Commit Graph

937 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
MechaCat02
1f138b3db4 agents: move the working surface to Gitea -- issues, PRs, and where files live
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The human wants to direct this project from a web UI rather than chat or Remote
Control, so Gitea becomes the working surface. No new store: adding a second
copy of the truth is this project's defining failure mode, and Gitea already
holds the code. Its first-party MCP server (gitea/gitea-mcp v1.7.0, checked) has
issues, labels, milestones, PRs, attachments and notifications.

ISSUES replace BLOCKED.md. Milestones are bundles the human defines; issues are
items agents propose and the human approves. The state labels end in
`needs-human`, which is the state the whole model turns on and the one no
off-the-shelf tool models -- the market has converged on removing the human.
`blocked` uses Gitea's DEPENDENCY EDGES rather than prose, so "the Port is
blocked on the Decoder answering X" becomes queryable and closes itself.

PULL REQUESTS, the human's proposal, adopted -- and a bigger improvement than it
looks. Today's long-lived auto/* branches have drifted 280 and 373 commits apart,
which is unreviewable by construction. One PR per item makes the human gate
NATIVE rather than a label convention, binds the change to its item, and enforces
the sizing rule: an item too big to review in one sitting was too big to be an
item.

🔴 Agents must not merge their own PRs, and pull_request_write includes merge --
so this goes in BRANCH PROTECTION on main, not in a document asking them not to.
Same principle that fixed the build-jobs cap: policy where the agent cannot reach
it.

WIKI -- the human suggested it for RE findings, and that half is declined with
reasons. A finding's value is that it sits beside its evidence, versioned with
the code that consumes it; the wiki is a separate git repo, so a decode
correction and the exporter change depending on it could never be one reviewable
PR. And wiki edits bypass review: the REFUTED.md reclassification changed the
file both agents read to decide what not to try, and as a wiki edit it would have
been an unreviewed mutation of shared ground truth. The wiki takes human-facing
orientation instead -- runbook, navigation, container notes, and a landing page,
which closes the real gap that there is no view of what is happening except
container logs.

FILES: three needs, three homes. Agent-to-agent transient stays in /exchange.
Evidence a HUMAN must look at attaches to the issue it belongs to -- it travels
with the item and cannot be orphaned from the claim. Evidence a finding cites
stays in git. Note the MCP exposes attachment_read only; upload needs a direct
REST call.

tools/gitea-setup creates the labels and bundles, idempotently, with --dry-run.
Blocked on a token with write:issue -- the push credential is write:repository
and every issue endpoint refuses it, checked rather than assumed.
2026-09-04 15:46:57 +02:00
MechaCat02
fee2e4278a agents: one item only -- the title's animation timing -- and split work into human-checkable units
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Two new findings from the human, both about WHEN a title animation starts, and
both handed over rather than guessed:

F5 Does (A) SNAP the title to finished, or ACCELERATE it? The human says they
   cannot tell and is right that they cannot -- a three-frame acceleration and a
   one-frame cut look identical to an eye. Two routes that should agree: a
   per-frame capture (acceleration shows intermediate alphas, a cut shows none)
   and the code (assigning a target time and raising a rate multiplier are
   different instructions). Their "looks more like a snap on multiple attempts"
   is recorded as a PRIOR, not a result.

F6 The title's sweeping white glow -- ptloop01/ptloop02, the blue PCB-like lines
   -- starts only when the plate appears in the real game, and starts earlier in
   the port. A lead from the exported declaration, mine and unverified: those
   elements are keyed at t = 0, 70, 100, 238, 250 while the plate reaches full
   alpha at 236, with pteff02 keyed at exactly 236 and ptlogo_back2eff and
   ptcopyright at 238. 236-238 is a synchronisation point in the declared data
   and a human just reported a behaviour change there. Flagged AGAINST itself
   too: 238...250 looks equally like an exit ramp -- ptcopyright uses that shape
   and starts nothing -- and the sweep lives in a nested .rat leaf with its own
   timeline.

F6 bears on clock: "shared" and on F4: if a title element does not move until
the plate arrives, either the declared data says so and our keyframe reading is
wrong, or something at the plate's arrival STARTS it, which is a mechanism
nobody has proposed.

And the process change, which is the human's and outlives this item:

  "attacking the 'whole' mission was too big for them to handle. Split the given
   missions and tasks into even smaller tasks which they can tackle and give to
   a human for feedback."

PROTOCOL.md gains "Work in units a human can check in a minute". A milestone is
not a unit of work, it is a bag of them. A unit is right-sized when it ends in
something a person can judge in under a minute WITHOUT READING ANYTHING, and
each one states its question, what the human looks at, and what it does NOT
cover. Do one, hand it over, stop -- an unverified fix under a second change
makes a regression two-variable.

The evidence for the rule is this week: the splash sat through a whole milestone
and took one day once scoped to "does it animate?". The bar is a HUMAN check,
not a green tool -- three instruments passed a frozen screen.
2026-09-02 20:14:46 +02:00
MechaCat02
6438316f24 agents: correct "both clocks" -- there is ONE, and F4 tests whether it is right
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I wrote "whether the game snaps both clocks forward" into yesterday's F4 and the
human asked which clocks. There are none: authored/flow.json sets
`clock: "shared"`, so the title's two composited builds -- build 4 the artwork
(finishes t~=118) and build 2/3 the plate (full alpha t=236) -- run on ONE clock
started together. Left standing, that phrasing sends an agent hunting for a
second clock this corpus says does not exist.

