The Port asked which of two of my measurements to believe, 55 units/s vs
~150, a factor of 2.7 off one game. Measured on the plate's own declared
ramp, against a pre-registration committed first.
PREDICTED 11 frames at 2 units/frame, 4.4 at the Port's inferred 5, +/-1.
MEASURED 10 labels, and three consecutive gap-free steps of EXACTLY 23,
which is 255*2/22 on the nose. 5 units/frame is excluded by >2x.
Why the splash read as 5: an alpha step is not a clock rate. For a linear
segment d(alpha)/frame = 255*(units/frame)/T. Splash B's quads step 34 with
a declared T=15; the plate steps 23 with a declared T=22; ONE clock, two
steps 1.5x apart. And the Port's intervals start at each quad's first
submission, which on splash A is already alpha=85 -- not the element's t
where alpha=0, and biased by a different amount per element because T
differs. My own splash-quad-timeline.txt published alpha against frame with
no T beside it, which is the column that makes the conversion possible; it
now carries the warning.
The other half: the 'title settled' anchor is ptcopyright reaching full
alpha -- the last build-in element and the ONLY glyph one, which is what a
glyph counter settling means. Calibrated on the plate's own ramp it lands at
t~168 (t~176 at a flat 2.0/label). The Port's candidates are 118 and 160, 42
units apart: this is 8-16 units from 160 and 50-58 from 118. It is 160.
Instrument fact that bounds all of it: labels with zero draws exist, ~1 in 5,
and the clock does NOT advance a fixed amount across them -- across label
5376 the plate moved +82 where three adjacent labels each moved +23. So an
empty label is a real advance, not a logger artefact, and spans that cross
one are approximate. The conclusion rests on the gap-free steps.
Also recorded: the sweep leaves never settle. They translate monotonically
through every label examined and are still moving when the plate arrives, so
'settled' can only mean the build-in elements are done.
NOT answered, and it is what the port actually needs: units per SECOND.
units/s = (units/frame) x (guest fps); this pins the first at 2 and says
nothing about the second, and 2x30 vs 2x60 differ by exactly the ~2 s the
human reported. My own title-plate-delay-measured.md's 2.13 s does not
reconcile with this capture's 20 labels for the same two anchors -- a real
~2.9x disagreement, now localised to frames->seconds rather than
units->frames. Settling it needs the guest's own frame counter, which
neither capture read.
Play-test finding 4 asked, in order: is there a pass, what is it, where do
its parameters come from, only then what curve. All four, from GPU state.
1. NO post-process pass. Over all 1 048 draws of frames 4..226 (both boot
splashes): rt0=[tile=0 fmt=0 exp=0] on 1048/1048, pitch=1280 msaa=0 on
1048/1048, edram_mode only ever kColorDepth or kCopy, resolve dests only
the two alternating front buffers, and NO texture base anywhere in the
capture equals a resolve destination. The only texture bound in the whole
splash region is the sprite page 0x11A50000. No blur, no bloom, no fade
quad over a resolved image, no tone curve, no resolve-and-resample.
2. What it is: per frame, a full-screen replace triangle (the clear), a
full-screen black quad through the ordinary blend, ONE batched sprite
draw carrying every visible element (indices 4/8/12/24), and the two
presentation resolves.
3. Where the parameters come from: NOT the constant banks -- the splash
pixel shaders read zero float constants, ps_c[n=0] on 1048/1048, taken
off each shader's own float_bitmap. NOT immediates. The fade is the
per-vertex k_8_8_8_8 colour in a vertex buffer the guest rewrites every
frame.
4. The curve falls out of 3 and is the corpus's existing 34/frame law,
reproduced on an independent capture. Not claimed as new.
And the composite is ORDINARY SOURCE-OVER, confirmed from the shader ucode
rather than inferred from the blend register: the register reads
ONE/ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA, which looks premultiplied, and is -- because the
shader premultiplies. The two together are src*A + dst*(1-A). So the 'more
pronounced' fade is neither a blend difference nor a pass.
The likely mechanism instead: the developer splash submits SIX quads, three
logos plus three slightly-larger companions that lead them by 8 frames and
are gone 79 frames early. Two over-blended copies of the same art at
different scale is a halo, on screen only during the entry.
Refutation attempt, recorded: REFUTED.md's re-opened rest() pair states its
settling condition as 'a draw capture of the developer splash naming which
of the three glows is submitted at rest'. This is that capture. All three
companions ARE submitted in all 21 frames -- so no rule that hides one
describes this stream -- but they are NOT interchangeable: Q6 leaves the
plateau on its own -5.6/frame decay while Q4 and Q5 hold 255. The one-byte
sibling difference is drawn.
Trap recorded with the evidence: censusing the whole 600-frame log finds six
640x360 textures sampled ~330 times each, which reads exactly like a
half-resolution blur chain. They are the attract movie's chroma planes and
first appear at frame 234, after both splashes. Restricting the window is
what separates them.
Evidence: docs/re/data/splash-draw-pass-census.txt,
docs/re/data/splash-quad-timeline.txt, docs/re/data/shaders/*.ucode.frag.
Logger: canary sylpheed-re d90d14e02.
