The clock origin is the last surviving candidate for finding 3, and now
that the clock is known to advance 1 unit per present it is directly
measurable as a count: observe the plate at a known declared alpha, count
presents back to the title's first draw, and the difference is the title's
clock value at its own first draw.
No capture I have contains the title. Three captures agree on what the boot
does: publisher splash (219/228/244 presents), developer splash
(186/185/204), then the attract movie at 422/429/463. Two splashes, then
the movie. There is no title segment.
This re-frames an old blocker as expected rather than mysterious. The
corpus records "three runs, two locales, two launch paths, ~35 minutes of
emulator time, no interactive title" as unexplained. MISSION's own boot
order is splash -> intro video -> title, ADV.wmv is 137.7 s from the disc,
and 600 presents at ~50/s is ~12 s. The title is on the far side of a
two-minute movie; a capture that never reaches it is behaving correctly.
Two ways to settle it. Tapping A skips the movie but risks the save-data
probe that crashed the guest on 2026-08-18, per the capture script's own
header. Capturing through the whole movie needs ~6900 presents against the
600 used here, needs no pad input and cannot crash the guest, so that is
the one to run.
Not run this iteration, deliberately: I would rather pre-register the
origin prediction than start a long capture at the end of an iteration. The
prediction is stated on the page so the next run is not exploratory -- the
plate's a=17 must land 215 presents after the title's first draw if the
clock starts there, and any shortfall is the offset in units.
Reach: the negative is specific. Within the first ~460 presents of boot the
title does not draw. It says nothing about after the attract movie, which
is where the answer is.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
Ran --framerate_limit=30 against predictions committed beforehand. Every
discriminating row went to the frame-based column:
frame-based time-based (mine) measured
presents/s ~27 ~27 28.4
modal alpha step 17 unchanged 34 doubled 17 UNCHANGED
units/s ~30 halved ~60 unchanged 30.2 / 30.3
publisher dwell ~8.5 s ~4.2 s 8.450 s DOUBLED
developer dwell ~7.0 s ~3.5 s 6.923 s DOUBLED
Both controls passed first. The limiter took effect (28.4 presents/host-s
against 51-55, interval mass moving from one 60 Hz vblank to two, 422 of
468), and all 8/8 splash quad rects are identical so nothing but the frame
rate differs.
So the UI clock advances exactly 1 unit per presented frame. The step is 17
on every quad at 28.4, 51.4 and 54.8 presents/s, and 255*1/15 = 17 with the
declared T=15. units/second = presents/second, and seconds are not a
property of the game.
The port's 60 stands: the guest presents once per 60 Hz vblank
unconstrained, and 1 unit per present at 60/s is 60 units/s. Same answer as
my first position, finally with a tested mechanism instead of an inference.
This withdraws units-per-frame-is-not-a-constant.md in its central claim.
My "a time-based clock is immune to dropped frames so the dwell is stable"
was a real prediction and it failed -- the dwell doubled. The four-run
agreement I read as evidence was four runs at similar frame rates.
h3-units-per-frame-measured.md's +34 is now the anomaly rather than the
rule: 34 per label at 27.2 labels/s against 17 per present at 28.4
presents/s. Both cannot be presents. Not asserting it is wrong, only that
one of them must explain the disagreement.
Three of my four positions came from inference over a measured quantity;
this one came from changing an input and watching what moved. The
opportunistic comparison pointed exactly the wrong way because nothing
controlled what else differed between those captures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
The time-based-clock claim rests on two captures that happened to run at
different speeds. Nobody has changed the frame rate on purpose and watched.
--framerate_limit=30 halves Xenia's vblank ceiling. Predictions committed
before the run:
quantity frame-based time-based (my claim)
presents/s ~27 ~27
modal alpha step 17, unchanged 34, DOUBLED
units/s ~30, halved ~60, unchanged
splash dwells ~8.5 / ~7.0 s ~4.2 / ~3.5 s, unchanged
Accept time-based only if the step lands in 30-38 AND the dwell stays
within 10% of 4.2/3.5 s. If the step stays 17 and the dwell doubles, the
claim is refuted, the clock is frame-based, and the port's 60 is unsupported
again.
The control is the present rate itself, read FIRST: a doubled step also
appears if the limiter did nothing, so if presents/s does not fall to ~27
neither prediction is tested. Second control: the eight splash quad rects
must be unchanged, or something other than the frame rate differs between
runs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
My fourth position today, and it returns to the port's.
Splash B's logo quads in this capture step +17 per present, 14 gap-free
steps, four quads agreeing. h3-units-per-frame-measured.md measured the
SAME elements at +34 and concluded 2 units per frame.
Both are right. With the declared T=15, dA/present = 255*(units/present)/T:
h3 capture 27.2 presents/s +34 2.0 units/present 54.4 units/s
this capture 51.4 presents/s +17 1.0 units/present 51.4 units/s
Units per present halved when the presentation rate doubled. Units per
second did not move. The UI clock advances by ELAPSED TIME, not by frame
count, and "2 units per frame" was a property of a capture that ran at
27 fps, never of the game.
So my 120 units/s is withdrawn: it was 2 units/present x 60 presents/s, and
the first factor is not a constant.
The movie result is re-explained rather than refuted. 2 presents per
decoded movie frame at 51.4 presents/s is a movie decoding at 25.7 fps -- a
30 fps movie at 86% under a slow emulator. The measurement held; the
inference assumed the movie decoded at 30/s in real time, which it does not
when the emulator is slow. Same shape as the first withdrawal.
60 is now positively supported rather than merely undefended. A time-based
clock is immune to dropped frames, which predicts the dwell in seconds is
stable across runs at different frame rates -- and it is, across four runs
whose present rates differ by 1.9x: 255/4.27 = 59.7 and 210/3.46 = 60.7,
both within 1% of 60.
h3-units-per-frame-measured.md's conclusion needs demoting: its measurement
stands, its law is a single-capture artefact, and it is the origin of the
constant this question has thrashed on.
Finding 3 is open again with no surviving named cause.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
The port raised this as load-bearing and it is answered, without a speed
factor.
I expected to find the three cold boots slow and argue contamination. They
are not. My capture reproduces them: publisher 4.263 s against 4.297 /
4.604 / 4.370, developer 3.457 s against 3.508 / 3.503 / 3.366. Four runs
agree, so that defence is unavailable and I am not using it.
The flaw is in the comparison. 2.125 s is the publisher's declared
ANIMATION length; 4.3 s is how long the SCREEN is up, and the screen holds
after the timeline ends. Measured as counts in one capture: the publisher
is on screen for 219 presents and animates for about 128 of them. The
falsifier would have found a contradiction at any units-per-second.