Corrected in both briefs and in the playtest page, marked as a correction rather
than silently edited.

And the question is better than I first framed it. `clock: "shared"` is
AUTHORED, and the port's own plate-arrival-halves.md calls it "not falsified...
not confirmed to better than ~20 % either", with an unresolved anchor
disagreement inside one binary: the reconciliation picked t=118 while
settle_time() returns 160 and the boot prints "settles at t=160".

So F4 is a TEST OF THAT PREMISE, and the discriminator is observable -- press (A)
early, while the wordmark is still building in, and watch the ARTWORK rather
than the plate:

  advances the shared clock   -> the artwork SNAPS to finished
  only forces the plate       -> the artwork KEEPS ANIMATING its build-in

Both briefs now say to answer F4 before building on `shared`, and tell the port
not to choose what "jump" means.
2026-09-02 18:39:13 +02:00
MechaCat02
18620e99aa agents: P5's gate is MET, and four findings from the same walk
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"Menu walk and navigation is fine. Video skips too. Extras open. New Game
   shows new game intro video."  -- 2026-09-02

P5 is done. Its gate was "a human clicks through it", the retro said it had been
waiting on that and not on code for the whole milestone, and it has happened.
PORT-MISSION.md updated. The NEW GAME gap is accepted as-is.

Four findings, three of them the Decoder's:

F1 THE MENU REPEATS ON A HELD DIRECTION AND OURS DOES NOT. One step per
   deflection was authored as the conservative choice because nobody knew; a
   human has now watched the real game and it repeats, "at a medium pace... slow
   enough to see which item is selected". That settles the existence half of H1
   against us. The RATE is still unmeasured and must not be guessed -- the
   description bounds it and supplies no number. Decoder measures initial delay
   and repeat interval as frame counts; the port implements the mechanism and
   waits for the numbers.

F2 THE SFX ARE TOO LOUD BECAUSE THERE IS NO MIX AT ALL. Measured: confirm
   -17.7 dB mean / -0.0 dB peak, 3 dB hotter in mean than the music and 6.4 dB
   above move. No volume or gain value exists anywhere in export/ or authored/,
   so every clip plays at unity on one bus. Decoder: is per-cue or per-bus gain
   on the disc -- the cue table is the obvious place and cue 1103 is already
   decoded. Port: gains at PLAYBACK as data, and explicitly NOT normalisation in
   the exporter, which destroys the relationship between clips and cannot be
   undone by a modder.

F3 SOMETHING IS MISSING ON THE TITLE SCREEN. The export carries one music file
   and the port plays nothing on the title. Which cue does the title play, and
   is there a sting on the plate or on accept? A negative needs a positive
   control: find the menu's cue by the same method first.

F4 (A) SKIPS FORWARD THROUGH THE BOOT AND WE IMPLEMENT TWO OF THREE PRESSES.
   In the game: skip video, reveal plate immediately, accept plate. The middle
   one is missing here. Whether the game snaps both clocks forward or only
   reveals the plate is a question, not a detail -- and it is a cheap second
   route to the plate-arrival question, since a press that skips to the plate
   says where the game thinks the plate belongs.

H3, the plate delay, is ACCEPTED -- "feels the same... sufficient". Left
unattributed rather than closed green.
2026-09-02 18:32:38 +02:00
MechaCat02
0ba7542547 agents: the logo splashes are DONE -- the human cannot tell them from the game
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"Looks good! Cannot notice any obvious difference from the actual game.
   Mark logos as done."  -- 2026-09-02

Not "the check passes": a person compared the port against the real game and
could not tell them apart. That is the oracle, and it is the strongest result
this port has produced. The sole-focus order is lifted; both agents return to
their milestones.

The fix was one word -- pose_at ASSIGNED the settle instant instead of clamping
to it, so every query returned the settled pose whatever the clock said. The
same line manufactured the false green: the capture harness shoots after two
frames, so it was photographing t~=2 units, which looked settled only because
everything looked settled. The 0.01 % agreement that closed H2 was measured
through the accident. One bug produced the defect AND the evidence of its
absence.

Verified here before it went to the human, by film rather than by claim:
motion 16.4 % -> 27.7 %, distinct luma states 26 -> 43, the publisher ramp 6
steps -> 13 in one continuous run, and the developer splash's interrupting
0.50 s freeze gone. The publisher trajectory rises to a peak and settles back --
the crossfade signature.

The port then closed a gap motion-census names in its own header ("a wrong ramp
that moves every frame passes here") with a shape check pre-registered from the
disc, measured off a film, on a non-overlapped strip, in ratios so the texture
divides out: rise:last declared 1.20, measured 1.20 exact.

Kept as the standing lesson, because it is the fourth instance: an instrument
that sits below the thing under test cannot see it fail. Ask of any new check
what it would still report if the feature were entirely absent.

Explicitly NOT claimed: P5's gate is "a human clicks through it" and nobody has
said the milestone is met. The briefs say so, and say not to record it on the
human's behalf.

