdRetrainEDRAM and 358
VdGetSystemCommandBuffer lines, so an absent call would have been
visible. Per the export's own comment the returned type is "used in D3D
SetGammaRamp/SetPWLGamma" -- the game asks the question a ramp-builder
asks, at the moment one would ask it.

Still open, and stated: whether it then WRITES the ramp, and whether the
measured gamma 1.34-1.49 is that ramp. The write is a GPU register
operation (DC_LUT), invisible to kernel logging; a GPU trace records
gamma ramps as a command type (TraceWriter::WriteGammaRamp), which is
where to look next.

Worth its own METHOD line: this had been parked behind "needs the
emulator to reach a menu" for several iterations, and it needed the
emulator only to BOOT -- video init happens in the first seconds. A
blocker that stops one experiment does not stop every experiment in the
same area.
2026-08-29 02:51:32 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
7919ed90e2 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
6c4e5d3d71 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
6c8ee2ee6a docs: the UI decode's own evidence images were unreachable -- 11 links repaired
The brief's rule is to commit reference data beside the finding so the
port can be built without a disc. Nothing had ever checked that the docs'
cited artifacts actually exist. doc_link_check.py walks every markdown
file under docs/, resolves each relative link, and reports targets that
are missing -- and separately targets that resolve to a ZERO-BYTE file,
which looks fine in any listing.

  links resolving   1038 -> 1049
  missing targets     16 -> 5
  empty targets        0 -> 0

+11 resolving and -11 missing against 11 edits: the counts pair, which is
the confirmation the pass did what it claimed and touched nothing else.

Two of the sixteen were the evidence for the UI layout decode itself.
structures/ui-rat-layout.md is what the port is built on, and its two
figures -- backing "the tutorial PAUSE menu rebuilds pixel-accurately
from its sprites" and "the same method reproduces the main menu" -- were
written as captures/ui-layout/... from a file in structures/, one
directory too shallow. The headline evidence for the decode could not be
opened from its own document.

Eleven links had the wrong relative depth with the target present. Each
was rewritten only where exactly one candidate path resolved, so nothing
was guessed; the first pass left three alone because equivalent spellings
(captures/../captures/x) failed to collapse, and a second pass normalised
them.

Five remain genuinely absent and are left rather than invented: two point
at MEMORY.md outside the repo, one at a header in the separate
xenia-canary-native tree, and two name documents that were never written
(weapon-datasheet-runtime.md, canary-build-verified-env-confound.md).
None is port-relevant. A missing document is a different problem from a
bad path and is not something a link fix should paper over.
2026-08-29 02:34:16 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
3eba09aae0 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
9ff9e8e633 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
af43563806 re(ui): measure the paint-order hedge -- exact on 4 of 5, and bound the rest
`compose` claimed the derived paint order "reproduces both measured
orders up to ties". That sentence was never measured and was stale by
one: there are three measured orders, not two. examples/paint_order_audit.rs
checks it.

  main menu (entries 5, 8)      derived == measured   0 inverted pairs
  developer splash (11, 14)     derived == measured   0 inverted pairs
  title (entry 4)               DIFFERS               8, all same-key ties

So the claim holds and the exception is entirely ties -- but two of those
ties are total occlusions, not near-misses. The tied family is the five
ptlogo_back2eff glows (key 32899); back2eff5 is 1133x280 and FULLY
CONTAINS back2eff3 (82,824 px^2 = 100% of the smaller) and back2eff4
(152,047 px^2 = 100%). Derived paints it on top of two glows it entirely
covers; the game paints it underneath. A tie-break by declaration index
can therefore be wrong by a whole layer. The title itself is unaffected --
it has a measured order.

The port's actual exposure, per screen: title, main menu and developer
splash all use MEASURED orders; the publisher splash is derived but has
ZERO ties, so it is fully determined; EXTRAS is derived with 15 tied
pairs of which only 2 OVERLAP. Two element pairs on one screen is the
whole risk, and that is what HANDOFF now says -- not the raw 15, which
would have overstated it 7x.

Reach stated: this compares the derived order against orders measured
from the game, not an independent derivation, so where no measured order
exists only the tie exposure can be checked. Overlap uses pivot*2 as the
element size at its resting placement.

Stale comment in compose corrected. METHOD: a hedge in a code comment is
an unmeasured claim; and count the cases that can bite, not the ones that
match the pattern.
2026-08-29 02:22:01 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
9c16fa7860 re: a title negative that survives its own cross-check
Three earlier "the title never appears" claims came from instruments
later found broken -- a stale pixel oracle, a 41 s sampling interval, a
freezing stream. This one carries its own evidence.

title_probe_xchecked.py restarts its capture stream every 30 s AND prints
its reading beside an independent `import` grab every 60 s:

  1851 frames in 560.2 s = 3.30 fps
  cross-checks 9, disagreements 1
  max glyph 0

  t= 62s stream   6.05 | import   0.07  disagree (a fade, logos mid-transition)
  t=123s stream   7.40 | import   7.49  agree
  t=183s stream   8.18 | import   8.29  agree
  t=243s stream   0.23 | import   0.10  agree
  t=311s stream  89.68 | import  89.51  agree
  t=371s stream  80.97 | import  81.58  agree
  t=426s stream 117.43 | import 117.72  agree
  t=487s stream  77.71 | import  76.25  agree
  t=546s stream  70.43 | import  70.55  agree

Eight of nine agree within 2%, fps held at 3.30 with no collapse to 1.60,
and the surface moved through dark and bright phases. So the frames were
live: over 560 continuous seconds from launch, sampled 3.3 times a
second, the interactive title's green (A) plate never appears while the
game renders throughout. The final frame correlates 0.0145 / -0.0047 /
0.0102 with our title / main menu / EXTRAS renders -- attract-movie
content, not a UI screen.