The decisive number needs no speed factor: 51.4 presents per host-second on
the publisher splash, 53.8 on the developer. Xenia's limiter marks vblank
at 60 Hz and caps presents there. A 30 fps guest presents every second
vblank, at most 30 per second, and a slow emulator can only make intervals
longer. 51.4 > 30, so a 30 fps guest cannot produce this. A 60 fps guest
can: 51.4 is 86% of 60, matching the vblank histogram's 14% drops.
So 60 units/s is refuted by a count against a hard limit rather than by a
duration against a fitted factor -- the argument the 2.13 s reconciliation
could not make.
The dwell corpus stands in its own terms. Those seconds are the screen's
dwell on this emulator, reproducible, and were never a statement about
units per second.
Recording what I got wrong on the way: I first segmented the atlas eras as
"both splashes then the title" and briefly had a 2x discrepancy that would
have let me declare the dwell corpus contaminated. The segmentation was
wrong, and the durations matching the corpus to 1% is what exposed it. A
convenient answer from an unchecked segmentation is the same trap as a
clean answer from an unguarded assumption.
Reach unchanged: still one boot for the hash ratio.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
Answered against the pre-registration committed before the capture, with a
content hash added to the draw logger.
The buffer rotates three times faster than the content changes: 177
presents carry 3 base addresses but only 102 distinct content hashes, and
the modal run is exactly 2 presents per decoded frame. Consecutive presents
with changed content = 0.5739, inside the pre-registered R band of
0.40-0.60.
That is precisely the failure that invalidated my first answer this
morning. The base address changed every present, which I measured and read
as one decode per present. The content did not.
ADV.wmv is authored at 30.000 fps, so 2 presents per movie frame is 60
presents/s, and 2 units/present x 60 = 120 units/s.
Both controls pass, and they are the ones the withdrawn version lacked --
its two guards tested how I READ the buffer, neither tested whether a
buffer change meant a decode.
Control 1, a static texture must hash constant: the splash atlas changes
once, at an era boundary, and never within an era -- 1 change in 403
samples. Noting that I first wrote this control as "must be constant" and
it read FAIL; stated that way it was wrong, because a re-upload is real
content change and the control has to separate temporal from alternating.
A control that is too strong gets waved away, which is its own failure.
Control 2, the movie luma hash must not be constant: 102 distinct.
Consequence: the plate's t=236 is 1.97 s, not 3.93 s, and the port shows it
~1.96 s late. That is play-test finding 3, and "about two seconds" is the
size the human reported. Every declared duration in seconds across the
corpus is half what we have been quoting; unit counts are untouched.
The 2.13 s third route is explained by emulator speed, and that explanation
is labelled POST-HOC and is not offered as support -- fitting a speed
factor to close a gap is what this corpus keeps losing claims to.
Reach: one boot. This number has moved twice today and a second independent
boot should come before the port rewrites a timeline.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
The experiment guest-frame-rate-WITHDRAWN.md named. A triple buffer
rotating once per present visits the same three base addresses whether or
not anything was decoded into them, so base identity cannot separate
"decode per present" (30 fps guest, 60 units/s) from "rotate per present"
(60 fps guest, 120 units/s). A content hash can.
command_processor.cc now emits h=<FNV-1a over 4096 sampled bytes> beside
every sampled texture, omitted rather than faked when the address does not
translate, so a missing hash cannot read as a matching one. Incremental
build, one translation unit.
Predictions committed before the capture: consecutive presents with changed
luma content is ~1.00 under decode-per-present and ~0.50 under
rotate-per-present, with acceptance bands and "neither" reported rather
than rounded.
The control is the part I got wrong last time. A STATIC texture must hash
constant: the splash sprite page 0x11A50000 is a fixed atlas, and if its
hash varies between presents then reading guest memory at draw time races
the decoder and nothing in the log may be read. That fails loudly in the
direction which would otherwise manufacture the answer I previously
reached -- the property my last control lacked. A second control in the
other direction requires the movie luma hash NOT to be constant, which
would mean hashing the wrong bytes and would manufacture the opposite
answer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
The port kept 60 on a stated constraint: the transition quad is declared
black for 12 units, measured at 0.14-0.30 s, giving 40-86 units/s, so 60 is
in and 120 is out. Attempted to refute it, and it does not hold.
Two reasons, either sufficient.
The low end is the instrument's floor. title-plate-delay-measured.md says
of that number, in its own words, "at a sampling resolution (0.125 s) that
cannot do better". 0.14 s IS one sample. At 120 units/s, 12 units is
0.100 s, which a 0.125 s sampler reports as roughly 0.14 s -- exactly the
value read as excluding it. The 86 units/s upper limit is an artefact of
dividing by a floored duration.
And a wall-clock duration off Canary is not independent of the unknown.
Apparent units/s = true units/s x speed factor, and the speed factor is
precisely what makes the three routes disagree. The bracket says "if Canary
ran at real time, 40-86" and whether it did is the question.
What survives is the declared side, and it is a disc fact worth keeping:
the transition opens over 12 units, independently confirmed as 6 frames by
screen-transitions.md's 255/6-per-frame ramp. That leg has no wall clock in
it and is real evidence -- for units per FRAME, which was never in dispute.
This does not argue for 120. Nothing supports 120 either. It removes a
reason for excluding it, and my position is unchanged: the value is
authored until the content-hash experiment runs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
Published this morning, withdrawn the same day. The measurement was real;
the inference was not established.
My own pre-registration named three ways the instrument could lie and
guarded two. The third -- "the guest may be frame-locked to its own
presentation rather than to the movie clock" -- is the one that occurred,
and a perfect 1.0000 is exactly what it produces: a triple buffer rotating
once per present gives run-length 1 at ANY frame rate. So the measurement
cannot separate a 30 fps guest decoding one movie frame per present from a
60 fps guest rotating a buffer per present.
The methodological error is the part worth keeping. I wrote the guard down,
saw a result so clean it had no tail, and read the cleanness as strength. A
clean result on an instrument whose key assumption is unguarded is not
confirmation -- the cleanness may be the failure mode's own signature. Both
guards I did build tested how the buffer was READ; neither tested whether a
buffer change means a decode.
What surfaced it: the draw log carries a per-frame gtick marker I had not
noticed. It is host time rescaled (Clock::QueryGuestTickCount is
host_tick_count * guest_tick_ratio, scalar 1.0), so it is a wall clock and
cannot be read as a rate -- but its SHAPE has no phase. Xenia locks vblank
to 60 Hz, and the present interval is ONE vblank 71.7% of the time and two
24.6%. A guest hard-locked to 30 fps presents every second vblank and would
put the mass at 2.
I am NOT replacing it with 120. Three routes now disagree: the withdrawn
movie cadence says 60, the vblank cadence says ~120, and
title-plate-delay's 120 declared units in 2.13 s measured twice to 6 ms
says ~56. Two of the three must be wrong and I do not know which.
Publishing 120 would repeat the mistake this commit withdraws.