The decoder's end-to-end pipeline work returns to normal priority rather than
being dropped -- it is what decides whether the port's 60 units/s matches the
game. The ramp is now right in SHAPE and unverified in DURATION.
2026-09-02 18:15:03 +02:00
MechaCat02
3cc3400a96 agents: the splash does not animate, and three instruments could not see it
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A human on a GPU at ~140 fps: "the logos just switch, there is no animation at
all." Measured from a real boot with --film at 0.05 s, then per-frame change:

  splash moves        1.30 s of 7.95 s = 16.4 %
  publisher splash    0.30 s of motion, then 3.20 s FROZEN
  developer splash    0.35 s + 0.25 s, then 2.40 s FROZEN
  distinct luma states in 7.95 s   26

A 45-unit build-in cannot be drawn in 26 states, and a fade does not hold one
picture for 3.20 s. The frame counter says 24.8 fps achieved; both are true --
the port is DRAWING 25 times a second and CHANGING almost never.

🔴 Why every check passed, which matters more than the bug:

  frozen sweep     drives the clock BY HAND -- proves the renderer can draw
                   pose N, never that the poses are drawn in sequence
  settled compare  0.01 % against the capture -- a screen frozen 84 % of the
                   time matches a settled reference PERFECTLY, that is what
                   frozen means
  achieved fps     counts frames DRAWN -- the same pixels 25x/s scores
                   identically to animating

Every one measured throughput or a pose. None measured CHANGE. Same shape as
InputEventAction bypassing the input map: the instrument sat below the thing
that was broken, so the break could not appear in it.

tools/motion-census closes the class. It measures change and nothing else, and
its --selftest asserts it separates a fade (97.4 % moving) from a switch (2.6 %)
from a frozen film (0.0 %) -- a detector that cannot tell those apart would
report the same green line on all three.

Both briefs: this is the SOLE focus. The port reproduces before changing
anything and gates every fix on a film rather than a still. The decoder maps the
whole pipeline end to end -- disc bytes, the game's per-frame update (does it
interpolate between keyframes or hold?), what is submitted per frame, and what
Canary does to it before a capture records it -- delivered as a SERIES, not a
settled value.

The port should also record the refutation against itself: H2 reads ANSWERED on
the strength of the frozen sweep. The mechanism half stands, the blur is a baked
companion texture. The behaviour half does not.
2026-09-02 17:24:42 +02:00
MechaCat02
1af103d9b9 agents: point each brief at its human branch, to merge on the first iteration
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Both are pushed. The decoder's carries the R1 register reclassification and
tools/stale-instrument; the port's carries the two input fixes, verify-input
and BLOCKED H1-H3. Each branches from that agent's own tip, so it is a
fast-forward on the line they are already on -- and the port must merge before
touching input or it will re-derive a fix that is already asserted.
2026-09-01 17:59:59 +02:00
MechaCat02
aad3fb382e agents: the splashes exactly, and stop photographing a moving thing
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A human played the port on real hardware for the first time (2026-09-01) and
found four things. Two were port defects, fixed. Two are open and are now both
agents' focus: the PRESS (A) plate arrives late, and the splash fade/blur is
weaker than the game's.

Their verdict on method is the reason this is a brief change and not a ticket:

  "the agents were essentially guessing and trying to copy what one would see,
   but while they did get close it still is not quite right"

Close-but-not-right is the signature of reproducing APPEARANCE instead of
deriving MECHANISM. So the Decoder's focus block asks, in order: is there a
post-process pass at all, what is it, where do its parameters come from -- and
only then what curve. Both routes, dynamic (GPU state, shader constants, render
targets; add logging to Canary, it is theirs read-write) and static (.pe, the
DB, the paks), with each fact labelled by which produced it.

TEMPORAL-VERIFICATION.md is the other half, and it generalises past the
splashes. We have been photographing the game at time t, and t is never the
same twice: emulator speed varies with host load, Canary presents at ~28.1 fps,
the capture path costs a variable 0.1-10.8 s, and a long-lived x11grab stream
degrades and then freezes. The register already carries FOUR refutations of
exactly this shape. The replacement rule: record a film, not a photograph;
align by CONTENT, not by clock, and report the lag as a measurement rather than
minimising it away; prefer ordering, counts, durations and shape over any value
at a wall-clock instant; anchor on an event; report achieved fps against
requested fps.

Also into both briefs: the input set. The port had no joypad binding for (A) or
(B) and nobody noticed for a whole milestone, because --script sends
InputEventAction, which BYPASSES the input map -- so every check asserted the
code below the map and nothing about the map. The Decoder is asked to DECODE
the full set the game reads rather than discover it by pressing buttons; the
Port is told input is verified at the device level or not at all.

And both briefs now point at the R1 register reclassification, because two of
the ten re-opened entries land on this focus: "the declared keyframe timeline
reproduces the captured splash" is 🟡 our-reader, and the rest() pair is open
in BOTH directions -- while the two splashes are the only screens that reach
that fallback.
2026-09-01 17:59:17 +02:00
MechaCat02
f1b87e47b6 decoder: tell it about the reference assets, and that the DB can be wrong
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The mounts landed but the agent could not learn of them: I documented them in
CONTAINER-NOTES.md, which the decoder's prompt does not list, and then restarted
the container -- so a fresh session with no memory of the exchange had a 586 MB
database and a decompressed image sitting unmentioned in its filesystem.