Why remains unknown. live-title-press-a.png with its 753 glyph pixels
proves the title was reachable from this container on 2026-08-28, and
clearing the shader cache fixed the black surface but not this.

The two emulator-side questions (gamma control, 8AX vs ptbase) are
therefore blocked on a characterised failure rather than a suspicion.
Neither blocks the five menu screens, so I am returning to static work;
the probe is committed for whoever picks it up.

METHOD: a probe that cross-checks itself turns "no result" into a result.
2026-08-29 02:14:21 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
801a9116c4 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
8f07819b02 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
e492cee8b9 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
924d4953d5 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
969947e0e6 re(ui): put a number on the render-vs-capture tone difference
Closes an observation I left dangling last iteration ("the capture is ~4x
darker than the render") and puts a figure on the  INDEX's texture row
already carried: exact gamma/sRGB fidelity untested because a hue
comparison cannot see it.

Geometry first: cross-correlating the main-menu capture against our
render over +/-6 px puts the best alignment at exactly dy=0 dx=0,
correlation 0.9466. Only the tone differs.

Two methods failed before one worked, and both failures are recorded.
Three dark patches gave "4x darker" -- the whole-frame best linear scale
is 0.914, so three patches from one region are not a transfer curve. A
pixel-wise fit over 854,685 pixels then produced a NON-MONOTONIC transfer
(render 96-127 mapping brighter than render 128-159) with mean abs error
10-14 for every candidate model. That is edge misalignment, not a tone
curve: at correlation 0.947 a bright pixel routinely lands on a dark one.

Flat patches fix it -- 16x16 blocks with std < 8 in BOTH images, a
threshold chosen from the counts (0/83/404/1055/1788 at std<3/5/8/12/20):

  main menu  404 patches  gamma 1.491  err 0.28   (best linear 0.276, 0.34)
  EXTRAS     382 patches  gamma 1.493  err 0.22   (best linear 0.273, 0.28)
  title      506 patches  gamma 1.338  err 1.08   (best linear 0.842, 9.02)

Reach, stated because it is narrow: those patches span only render values
~0-60, where gamma and a plain scale are nearly indistinguishable -- the
two menus decide nothing (0.28 vs 0.34, 0.22 vs 0.28) and only the title
separates them. Nothing constrains midtones or highlights.

The held-out control FAILED TO DISCRIMINATE and is reported as such: the
splash's 2918 flat patches are pure black (render 0-4), so every model
scores ~0.00. That is a test with no power, not corroboration.

Confound left open: this compares our composite to what canary DISPLAYS,
and canary applies kernel_display_gamma_type = 2 (BT.709). The exponent
may be its output stage. The discriminating run -- set it to 0, recapture,
refit -- needs one emulator session reaching the main menu and was not
done.

Classified measured, not decoded; HANDOFF says plainly that a port
applying it is authoring.
2026-08-29 01:05:25 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
1e82096519 re(ui): a full-screen element is dropped on three port screens -- do not "fix" it
Audited what `screen render` silently omits on the port's five screens,
since an element the game draws but we skip is the one defect class the
port agent has actually hit. Everything is accounted for -- kind & 0x4
ghost instances, .prm primitives, loop* animations -- except pteff04.t32
on the title and pteff05.t32 on both menus. Those are kind 0x0, one
keyframe, rest a=255, pivot (640,360): full-screen and opaque.

Cause: the element declares pteff05.t32, but the T8aD behind its `opt `
link is registered under the name 8AX, so build.sprites.get() misses and
compose hits a silent continue. Bytes at 0x0e2035 of GP_TITLE entry 5:

  opt  ... 70 74 65 66 66 30 35 2e 74 33 32 00  38 41 58  54 38 61 44
           p  t  e  f  f  0  5  .  t  3  2  \0  8  A  X   T  8  a  D

8AX is 1280x720 and present in all six title-family bundles; it is a
sprite in builds 4/5/6 and never an element.

It does not currently show, and that is the useful half. ptbase.t32 is
640x360 drawn at 200% and carries THE SAME ARTWORK: its 2x upscale
differs from 8AX by mean abs diff 2.05 (max 80), and our rendered
background is pixel-identical to 8AX in every patch sampled. So resolving
the name and drawing it in addition would double-draw an opaque
full-screen layer -- invisible as a doubling, which is worse than a
visible bug. Written into HANDOFF as a do-not-do.

The free win, offered and not taken: use 8AX at 1:1 and drop ptbase
instead of upscaling a half-res copy. That is a rendering choice and
ptbase's element carries the keyframes, so it is the port's call.

Not established: which of the two the game actually draws. Both carry the
same art, so pixels cannot separate them; it needs a per-draw capture
recording texture base addresses, since the two differ in size.
2026-08-29 01:00:36 +00:00