The port is told to keep 60 for now, and told plainly that it is an
authored value rather than a measured one.
The settling experiment is named: hash the movie luma plane's CONTENTS per
present rather than its base address, which separates "the buffer rotated"
from "a frame was decoded".
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
The blend bit has been decoded against RB_BLENDCONTROL0 since 2026-08-31,
but ui_layout::blit could not draw it, and said so in a comment citing a
refutation that is <render-vs-capture> -- this renderer disagreeing with
itself while it had a stale keyframe association, no leaf geometry and no
rotation.
The consequence the port raised: verify-screen compares two renderers, so a
renderer that structurally cannot express a declared field makes the check
incapable on every screen that uses it -- 12 of 16 -- and the tolerance
silently excuses all of them. A quiet check is worse than a failing one.
Both equations come off the game's own pixel shader, which premultiplies
(oC0 = rgb*A, A), so only the blend register differs: 0x07010701 gives
rgb*A + dst*(1-A), 0x01010101 gives rgb*A + dst. Additive therefore
saturates rather than wrapping, and a transparent or black source is the
identity -- neither is a choice.
No plumbing needed: t8ad::parse already stores +0x04 as T8adImage::flags.
Four controls, pinned against arithmetic per the rotation precedent. The
fourth is the only one that can fail for the right reason: the first three
pass just as well if blit ignores the flag and draws everything additive,
so the discriminator flips only the blend on one sprite and requires two
different answers, each equal to its own equation. That is the same failure
class as the port's non-inverting latch check and my own backward scan that
resolved every guard to "internal".
120 passed, 0 failed on the full lib suite.
67 sprites over 14 screens were being drawn with the wrong blend, including
10 of 18 on the title and ptbtn00f, the PRESS (A) plate's highlight.
R1: tools/stale-instrument render-vs-capture lists 8 claims that died to
this instrument, including both legs of the rest() pair and "the plate-free
title capture may be too early to be settled", which sits on play-test
finding 3. None is re-derived here; this only records that the instrument
no longer exists in that form.
Also corroborates the port's H5: pgloading_loop5 is an ELEMENT resolving to
sprite pgloading_ring.t32, which is additive. I could not find loop5 as a
sprite in any pak and nearly reported a false contradiction from the
element/sprite name split.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
The port isolated main_menu's 10.88 -> 13.02 regression to pteff10 and
asked whether the per-draw log shows it alpha-over, which would be a
counter-example to ui-blend-mode-decoded.md.
It does not. blend-bit-vs-oracle.txt has pteff10 ADDITIVE on entry 5 (main
menu) AND entry 6 (extras), both labels read out of the guest command
stream, and HANDOFF states it from three independent menu sessions, every
frame.
The premise came from a stale coverage table of mine that the same HANDOFF
entry had already corrected in place. Recording that: a correction which
leaves the wrong table visible upstream of it has not landed.
And the regression was predicted on this exact element before adoption --
HANDOFF flagged pteff10 as the one row the port's renderer would not
corroborate, because for a dim wholly-semi-transparent glow (max alpha 130)
over a dark background additive and alpha-over nearly coincide. A renderer
metric getting worse while the render gets more correct is the standing
rule with a number on it.
Separately, the port answered my finding-3 candidate: a frozen sweep of the
plate region rises monotonically across the declared 214->236, so the port
fades rather than pops and its t=236 is a completion. That kills the onset
branch.
Two of the play-test's four named candidates for finding 3 are now dead --
units/s (measured at 60) and the ramp. Finding 3 has no surviving named
cause. The clock origin is the one to take next, because every measurement
so far is a DIFFERENCE between two events and a difference cannot detect a
common offset.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
Answered against the pre-registration committed before the capture.
Units per second was the last open number on the PRESS (A) plate, and both
prior measurements of it were wall-clock readings off an emulator that runs
the guest slow by an unknown factor. They disagreed by 2.9x, because a 30 Hz
guest at full speed and a 60 Hz guest at half speed look identical on a wall
clock.
The ruler here is not a clock. ADV.wmv declares 30.0000 fps in its own ASF
header, so a decoded movie frame is a tick the emulator's speed cannot
stretch. Presented frames per decoded movie frame is guest_fps/30 with no
wall clock in the chain.
predicted H_A 30 fps -> 60 units/s -> 1.0
H_B 60 fps -> 120 units/s -> 2.0
measured 1.0000
Both pre-registered guards pass. Guard 2: a perfect repeating 3-buffer
cycle, 52 uses each (exactly 156/3), 2 chroma planes per luma on 156 of 156.
Guard 1: run lengths are 156 runs ALL of length 1 -- no smear, so the
dropped-movie-frame bias that would have pushed the answer toward 120 is
measurably absent rather than argued away.
So H_A. The port keeps its 60 and changes nothing.
REFUTES the live H3 hypothesis that 120 units/s explains the play-test's
late plate. That hypothesis was well-formed and attractive precisely because
it would have explained the complaint, which is why it needed a ruler that
is not a clock.
Which means finding 3 still has no cause. The strongest remaining candidate
is decoded rather than speculative: the plate's declared onset is t=214, not
t=236 -- a 22-unit fade, matching the T=22 the oracle confirmed by measuring
+23 alpha per presented frame on that element.
The pre-registered control could NOT be run: this logger build emits vb=
addresses, not vertex contents, so there was no alpha to check +34 against.
A weaker control is substituted and labelled -- the splash shader/blend
census, which validates the log's structure (what this measurement uses) and
not alpha extraction (which it does not).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
Units per second is the one number left on the PRESS (A) plate, and both
existing measurements of it are wall-clock readings off an emulator that
runs the guest slower than real time by an unknown factor. They disagree
by 2.9x, which is what that method is worth here.
ADV.wmv declares 30.0000 fps exactly in its own ASF header (stream #2,
avgTimePerFrame = 333333 x100ns). That is a disc fact, so a decoded movie
frame is a tick of a clock Canary's speed cannot stretch.
The measurement is a ratio of counts with no wall clock in it: how many
consecutive swap labels bind the same movie luma texture base.
H_A guest 30 fps -> 60 units/s -> 1.0 labels per movie frame
H_B guest 60 fps -> 120 units/s -> 2.0 labels per movie frame
Committed BEFORE the capture so the number cannot be chosen afterwards,
with acceptance bands, the three ways the instrument could lie, a guard
for two of them, and a named control (the splashes' established +34/frame
must reproduce in the same log, or the log is not comparable).
Noting the trap I nearly fell into: stream #1's avgTimePerFrame is a
packet rate and reads as 3.05 fps. Reading the wrong stream is the obvious
way to get this wrong, so it is written down.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
input-pad-read-path.md says of the word the C_PAD_DECODER reads: "There is
no shift and no remap on the way in -- the bit positions are XINPUT's own."