Now in the PROMPT itself, not only in a document, because the prompt is the one
thing a new session is guaranteed to read. CONTAINER-NOTES.md is also added to
its reading list.

And the caveat that matters more than the asset. The .pe is PRIMARY -- the bytes
the console executed. The database is somebody's ANALYSIS of them, produced by a
disassembler that had to guess, and it is wrong in the ways disassemblers are
wrong: misdecoded mnemonics where data was read as code, function boundaries
short or long or merged or split, coverage missing entirely for code reached only
by indirect dispatch, and names that are derived rather than symbols.

So a finding resting on a database row is not established until the bytes agree:
read the same address out of the .pe and check. Where they disagree the image
wins, and the disagreement is itself worth recording, because it tells the next
reader which parts of the database to distrust.

A fast index into 9.2 MB of machine code, not a source of truth.
2026-08-29 15:23:47 +02:00
MechaCat02
72b10e7d03 decoder: mount the disassembly DB and the flat VA image
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The decoder had neither, and reported the gap precisely: four scripts in this
repo READ /work/xenia-rs/sylpheed.db and nothing produces it, so the whole static
PPC route was consumers with the producer missing.

Both exist on the host and are now mounted read-only: the 586 MB database (25 481
functions, 851 classes with RTTI, EH tables, imports, 1.8M indirect-dispatch
candidates) and the decompressed image.

The image is the more useful of the two. It is a FLAT VA DUMP -- file offset =
VA - 0x82000000 -- so reading a known address needs no XEX decrypt, no LZX, and
no booted emulator. The decoder had independently recovered the same bytes by
dumping /dev/shm/xenia_memory_* and validating against the GamePart table, which
is good work and a sound method, but it noted itself that needing a running
emulator is a bad dependency for something the entire static corpus rests on. It
does not need one.

Also recorded that an earlier claim the .pe was STALE was tested and refuted, so
nobody re-litigates it, and that instructions.raw is an INT rather than hex.

Written down as reference material, explicitly NOT a deliverable: they are
read-only, they come from outside the repository, and a fresh checkout elsewhere
has neither. Reimplementing the producer belongs in sylpheed-formats, and until
it exists every static finding rests on an artefact this project cannot rebuild.
2026-08-29 15:17:52 +02:00
MechaCat02
2021eee47d agents: merge main at the start of every iteration
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Both agents read the protocol, their mission and the shared tooling from their
OWN checkout, and both work on topic branches -- so without an explicit sync
they follow whichever version of the rules existed when the branch started.

Found concretely: tools/audio-capture and two protocol revisions were on main
while the decoder worked for hours from a branch that had neither. The port had
merged on its own initiative and did have them, which is exactly the kind of
divergence nobody notices until the two disagree about what the rules say.
2026-08-29 13:53:00 +02:00
MechaCat02
a8d2491366 audio: actually install the capture path I kept deferring
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The audio work was three parts and I shipped two. The transcode-fidelity method
and the pinned 5.1 downmix landed; the null sink -- the only one that answers
"what does the GAME play" -- I deferred to "the next natural rebuild window" and
then rebuilt both images four times without doing it.

pulseaudio-utils is now in both, with tools/audio-capture wrapping it: a null
sink is a real device as far as an application is concerned, so Canary and Godot
open it normally and parec records what they emit.

This unblocks the decoder's Q8. The cue-to-event bindings are currently a name
match against the authors' own identifiers -- a plausible guess, not a
measurement -- and capturing what the game plays on a menu move converts them.

`audio-capture run` reports the peak level and warns when the capture is silent,
because silence is the failure that looks like success: a WAV of exactly the
right duration, full of zeroes, because the application opened a different sink.
A duration check alone passes it, which is how a confident wrong number gets
made.
2026-08-29 13:41:02 +02:00
MechaCat02
20b3c74b2c agents: they never spoke, the decoder lost the disc, and both shared one state dir
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Three defects, all mine, found by checking instead of assuming.

**They never exchanged a word.** SendMessage=0, ListAgents=0 across both new
sessions. PROTOCOL.md specified in detail what a message MAY and MAY NOT do and
never said how to send one or that the other agent was addressable -- they knew
that last time only because the human told them directly, and rebuilding with
fresh volumes wiped it. Policy without mechanism is prose. Now documented with
the two addresses, a worked example, and an instruction to introduce themselves
on the first iteration rather than waiting to have a question.

**The decoder lost the disc and the ISO.** They used to arrive inside the project
mount and silently stopped when /work became a clone. Silently is the word: the
disc-gated tests SELF-SKIP without SYLPHEED_DISC and report green, so a whole
test suite would have passed while measuring nothing. Both are now mounted
explicitly, the ISO at a stable path so run-canary does not depend on host
directory names.

**Both agents shared one Claude state directory.** They share the host's
~/.claude, and once both working directories became /work they resolved to the
same projects/-work/ -- two supposedly independent agents writing to one place,
which undoes the point of separate checkouts. Each now has its own volume, seeded
once from the host with credentials only, so a token refresh writes locally and
neither can corrupt the host's auth.