That is wrong. sub_8220D500 rebuilds the word out of XINPUT_GAMEPAD before
anything else sees it, into the game's own numbering.
bits 0-3 A B X Y
bits 4-7 left stick UP DOWN LEFT RIGHT (+/-20000 of 32767)
bits 8-11 right stick UP DOWN LEFT RIGHT
bits 12-15 D-pad UP DOWN LEFT RIGHT
bits 16-17 START, BACK
bits 18-19 LB, RB
bits 20-21 LT, RT -- digital, threshold >220 of 255
bits 22-23 L3, R3
Extracted mechanically from the image, no row typed by hand. The control is
the shape of the result: the 24 assignments land on bits 0..23, each used
exactly once, none repeated. A misdecode does not produce a bijection over a
contiguous range, and coincidence does not put the stick and D-pad
directions in the same order in two aligned nibbles.
So every mask in that page's tables names the wrong button. The 0xE000 x18
site, read there as "B | X | Y", is "D-pad DOWN | LEFT | RIGHT" -- eighteen
sites testing a menu cursor, which is what 18 sites should be.
And its headline negative is REFUTED: "LB and RB are not menu inputs" is
false. They are bound at config fields this+0x70 and this+0x84, LT/RT at
+0x74/+0x80. The negative was searched for 0x0100/0x0200 -- LB and RB in
XINPUT's numbering -- in a word where they live at 0x40000/0x80000. Right
function, right buttons, wrong bit positions, so it could only come back
empty. A negative is only as good as the numbering it was searched in.
Also decodes the ring record: +12 HELD, +16 PRESSED, +20 RELEASED, +28/+32
raw trigger bytes. Edge and level are one struct four bytes apart, which
displaces that page's guess that press-vs-hold was split between GetState
and the XamInputGetKeystrokeEx queue.
The superset claim in that page survives and is untouched: sub_82457038
really does compare every XINPUT_GAMEPAD field, and it really is
XINPUT-layout. This page depends on it.
Not decoded: which output bit means which ACTION, and per-screen sets. 5 of
18 output-bit sites did not resolve to a pad guard, so the output map is a
lower bound -- in particular "START is not tested" is NOT claimed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
Play-test finding 4, answered as a mechanism and from the disc, so it
generalises instead of describing one boot.
ui-splash-draw-pass.md excluded a post-process from GPU state and closed
with "that softness is in the texture or in which quads are drawn, not in
a pass", leaving the two unseparated. It is both, and they are one fact:
each logo ships a second texture that IS the blur -- the same artwork
outset by exactly 10 px per side, concentric to <=1.5 px, drawn as its
own alpha-over quad.
Three results, each with its control:
* The capture's eight anonymous quads are NAMED from the disc. Predicting
each NDC rect from declared position + decoded sprite size matches all
eight bijectively; every match <=0.0061, every runner-up >=0.0272, a
4.5-8.9x margin. That margin is the control -- eight similar boxes
would match anything.
* REFUTES splash-quad-timeline.txt's "the same three rects scaled
slightly larger" (my own earlier wording). The x and y scale factors
differ by up to 0.28; a uniform scale cannot do that, a fixed 10-px
border can. The conclusion it supported (draw all six quads) stands;
the model was wrong, and the wrong model tells a port to scale a
sprite.
* The T8aD blend bit tested OUT of sample on entries 10/11, which were
not in its 35-row fit and are the screens under complaint.
Pre-registered additive=false for all eight against 0 additive draws in
1048; held 8/8, with the control still reporting 9 additive on entry 6.
Also resolves a REFUTED.md 🟡 <our-reader> in the reader's favour: the
prediction is ours and the target is the oracle, so the agreement is
evidence about the reader rather than a claim resting on it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
Told the port plainly: their arithmetic was right, the 35-40 is withdrawn,
keep 60 for every screen, and do not average or split anything. Struck the
previous section's heading in place rather than deleting it.
Carried the instrument lesson across, because it is worth more than the
number: the guest timebase does not remove the pacing artefact, since the
game's animation clock is frame-coupled rather than being the guest
timebase. My control verified capability -- does this clock track real time
-- when the question was configuration: is the quantity I divide by coupled
to the frame rate.
Also told them what this leaves: both halves of the human's finding 4 that
were mine are answered and neither points at their export, so their own
unbound-A observation is now the strongest candidate and it is theirs.
The Port's arithmetic was right: a 160-unit sub-interval cannot outlast the
210-unit group containing it, and my hold (4.514 s) outlasted three cold-boot
measurements of the whole group (3.37/3.50/3.51 s).
My own capture says why, once asked the right question. The three numbers I
quoted came from three regions of ONE run, and I never asked how fast the
emulator was going in each:
splash B (the hold) 3.39 labels/guest-second -> I reported 35.4
splash A (publisher) 15.33 -> I reported 40.0
the title (the plate) 23.20 -> I reported 56.8
Monotonic. The 'per-GamePart rate' is the pacing of the region it was
measured in. Splash B was captured at 3.4 fps, an eighth of the title
region.
And the corpus already had this. boot-splash-dwells-are-declared.md says in
its own words that the wall-clock dwell is an emulator-pacing artefact that
varies run to run, with a no-input boot 15-20% long on the same declared
timeline. I re-derived a documented artefact as a discovery and drew a false
conclusion from it.
The instrument lesson, which is the part worth keeping: I believed the guest
timebase removed the artefact. It does not. The game's animation clock is not
the guest timebase -- it is frame-coupled -- so a slow run advances less
animation per guest second and no clock can see that from inside. My control
asked 'does this timebase track real time', which is capability. The question
that mattered was 'is the quantity I divide by coupled to the frame rate',
and nothing I ran asked it. That is PROTOCOL's own warning, which I quoted at
the other agent two iterations ago and then walked into.
Restated: the clock is neither purely frame-counted (21 vs 33 labels for one
animation) nor purely time-integrated (rate scales with frame rate).
Consistent with a clamped per-frame delta, untested, and now the real open
question.
Consequence: no rate measured on this emulator is the console's; all are
biased low. Best estimate stays the declared timeline against the fastest
runs -- 60 units/s, 1.1% on the developer splash. The port keeps 60 for every
screen and nothing needs averaging.
Untouched: section 1 of splash-declared-vs-captured.md. It compares a disc
table against vertex alphas at integer t and never divides by a duration, so
the pacing artefact cannot reach it.
Three sections, the correction first.
The rate is per-GamePart: title ~57, splash ~35-40. I gave them 56.8 an hour
ago and said the reach was the title; the splashes now have their own number
with T read off the disc. The hold is what makes it safe to hand over -- 160
declared units in 4.514 guest seconds, with no T, no alpha slope and no
interpolation in the arithmetic, agreeing with the same screen's ramp which
shares none of its algebra. Told them a splash played at 60 runs 1.5-1.7x
too fast, which is a TIMELINE cause for the complaint we had both filed
under blur. Classified measured, not decoded, and told them not to extend
either number to any other screen.
The R1-re-opened 'declared timeline reproduces the captured splash' settles
in favour of the timeline: 39/50 exact under truncation, worst error one
alpha level in 255, nothing off by more than one. So their export's splash
keyframes are right and the rate was the defect.
Refutation attempt on their H5, recorded whether it survived or not: it does
not. build_12 and build_15 have identical declaration bodies, so identical
statistics is one fact rather than two coincidences -- as do 0/1, 2/3 and
11/14, while 4/7, 5/8, 6/9 and 10/13 genuinely differ. Also recorded the trap
I hit first: the dump header carries the build number, so the compared text
contained the label distinguishing the subjects and every pair read as
different. A self-comparison control caught it.
Two results, one of which corrects me.
1. The R1-re-opened 'declared keyframe timeline reproduces the captured
splash' resolves in FAVOUR of the declared timeline. Instrument is a disc
keyframe table against the guest's vertex stream -- no renderer in the chain,
which is what the 'our-reader' tag demanded. Calibration-free test: is each
captured alpha an exact member of the declared piecewise-linear value set at
integer t? 39/50 exact under truncation, 30/50 under rounding, and the worst
error under either rule is ONE alpha level in 255. All 11 non-exact samples
are low by exactly 1 and all are on falling segments. The old refutation
rested on 'still at a=255 nine frames after its declared a=32' -- under the
fixed layout a=32 is at t=206, four units from the end of a 210-unit
timeline. That was the off-by-one association.
2. The unit->seconds rate is PER-GAMEPART, which corrects what I told the
port an hour ago. Title ~57 units/guest-second; splash ~35-40. The splash
figure is confirmed two ways that share no algebra: a 15-unit ramp (T read
off the disc, not borrowed) and a 160-unit HOLD, which is a declared
duration with no T, no alpha slope and no interpolation in it.
And my 'the borrowed T=15 does not apply' was wrong in the other direction:
the disc says T=15 plainly. What failed was the premise of a single global
rate, not the T. Noted at the foot of that page rather than by editing it.
The trap worth recording: all four elements give 650-679 alpha/s, agreeing
to 2%, which reads exactly like one clock. It is a coincidence -- T differs
22 vs 15 and the rates differ 57 vs 37, and the ratios nearly cancel. A
quantity that looks constant across screens is not evidence of one clock
when the thing that would vary is inside it. The hold breaks the tie.
For the port: a single keyframe_units_per_second cannot be right, and a
splash played at 60 runs 1.5-1.7x too fast -- shorter, sharper fades than
the game's, which is the direction the play-test reported.
Told them plainly: 56.8 is inside my pre-registered band, the control passes
at 1.15%, 30 and 120 are excluded, and my own earlier ~30 was a borrowed T
that does not apply to those elements.
Three instructions: keep 60 (5.6% away against ~5% resolution, not refuted);
units = 2 x frames stays dead because only the constant survives and not the
route; and the unit constant is now ELIMINATED as the cause of a late plate,
since at 56.8 the plate lands at 4.15 s against their 3.93 s -- they are
fractionally early. That closes H3's last candidate from their side.
The title still said 'not yet a number' after the second half resolved it to
56.8. Kept the failed first half in place and in order -- the borrowed T is
the lesson -- but a reader must not stop at the header.
The capture reached the title AFTER the harness stopped classifying, so the
plate's ramp was in the log with tick stamps after all.
ptbtn00: alpha 11->231 over 334.4 guest ms = 657.9 alpha/s. With its
independently attested T=22 that is 56.8 units per guest second, inside the
pre-registered 55-65 band. The final step of every ramp is excluded because
it clamps at 255 and reports more elapsed time than it consumed -- including
it drags the plate to 633.0 alpha/s, a 4% error entirely inside the clamp.
Control passes at 1.15%: ptcopyright gives 650.4 alpha/s, and at one shared
clock that makes its own segment T=22.25. Two elements agreeing on a rate
AND independently landing on a round declared length is stronger than either.
Why my earlier 29.9 was wrong, and it is the failure the page predicted: it
used T=15 borrowed from a row that is about A element with a 15-unit fade,
generalised to splash B's quads, which is not what that row says. At 56.8 the
splash elements' implied T is 23-34, none of them 15. And the step quantum
does not rescue 15: splash steps are multiples of 17 = 255/15, which is what
made 15 look confirmed, but at T=28.5 a step of 17 is simply TWO units of
8.9. A quantum fixes T only if you already know the step is one unit.
60 is NOT refuted -- 5.6% away against ~5% quantisation resolution -- so the
port keeps it. But this DOES eliminate the unit constant as a cause of a late
plate: at 56.8 units/s t=236 lands at 4.15 s against the port's 3.93 s, so
the port is fractionally early.
Two sections, the retraction first.
The clock is time-integrated, not frame-counted, so 'units = 2 x frames' --
which I sent them two hours ago -- computes an emulator artefact. Told them
what still stands from that message (the T-vs-step arithmetic and the t~160
anchor, both ratios inside one run) and what does not.
Also told them explicitly to KEEP 60 units/s and act on nothing today: my
own measured 29.9 rests on a T whose usual derivation is circular with the
thing just retired, and a failed prediction is not a licence to move their
constant.
Their H4, the blend space: the game blends in the ENCODED space.
RB_COLOR_INFO.color_format is k_8_8_8_8 on 2402/2402 splash draws and
33779/33791 of the boot-to-title capture; k_8_8_8_8_GAMMA appears zero times
and color_exp_bias is 0 everywhere. Mechanism from Canary's own source:
k_8_8_8_8_GAMMA is the only colour format around which a PWL gamma<->linear
conversion is applied. So a renderer that linearises and re-encodes is doing
a different operation, and the difference is gamma-shaped and zero on
unblended pixels -- their reported signature.
Reported against the pre-registration, failure first.
HELD, and by a cleaner argument than the regression: the clock is NOT
frame-counted. The same animation takes 21 frame labels in one capture and
33 in another, and splash A's logo steps +136,+34 in one and
+17,+51,+34,+34,+17,+17 in the other. A fixed per-frame increment cannot do
that. Steps are always integer multiples of 17 (255/15 = one unit), so the
clock advances in whole units at a rate set by how long the frame took.
That retires '2 units per submitted frame' as a MECHANISM -- including my own
page from two hours ago. The measurement stands; 2 was that run's frame
pacing. units = 2 x frames computes an emulator artefact. Recorded as a
proposal against the register, not enacted, and noted at the head of the H3
page rather than by editing it.
FAILED: predicted 60 units per guest second, accept 55-65. Measured median
29.9 over six elapsed-ratio estimates (25.2-36.6). Prediction 3 said 30 was
excluded and 30 is what came out.