Also widened the pacing rule. It banned ScheduleWakeup by name; the decoder then
scheduled itself an hourly cron job -- not harmful, but the same instinct that
ended a run yesterday, through a door I had left open. Now: no self-scheduling by
any route.

Mount audit after the changes: shared and intentional are the exchange volume and
the read-only credential seed. Everything else -- repo, Claude state, cargo,
target, canary, disc, ISO -- is per agent or one-sided.
2026-08-29 13:05:41 +02:00
MechaCat02
06676d3dc0 containers: each agent clones the monorepo into its own volume
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The last structural fix for the collision class that has bitten three times. Both
containers now clone the repository into their OWN named volume instead of
bind-mounting a human's working tree, so an agent's local git config cannot
capture a human's commits, a credential helper cannot leak a container-only path
onto the host, and a `git add -A` cannot sweep another party's in-flight files.

Cloned once at startup and never auto-pulled: pulling under a running agent
moves files out from under whatever it is mid-edit, which is the same bug again.

Accepted knowingly: Claude Code keys per-project memory off the working
directory, so moving off the host path starts that memory empty. The corpus in
docs/ is the memory that matters and it travels with the clone.

Other changes:
* docker/agent -> docker/decoder; the launcher is sylph-decoder. Roles, not
  "the agent", now that there is more than one.
* /reborn is gone -- one repository now, so the port reads HANDOFF from its own
  checkout rather than through a live read-only mount of someone else's tree.
* Canary mounts separately at /canary; it stays a fork tracking upstream.
* A shared `sylpheed-exchange` volume at /exchange, with tools/ on PATH so
  `share` is available in both.
* The decoder's credential file gets the .host-copy treatment the port already
  had -- `credential.helper=store` rewrites by rename-over-target, which is
  EBUSY on a bind mount and reports a fatal that is not one.
* Budget split deliberately: decoder 5 cpu / 6 GB, port 3 / 4, leaving room for
  the planned Referee. "Half the host" was right when there was one agent.

Prompts move to docs/agents/ and are rewritten around the protocol: the oracle
is the running game, dynamic RE stays with the decoder, each iteration must
attempt to refute one claim of the other, and neither may verify its way out of
its own role.
2026-08-29 11:48:30 +02:00
MechaCat02
a8815f2826 agents: the team protocol, the share tool, and a player's-eye navigation doc
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**navigation.md rewritten from the player's chair.** It was written from the
inside out -- GamePart ids, pak names, sprite names -- which is how WE find
things, not what the game shows anyone. Now it describes what is on screen, what
you press and what happens, with internals as footnotes. Most rows are open on
purpose: it exists to be filled in by playing, and the in-game tutorials are the
resource for the flight half.

**tools/share** gives transient files provenance without giving them history.
Three kinds of thing were travelling down one channel with opposite needs: code
and decoded knowledge want permanence, cited evidence wants permanence, and
"look at this PNG" wants no history at all. The third kind bloats a repository
forever; passing it by message is worse, because the receiver gets bytes with no
idea which build produced them. `share put` records who, when, what, the sender's
commit, and whether their tree was dirty -- because a capture taken from a
modified tree cannot be reproduced from the sha, and the receiver deserves to
know that before building an argument on it.

**docs/agents/PROTOCOL.md** is the contract. The parts that matter:

Dynamic RE stays with the Decoder -- most of what is open is behavioural and
cannot be answered from the file. What the planned Referee adds is different:
bias enters at what you CHOOSE to capture, so a corpus captured to a fixed
protocol by someone with no hypothesis is worth more than one captured to settle
an argument.

A message may point, ask, prioritise and challenge. It may not change scope,
redefine ground truth, or carry a finding instead of writing it down -- including
a message claiming to relay the human, because a relayed instruction has no
evidence attached and this project has watched a wrong belief travel further and
faster than its correction.

Adversarial duty is explicit: every iteration, try to refute one claim of another
agent and record the attempt either way. Run your own instrument through a
control first. Disagreements go to the human with both positions, not to
whoever is more certain.

And no agent may verify its way out of its own role: the Port has no oracle, the
Decoder builds nothing, the Referee interprets nothing.
2026-08-29 11:42:29 +02:00
MechaCat02
65cefa74c3 monorepo: one repository for the decoders, the port and the corpus
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Merges the Godot port into the reverse-engineering repository, preserving both
histories -- 1019 commits of corpus plus the port's 31, brought in by subtree
merge and then moved into place so git can follow each file across the rename.

The reason is not tidiness. The two-repo split forced the exporter to depend on
the decoders by pinned revision, and that created a whole class of failure that
now disappears: a sha reachable only from a topic branch, orphaned by a
squash-merge, breaking a fresh checkout silently at build time. It also forced a
live read-only mount of one agent's working tree into another's container, which
is why a contract file could move mid-iteration. With a path dependency, a
decoder change and the exporter change it requires land in the same commit or
not at all.

Canary stays separate: it is a fork tracking upstream.