Why the rate is not a number yet: units/s = (d_alpha/dt) * T/255, and T is
the load-bearing term. d_alpha/dt is measured cleanly six ways. T=15 for
these elements comes from a corpus row whose usual derivation is circular
with the thing just retired -- a step of 34/frame implies T=15 only GIVEN 2
units/frame. T=30 would give ~60. No amount of re-measuring alpha settles it.
Settles with ptbtn00, whose T=22 is attested by two independent readers with
no clock anywhere in the chain. That capture did not reach the title in 531 s
of attract loop against 243 s in the previous run -- the variable attract
loop capture-harness-status.md already documents at up to 604 s. Instrument
built and control-passed; one run is missing.
Instrument: guest timebase, 50 MHz per emulator.cc:225, scalar 1.0 per
clock.cc:37, so no host wall clock enters any number. Control: 123.24 guest
seconds across a capture running ~118 wall seconds.
Told the port to change NOTHING today: ~30 rests on an unverified T, and
retiring 2 x frames does not by itself supply a replacement.
The Port asks whether the blend is evaluated on sRGB-encoded values or
linearised and re-encoded. It is answered by one register field I already
log, and the answer is the same on every draw of two full captures.
RB_COLOR_INFO.color_format is k_8_8_8_8 (0) on 2402/2402 splash draws and
33779/33791 draws of the boot-through-title capture; the other 12 are
k_32_FLOAT and k_16_16_FLOAT and are not colour passes. k_8_8_8_8_GAMMA (1)
appears ZERO times, and color_exp_bias is 0 everywhere so nothing stands in
for a gamma either.
The mechanism is Canary's own source, not our inference: k_8_8_8_8_GAMMA is
the ONLY colour format around which a piecewise-linear gamma<->linear
conversion is applied (spirv_shader_translator.h:510 PWLGammaToLinear /
LinearToPWLGamma, render_target_cache.h:720, dxbc_shader_translator_om.cc).
With k_8_8_8_8 there is none, so the blender operates on the stored values
as they are.
So a renderer that linearises before blending and re-encodes after is doing
a different operation -- and the difference is gamma-shaped and exactly zero
on unblended pixels, which is the divergence signature the port reports.
Also renamed my units-per-second pre-registration off the 'h4' prefix: the
Port's BLOCKED.md numbers this blend-space question H4 and two different H4s
in one corpus is how a citation goes wrong.
H3 pinned 2 units per guest FRAME. The port needs units per SECOND, and that
decomposition is only valid if the clock counts frames. If it integrates
elapsed time then units/second is the invariant and units/frame is an
artefact of whatever rate the host managed.
Evidence it is time-integrated is already in hand and is the caveat H3 had
to quote: across empty label 5376 the plate's alpha moved +82 where three
adjacent labels each moved +23. 82/23 = 3.57, not an integer number of
ticks, and a fixed per-frame increment cannot produce a fractional multiple
of itself.
Instrument: the draw logger now stamps each frame boundary with
Clock::QueryGuestTickCount() and guest_tick_frequency() -- the GUEST's
timebase, 50 MHz per emulator.cc:225, scalar 1.0 per clock.cc:37. No host
wall clock enters the calculation.
Discriminator, within one run: regress alpha step against the label's guest
duration. Flat => frame-counted. Proportional => time-integrated, and the
slope is the answer.
Predicted before the run: time-integrated with r>0.9, at 60 units per guest
second, accept 55-65, 120 and 30 excluded. Stated honestly as a CONSISTENCY
prediction -- it is what the previous capture's run average implies -- not a
blind one.
Control: the same regression on ptcopyright's ramp, a different element with
a different declared segment. Two elements must agree under the
time-integrated model and need not otherwise.
Three rows the port is blocked on:
H3 -- 2 units per guest frame, measured on the plate's own ramp against a
pre-registration. Their 5 excluded by >2x, and the reason named: an alpha
step is not a clock rate without the element's declared T, and my own
splash-quad-timeline.txt published alpha against frame with no T column.
That file now warns at its head.
The title settle anchor is t~160, not t=118 -- it is ptcopyright, the last
build-in element and the only glyph one. Said plainly that this is the
reading under which their clock:'shared' collapses, and that a consequence
is not a counter-argument.
Told them NOT to change their 60 units/s yet: units/second is untouched by
this and two of my own captures disagree ~2.9x on frames->seconds.
The pad: sub_82457038 reads every field of XINPUT_GAMEPAD, 14/14 loads
verified against the image, plus a second keystroke-queue path. Flagged as
the superset the game can SEE, not the per-screen set, so it is used to
check a binding table and not to write one.
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.
The Port asks which of two of my measurements to believe -- 55 units/s from
the plate page, ~150 from their reading of my splash timeline, a factor of
2.7 off one game.
Neither is safe and for the same reason: both convert an ALPHA STEP into a
CLOCK RATE, which needs the element's declared ramp length, because
d(alpha)/frame = 255 * (units/frame) / T. My own splash capture shows that
biting: splash B steps 34/label while splash A's logo steps 68 or 136 across
one label pair. Same boot, 2x or 4x apart. An alpha step is not a clock rate.
So measure on an element whose T is declared: ptbtn00, the plate itself,
t=214 alpha=0 -> t=236 alpha=255, T=22 units.
Predicted, before looking: 11 frames at the corpus's 2 units/frame, 4.4 at
the Port's inferred 5. Accept +/-1. Committed first so it cannot be edited
afterwards.
R1 asks for tools/stale-instrument when an instrument improves. The draw
logger improved this iteration; all eight claims that <harness> killed are
about the SCREENSHOT harness -- polling cadence, x11grab latency, the
title/plate classifier -- and none of them ever used the draw logger, so
none re-open. Written down because 'ran it, nothing changed' and 'did not
run it' are otherwise the same absence.
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.
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.
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.
Both agents asked for this and neither could do it: the register is the file
they both read to decide what NOT to try, so two agents agreeing is not the
authority for changing it (RETRO-2026-08-31-agreed §7.1).
R1: a refutation whose instrument is one of our renderers is not a refutation,
it is "our renderer disagrees" -- 🟡, not ❌. The motivating case was not
careless work. "Blending those sprites additively worsens every measure against
the capture" killed a real disc field for weeks, and read exactly like a
publishable negative; the renderer behind it had a stale keyframe association,
no leaf geometry and no rotation. Nothing in the entry could have told you.
All 222 entries now end with ⟨instrument⟩, read off each entry's OWN stated
evidence -- never inferred. An entry that states none gets `unrecorded`, which
is 83 of them.
Ten moved ❌ -> 🟡, each naming what would settle it: 8 render-vs-capture,
1 our-reader, 1 harness.
Three things the pass turned up:
* The rest() question is OPEN and had been reading as settled in both
directions -- "rest = last keyframe" was refuted by a sibling argument, and
that refutation refuted by correlating our render against captures. Both legs
are our renderer. Which one you believed depended on which entry you found
first, and it decides the pose every plateau-less element is drawn at.
* A withdrawal never reached its sibling: "2 391 frames, max glyph 0" was
withdrawn because a long-lived x11grab stream freezes and repeats a stale
frame; the 1 674-sample negative three lines above it, same probe, was left
standing as a reinstated measurement.
* 83 of 222 -- 37 % -- record no instrument at all. Not disputed, not safe:
unauditable, and larger than every other group combined.
tools/stale-instrument is the --stale query the rule needs, because a colour
alone re-opens nothing: the failure was that nothing re-opened a claim when the
instrument that killed it improved. Its own --check found a real bug on the
first run -- sys.exit("text") exits 1, so three faults documented as exit 2
were reporting the same code as an ordinary miss.
R1 is now standing text in PROTOCOL.md, with R5's exception: our tool is the
right instrument for a question about our tool.
The R11 self-catch existed only in a commit message and a script comment. §5's
own rule says the file carries the finding, so it belongs in the retro.
Writing the BLOCKED.md pointer, the obvious form -- git show || { echo missing;
exit 4; } -- prints "the file is missing" for a file it has just printed in full,
because piping into head closes the pipe and git dies of SIGPIPE. An error path
that fires on success is worth no more than one that never fires.
Same family as the port's MIX default and my vertex cap, with one difference
worth keeping: both of those needed an outside observer, and this one did not,
because all four paths were exercised rather than the happy one. A script with
three failure branches has three tests and they cost a line each.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
The Port's standing ask list is not in my loop brief, which BLOCKED.md itself
records as having cost three sessions. My brief does force HANDOFF.md open every
iteration and HANDOFF is mine to write, so the pointer lives there. One line in a
file I own; no brief change and no human needed.
R11 says a cross-agent pointer must fail loudly when it goes stale, because every
staleness incident here has been silent. peer_asks.sh exits 2, 3 or 4 with a
message for a missing remote, a renamed branch or a moved file, and lists the
branches it can see so the fix is obvious. A blank output is a failure, not an
empty ask list.
Its own first version was wrong in the way this retro is about. Written as
`git show ... || { echo missing; exit 4; }`, piping it into `head` closed the
pipe, git died of SIGPIPE, and the fallback printed 'the file is missing' for a
file it had just printed in full. An error path that fires on success is worth no
more than one that never fires. Existence is now checked with `cat-file -e` and
the content exec'd; all four paths were exercised before this commit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
The human asked both agents for a critical retro; it reached me relayed through
sylpheed-port, and I am treating it as a message rather than as their word while
staying paused on RE iterations.
Worst failure first: I READ the refutation that mattered and routed around it
instead of auditing it. REFUTED.md killed the blend bit with our own renderer as
its instrument, and I quoted the 'a claim resting on our renderer is a claim
about our renderer' rule at the port in the same session while not applying it to
my own register.
Underneath it is the sharper one: I twice accepted render-derived labels for a
disc-side question. My 'no field separates them' negative was tested against a
partition that was wrong in six places, all six of which the oracle later called
additive.
Also recorded: the silent vertex truncation, a coverage claim written rather than
computed and wrong by four, a batching generalisation refuted by the log it was
written from, and navigation whose fix was worse than the bug.
Two additions to the port's list of shared costs: neither of us has ever given a
negative a positive control, so 'absent' and 'my search does not work' are
indistinguishable in every undecodable page I have written; and we keep
attributing a three-way residual to whichever leg we happen to be looking at.
Their eight proposals attacked one by one -- P2 sharpened into a
re-classification rather than bookkeeping, P5 pushed back on ('suppression
localises disagreement; only the oracle labels it'), the rest agreed with
amendments.
And the check the retro forced: my rival sweep covered the T8aD header and not
the 60-byte declaration entry, whose earlier hunt used the corrupted labels. Swept
properly, 16 of the 35 measured elements have no declaration entry at all and 0
declaration bits separate the other 19. The decode is not underdetermined -- run
because it could have gone the other way.
The PROTOCOL delta is presented, not applied.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
Delivered: T8aD +0x04 bit 0x02 selects additive, so the port derives the blend
instead of transcribing my table -- including for screens neither of us has
captured. With why I got it wrong first: the bit was already in REFUTED.md,
killed by a comparison of two renders made while our renderer had a stale
keyframe association, no leaf geometry and no rotation.
Their asks: pteff10 IS additive on the main menu, three sessions, every frame,
and my coverage table listing it uncovered there is corrected. The sweep ramp is
four leaf keyframes on the disc, with the oracle agreeing on sign and magnitude
and a second identification from the sub-128 alpha. And kind & 0x2 is not mine
to grant -- stated what the decode supports (0 violations in 15493 entries, and
it means the declaration marks the element focusable, not that the cursor can
reach it) and left the adoption to them.
ui-blend-mode-measured.md is superseded in its classification and keeps its
measurements, which are what the decode is fitted to.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
Reverses two of my own pages. t32-blend-mode-not-on-disc.md said the mode is not
on the disc; ui-blend-mode-measured.md classified it measured and told the port
that which field selects it was unknown. Both were honest and neither is current.
Bit 0x02 of +0x04 set means the game draws that sprite ADDITIVE
(RB_BLENDCONTROL0 = 0x01010101); clear means premultiplied alpha-over.
Fit: 35 elements over three screens, 16 set/additive and 19 clear/alpha-over,
zero errors, every label read out of the guest command stream rather than off a
render.
Control: of every bit of the first twelve header words, exactly one separates
those 35 without error. Nothing ties with it -- which is precisely what the
+0x08 = 0x8050 candidate failed.
Within-pair: ptbtn00 0x0110 alpha-over against ptbtn00f 0x0112 additive, same
screen, same bundle, adjacent draws, one bit apart. And other f variants are
bit-clear and alpha-over, so it is not 'focused variants are additive'.
Out of sample: a prediction committed at 088df91, before its capture, on a
different archive -- GP_OPTIONS entry 19, 3 additive of 16, falsified if any
other element drew additive. The game drew exactly po_menu_eff01/02/03 additive
and nothing else.
This revives a claim REFUTED.md killed. The refutation said blending those
sprites additively worsens every measure against the capture -- a claim about
our renderer, made while that renderer had a stale keyframe association, no leaf
geometry and no rotation. Recorded as a revival with its evidence;
check_refuted.py passes with 0 unmarked assertions.