New structure for the long term:

  docs/game/     how the game is NAVIGATED -- menus, modals, prompts, alerts,
                 and in-game flight. Written so nobody rediscovers it. Mostly
                 open questions on purpose; the in-game tutorials are the
                 resource for the flight half.
  docs/port/MODDING.md
                 modding as a constraint on the exporter TODAY, not a later
                 feature: one logical asset in one file (the disc splits nearly
                 everything, and resolving that is the exporter's job), names a
                 person recognises, PNG/OGG/OGV/JSON only, base-and-overrides so
                 re-exporting is always safe, provenance in every file.
  data/base + data/mods
                 generated tree and drop-in overrides, both gitignored
  exchange/      transient inter-agent files, deliberately outside history
  docs/agents/   the team protocol

Both the README and the navigation doc lead with the correction that cost the
most: the oracle is the real game under Xenia Canary. Reborn's renderer is a
hypothesis under test, it has been wrong, and treating it as ground truth
propagated into three documents and both agents before a human caught it.

Scripted modding stays possible without being built: no screen name is hardcoded
in GDScript and there is no native code in port/, which is what Godot Mod Loader
needs to be able to substitute behaviour later.
2026-08-29 11:34:46 +02:00
Sylpheed RE agent
26b5afeaa3 agent: tag the decoder states the port pins, and stop leaking credential config
Two fixes to push-work and the policy that goes with them.

**Tags.** The port's exporter depends on sylpheed-formats BY REVISION, so a
commit of ours is part of its build -- and the commit it pinned lived on one
auto/* branch and nowhere else. Deleting that branch orphans it; squash-merging
it is worse, because squash creates NEW commits, so main appears to contain the
work while the pinned sha becomes unreachable and the port stops building for a
fresh checkout. Silently, at their build, long after the breakage.

push-work now pushes with --follow-tags, which publishes annotated tags
reachable from the pushed commits, and MISSION.md says to tag whatever the port
needs. formats-pin-2026-08-29 at 7eeae30 is the first, created after the fact.

**Credentials.** This script set credential.helper as --local config, which
PERSISTS in the repository. The repo is a bind mount the host also uses, so the
host's git inherited a path that exists only inside the container and every host
push failed with "unable to get credential storage lock". Now applied with -c to
the single push. Same fix already landed on the port side; this copy still had
the bug and would have re-leaked on the next push.

Committed with a pathspec so the agent's in-flight work is untouched.
2026-08-29 10:59:14 +02:00
Sylpheed RE agent
3491d30066 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
7eeae3006a re(ui): the focus ring SPINS, the game draws it, and the leaf owns the f record
Three things, all from parsing ptbtn0Nf.rat as a build.

1. THE RING SPINS. Its two keyframes differ in exactly one field: rotation_deg
ramps 0 -> 360 with position, scale, alpha and tint all constant. A spin in
place, the same shape as the GP_BUNK example already recorded.

2. THE ORACLE CONFIRMS THE GAME RENDERS IT. In the OPTIONS-focused capture the
ring's bright head sits in a completely different angular position from the
sprite's own -- caught mid-spin. This is a SECOND independent confirmation that
rotation_deg is drawn, now on a different screen and a different element from the
ptloop sweeps, and it raises rotation's priority: it is not a title-only concern
that sits off-screen at rest, it is the main menu's focus marker.
NO ANGLE IS QUOTED. A brightest-region centroid says ~250 deg, but the control
refuses that precision -- rotating the sprite by a known 30/90/180/270 and
re-measuring gives errors up to 19.8 deg. What survives the error bar is that a
<=20 deg error cannot manufacture a ~250 deg displacement.

3. WHICH PLACEMENT WINS -- correcting this page's own earlier caveat, which said
to use the leaf only for elements the parent does not declare. Right for a BASE
record, wrong for an f record: the parent declares NO element for ptbtn0Nf.rat at
all (zero of build 5's 16), so the f record's placement comes from its leaf for
BOTH elements, label included. The label's (-7,-7) is load-bearing -- the f
sprite is 13px larger per axis and -7 keeps them concentric (535+96/2 = 583 vs
542+83/2 = 583.5). Corroborated against the oracle: the focused-minus-unfocused
region is x 505..703, and the leaf predicts a right edge near 707 where the
parent reading predicts 714.

Also exposes UiBuild::records (name -> (offset, size) of a nested .rat leaf).
Nested records were parsed into a PRIVATE map, so a consumer holding a UiBuild
could not locate a leaf's bytes at all -- which is exactly what blocked the port
from reaching the ring.
2026-08-29 08:46:53 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
d110cf38c7 media: expose se_wave_riff -- the menu's SE cues, assembled where the format lives
The port is forbidden from reimplementing media assembly and Static.slb is
exactly that case: no RIFF, no seek chunk, no XACT container, just a packed run
of whole 2048-byte XMA1 packets, so a wave is defined only by (offset, packet
count) and the header has to be synthesized. That step now happens once, in the
crate that owns the format, instead of in each consumer.

`slb::xma1_wave_riff` wraps raw packets; `media::se_wave_riff` looks the bank up
and reads just the packets asked for. Both reuse the existing synth_xma1_fmt /
build_riff, which are already byte-identical to what tools/re-capture/
slb_extract_wave.py writes -- so this is exposure, not a second implementation.

It reads a TARGETED range rather than the whole bank, and that is load-bearing:
Static.slb is the ONE entry of sound.pak's 9 519 whose declared extent runs past
the end of the extracted segments -- by exactly 616 768 B -- so reading it whole
fails outright on this extraction. Every cue we need is in the first few hundred
KB. Recorded rather than worked around silently.

Verified as an artifact, not a compile: all three cues decode through ffmpeg to
mono 48 kHz PCM at 0.533 / 0.344 / 1.016 s, non-silent (rms 2085 / 2985 / 4327,
peaks 29813 / 16973 / 32767). The refusal path is exercised in the same run --
an impossible packet count is rejected rather than returning a short stream,
because a truncated XMA decodes to plausible-sounding garbage.

Also adds docs/re/captures/ORACLE-CAPTURES.md: an index of the nine canary
framebuffer captures already in this repo, and a plain statement that THEY are
the reference and `screen render` is not.
2026-08-29 08:41:42 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
b21c8e4118 re(ui): the focus ring's position is decoded -- a .rat leaf parses as a build
The port needed ptbtneff01.t32's placement and was about to author it from an
eyeballed PNG measurement. It does not have to: a `.rat` leaf needs no new
reader. Its first 32 bytes have a bundle header's shape -- "RATC", 0x3c
declaration-entry size at +4, element count at +20, design 1280x720 at +24/+28 --
so ui_layout::parse_build reads it unchanged.

The control is the base record, whose position is known independently: the parent
screen reports ptbtn01.rat resting at (542,162), and parsing the leaf alone
returns ptbtn01.t32 at (542,162). It reproduces all five buttons.

Positions are absolute design-space top-left. The ring rests at (500, 156/236/
316/396/476) for buttons 1-5 -- a uniform (-42,-6) from each button's own rest,
identical in the Japanese bundle. The bright label is a uniform (-7,-7).

Two things recorded rather than smoothed over: a leaf's placement DUPLICATES the
parent's rather than being relative to it, and the two copies are not always
byte-equal (ptbtn04's parent says y=401, its leaf says 402) -- the parent is what
compose honours, so the leaf is the source only for elements the parent does not
declare, which is exactly the ring. And `screen render --focus` is blind to the
ring for the same reason the port's exporter was: el.focused is name-based on
top-level elements and neither walks into the leaf.
2026-08-29 08:36:53 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
9ca1eb50fd re(ui): answer four of the port's five asks -- splash, fade-out, focus, gamma
1 SPLASH ADDRESSING (was blocking P3). No content predicate exists: design size
fails (every extra composable bundle sampled is 1280x720, like every screen) and
element count fails (fragments run 2..15, the splash halves are 3 and 7). But
GP_TITLE needs none -- `--all` adds exactly four bundles there and all four are
real screens, with the --all index equal to the pak entry index 1:1. And there
are TWO splash screens: 11/14 are the developer logos, 10/13 are the SQUARE ENIX
publisher wordmark, which the port did not have and which the boot shows first.

2 FADE-OUT (was blocking P3). It is (a), and it is bigger than the fade quad.
Every element ends on exactly ONE untimed keyframe, which rules out (b); that
block is where the screen plays out -- quad to a=255, buttons/labels/glows to
a=0, frames hold. (c) is refuted by a null test that discriminates: a black quad
alone holds the button/background brightness ratio constant, and through the
fade it falls 6.50 -> 1.94, 3.4x monotonic.

3 FOCUS (saves P5 rework). Over-vs-instead is unobservable -- the focused sprite
covers the base at 100.0% of base-visible pixels on three pairs once aligned
(true offset (7,7); the centre alignment reads a misleading 78-84%), and
compositing both ways differs by RMSE 1.1 inside the button rect. The real defect
is the focus record's SECOND element: ptbtn0Nf.rat declares ptbtneff01.t32 (a
42x46 glowing ring, focus only) plus the bright label, where the base declares
one sprite. That ring is the marker the port draws nowhere.

5 GAMMA. The capture is not neutral: capture ~ 255*(render/255)^g, g ~ 1.34-1.49,
and the chain says it is a ramp the GAME installed, not a capture artefact. So
RMSE against captures has a floor. Reach stated: the flat patches are all dark
(render ~0-60), so midtones and highlights are unconstrained.

4 ROTATION is a human's call and is recorded in MISSION, not acted on -- the port
rotating while the reference renderer does not would make verify-screen report a
large diff meaning "the port is right". The RE half is answered: rotation is
about the declared pivot, measured against a GPU capture.

The focus record's +20 element-count word is marked 🟡 not  -- read on GP_TITLE's
ten button records only; the disc-wide check is written and still running.
2026-08-29 08:19:23 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
9a0ca0d71f 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
f817dd5939 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
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
7988f52ce7 re(ui): deliver the measured splash sequence the port has to author
The activation decision is code, and MISSION already says the port
authors the sequence -- so the useful move is to hand over the sequence
measured rather than chase the code. From the 235-frame draw capture, at
1 frame = 1/30 s (2 units/frame, 1 unit = 1/60 s, both settled in Q1):

  publisher: SQUARE ENIX logo    f1-90     90 frames   3.00 s+   at 0.00
  (gap, nothing drawn)           f91-93     3 frames   0.10 s    at 3.00
  developer: both glows          f94-115   22 frames   0.73 s    at 3.10
  developer: both logos          f116-211  96 frames   3.20 s    at 3.83

Three limits, stated with the numbers rather than after them. The capture
opens with palogo_sqex already at a=255, so the publisher phase began
before the window and 3.00 s is a FLOOR -- every "starts at" is relative
to the capture, not to boot. palogo_anima and palogo_anima_eff get 0
draws in all 214 frames, so a third pair's phase is not in this
measurement. And it is one capture, one run: the glow->logo switch being
a single frame boundary with no overlap is a strong shape, but each
duration is one sample.