Two other readings of the same bit stay refuted and are explicitly not revived:
'the name contains eff' and 'premultiplied storage'. Those were the bit's
meaning; this is its effect.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
The port asked for the sweep strips' vertex alpha as a function of position. It
is not a runtime curve to sample: ptloop01/ptloop02's nested leaves declare four
keyframes each, with x, alpha, rotation, scale and time.
pteff03 loop 600u x -639 -> 1521, alpha 255 -> 128 -> 255, rot +30, sy 600 %
pteff03a loop 720u x 1721 -> -839, alpha 0 -> 128 -> 255, rot -45, sy 800 %
Checked against three sessions of GPU draws: both signs right every time, and
magnitudes within ~15 % of the declared slopes.
The independent bit worth having: across sessions the measured alpha spans
45..242, and only pteff03a declares alpha below 128 -- pteff03's ramp never
leaves [128,255]. The strip measured at 45 is the 1303-tall one, which the AABB
geometry says is pteff03a for a completely different reason. Two identifications
agreeing.
Stated as limits rather than buried: this cannot separate the two declared
slopes, which are 25 % apart against a quantisation of 6.4 px and one alpha
level over 3-4 frames; and absolute phase is unchecked because the AABB-left to
element-x mapping under rotation and pivot is not established.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
REFUTED.md kills this claim: 'T8aD +0x04 bit 0x02 selects an additive blend ->
mine, and refuted. Blending those sprites additively worsens every measure
against the capture.' That refutation rests entirely on our renderer, which the
corpus's own rule calls a hypothesis under test. The blend is now measured off
the GPU, so the claim can be tested against the oracle.
35 elements over three screens, every label an RB_BLENDCONTROL0 value read from
the command stream: 16 bit-set and additive, 19 bit-clear and alpha-over, zero
false positives, zero false negatives.
The control that makes it a decode rather than a coincidence: of every bit of
the first 12 header words, EXACTLY ONE separates those 35 elements without
error. Nothing ties with it. A perfect partition on a small sample is worthless
if half the header partitions equally well, which is the mistake +0x08 = 0x8050
was.
And the pair no confound survives: ptbtn00 = 0x0110, ptbtn00f = 0x0112 -- the
PRESS (A) plate and its own highlight, same screen, differing in exactly this
bit, drawn alpha-over and additive respectively.
Committed alongside is a PREDICTION for GP_OPTIONS, written before the capture
that tests it: a different archive, a different element set, and a MIXED
prediction -- po_menu_eff01/02/03 additive, 592 elements alpha-over. Falsified
if those three draw alpha-over or anything else draws additive. The developer
splash was considered first and rejected as a test: both its elements predict
alpha-over, so it can fail but cannot discriminate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
The UI draw capture printed 8 vertices = two quads per draw, so a batched draw
dropped the rest silently. Four EXTRAS elements therefore appeared in no draw on
any screen, which reads as 'the game does not draw these' -- and the port spent
an iteration measuring them as the worst on the screen and asking about them.
When an instrument says an element never appears, check its limits before
believing the game.
And 'press down until the cursor stops moving' is not a stop condition on a
menu that WRAPS: it was unreachable, the loop only exited by exhausting its
budget, and it landed on EXTRAS because a dropped press cancelled one lap. An
earlier version of the same loop pressed (A) on NEW GAME after two identical
readings caused by a dropped press.
What held throughout is the part worth keeping: verify the state you measured,
never the actions you took.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
ptframe4, pteff21/22/23 and pteff10 are ADDITIVE, measured. They were missing
because Canary's vertex dump was capped at two quads, not because the game does
not draw them.
The title: everything alpha-over except the sweep strips and ptbtn00f, the PRESS
(A) plate's focused variant, whose base is not -- which is what the pulse is made
of. And ptlogo_back2 / ptlogo_back2eff are alpha-over despite having every
surface property the ptframe* elements have, so the obvious generalisation is
refuted on the one screen that could test it.
The sweeps are on screen on the main menu and move between frames, in two
sessions at different phases.
And the coverage claim they checked was wrong -- five elements, not one -- with
the correction and their 'every button' point both recorded.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
The four elements the port measured as the worst on EXTRAS, and which appeared
in no draw, were in a draw all along: the 24-index additive batch holds six
quads and Canary printed the first two. Cap raised to 64, screen re-captured,
all six named. Same draw as ptframe3, whose state was already measured -- the
one-way implication doing real work.
pteff10 is identified too, and it needed the resting SCALE: it ships as 409x144
and is drawn at 200 % x 500 % = 816x720. The matcher's 'try 1x and 2x' rule
could not name it at any scale and reported a near miss against something else,
which is a failure wearing the clothes of an answer. Candidates are now the
declaration's pivot*2 scaled by the resting keyframe as well as the texture at
1x and 2x, and the tolerance is the log's own NDC print quantisation rather than
a chosen number.
Flagged rather than buried: pteff10 measuring additive is in tension with the
port measuring it nearly exact under alpha-over. Both can be true for a dim
semi-transparent glow over a dark background, and it is the one row a rendering
check does not corroborate.
Also stated: the three full-screen alpha-over draws are NOT individually
identified -- four elements declare 1280x720 -- so the label on those rows is a
candidate, not an identification.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
sylpheed-port checked the coverage claim element by element and it was wrong.
The page said everything on the two screens was covered but for pteff10; on
EXTRAS, ptframe4, pteff21, pteff22 and pteff23 were also in neither the per-draw
log nor a prose row -- and they are exactly the four the port measures as the
worst elements on that screen.
The result rows were never wrong. The claim about what they covered was, and it
is the kind that reads as reassurance.
Also flagged, and fair: 'every button' is a class generalisation in the page
whose own instruction is to read it as per-element facts. It came from one
element on the main menu. Now stated as such.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
Two more emulator runs close two of the three reach limits on the blend page.
THE TITLE (entries 4 + 2 composited). Everything alpha-over except the two
rotated sweep strips and -- the finding -- ptbtn00f, the PRESS (A) plate's
focused variant, which is ADDITIVE while its own base ptbtn00 is not. That is
what the documented plate pulse is made of, and a port drawing both alpha-over
cannot reach the pulse's peak by any pacing.
And ptlogo_back2 / ptlogo_back2eff are ALPHA-OVER. They are frame-shaped, large,
dark and 94 %/87 % transparent -- every surface property the menu's ptframe* have
-- so 'frame-shaped and mostly transparent implies additive' is refuted on the
one screen that could test it.
THE MENU replicates draw for draw in two further sessions; the one-session
caveat is retired.
THE VERTEX CAP was 8 = two quads, so a batched draw reported its first two
elements and dropped the rest. Raised to 64. This is why ptframe4, pteff21,
pteff22 and pteff23 looked like elements the game never draws: EXTRAS' 24-index
additive draw holds six quads and the log printed two.
THE SWEEPS are on screen on the main menu in every captured frame, stepping
~0.03 NDC per frame in opposite directions with their vertex alpha ramping, at
different phases in two sessions. The leaf group runs on the menu. What that
does not say is how much they contribute.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