What is solid is the part that matters: the 0.73 s and 3.20 s phases are
each within 2% of their element's declared span, so the durations are the
bundle's own and only the ordering is authored. That is the difference
between a port transcribing timing and inventing it.
2026-08-29 05:00:54 +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
458585d136 re(ui): the structural case for last -- 2 293 of 2 305, checked disc-wide
The weakness in the rest-rule finding was that `last` had been SCORED on
only two elements. It cannot be scored on more -- only two ambiguous
elements sit on a screen with a live capture -- but the entry -> hold ->
exit model makes a prediction that can be checked on all 2 305: what does
each element's FINAL keyframe look like?

  final keyframe invisible (a = 0)          1 618   transient: gone at rest
  final keyframe visible, at max alpha        675   faded in and stopped
  final keyframe visible, BELOW max alpha      12   genuinely unclear

Of the 687 that end visible, 472 have monotonically non-decreasing alpha
-- a plain fade-in that stops, [0, 255] over two keyframes in the
commonest case (pjex_eff.rat, pghud_speed_cut.t32) -- and another 203 end
at their maximum after dipping.

So `last` is structurally defensible for 2 293 of 2 305 (99.5 %), against
a dwell rule that returns a mid-movement frame by construction. Observed
correct for 2, structural for 675, model-consistent for 1 618, unclear
for 12.

The assumption carrying the 1 618 is stated rather than buried: that a
plateau-less element's animation has finished by the time the screen is
settled. The draw log establishes exactly this for the two splash glows
(drawn frames 94-115, logos 116-211) and establishes nothing for the
rest.

Default still unchanged. The case is now observational, structural and
model-based rather than two data points, but it would move 1 896 elements
and the decision belongs with whoever owns the renderer.
2026-08-29 04:34:21 +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
515456c59a re(ui): quantify what changing the rest rule would do disc-wide
The open question was whether "last keyframe" holds beyond the two
elements I could score against a capture. It cannot be scored disc-wide --
only two ambiguous elements sit on a screen with a live capture -- but the
blast radius can be measured, and it argues the same way.

  genuinely ambiguous elements                       2 305
    the two rules AGREE on                             409  (17.7 %)
    they DIFFER on                                   1 896  (82.3 %)

  dwell (current): invisible pose 1 711 (74.2 %), zero-scale 195 (8.5 %)
  last           : invisible pose 1 618 (70.2 %), zero-scale  43 (1.9 %)

Two things follow. It is not a marginal choice: the rules disagree on 82%
of the affected elements, so "either is fine" is not available. And the
current rule produces 4.5x more degenerate poses -- a zero-scale pose is
collapsed to nothing, i.e. an element's PRE-ROLL before it has grown in,
which is definitionally not a rest. 195 elements currently rest at a frame
they are only passing through, against 43 under last.

That is an argument from the data's own structure rather than from the two
captures, and it points the same direction.

Kept honest: it is indirect. Fewer degenerate results is not the same as
more correct results, and last still returns an invisible pose 70% of the
time -- right for a transient element, wrong for a persistent one. The
default stays put; the numbers are in HANDOFF for whoever decides.
2026-08-29 04:24:40 +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
fb6376a548 docs: one page saying how good the five screens actually are
The answers for the port's five screens were spread across a dozen
documents and none of them said how good the result IS. Measured:

  screen              build  drawn   corr vs capture  alignment
  title                 4    15/24      +0.9500       dy=0 dx=0
  main menu             5    11/16      +0.9460       dy=0 dx=0
  EXTRAS                6    13/18      +0.9440       dy=0 dx=0
  publisher splash     10     2/3       +0.9600       dy=0 dx=0
  developer splash     11     6/7       +0.9643       dy=0 dx=0

Every one aligns at exactly zero offset over a +/-2 px search in both
axes, so placement and scale are right and the residual is tone and
detail rather than geometry.

The drawn/total counts are not slack. Each undrawn element has a reason
already documented: kind & 0x4 ghost instances (4 on the title), .prm
primitives off by default (2 per menu, 1 per splash), loop* animations
off by default and off-screen at rest (2 per menu screen), and the 8AX
name mismatch (1 per menu screen) whose art reaches the screen anyway via
ptbase. 4+2+2+1 = 9, 2+2+1 = 5, 1. Nothing unexplained.

The residual is ranked for a consumer: tone first (gamma 1.34-1.49, the
game's own display ramp), then 8AX resolution, then one drawable
paint-order tie on EXTRAS alone, then rotation-decoded-but-not-rendered
which does not affect these five at rest.

Reach stated: these are static composites at the resting pose against
single frames, so nothing here speaks to animation, and a whole-frame
correlation is a sanity figure rather than a per-element check.
2026-08-29 04:04:15 +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
145046f88f 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
6d9214fd07 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
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
921a3cfc44 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
421c61a517 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
c6ce000002 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