Four consecutive runs failed to reach the interactive title, across two
locales, two launch paths and two display-gamma settings. I attributed it
in turn to a stale oracle, to the locale, and to the attract loop. It was
none of those.
one `screenshot` call, emulator running: 10.8 s
one `screenshot` call, emulator killed: 0.117 s
92x, measured at a 1-minute load average of 1.80 -- so it is contention
with the emulator through the X server, not background load.
skip_intro.sh takes two grabs per iteration plus a numpy import, giving a
median sampling interval of 41 s in the last run (38/82/41/20/30/30/35/
47/46/45/44/43/21/19). The title lasts "a few seconds" before the attract
loop reclaims it -- wait_title.sh's own header says so. The harness was
sampling slower than the event it was waiting for. That also explains why
runs at 16:43-18:05 the same day succeeded.
Withdrawn as CAUSES, though the observations stand: "the JP run never
reaches the interactive title", "neither locale reaches it without a pad
press", and "the game sat in the attract loop for 604 s". The English
control did control for locale -- it just shared the same defect.
Also recorded: I set kernel_display_gamma_type = 0 for the gamma control
run, which brightens the frame (mid-attract mean 122.8 vs 52.5/82.8 at
type 2) -- and skip_intro classifies movie-vs-static on an ABSOLUTE rmse
threshold, so the gamma change biased the very classifier the run
depended on. Changing a display setting and a capture behaviour in one
run confounds both. Config restored to type 2.
The fix is not applied: make the probe cheap enough to outpace the title
window (small region, no convert round trip, one long-lived process).
Every remaining emulator-side question is waiting on that.
Closes an observation I left dangling last iteration ("the capture is ~4x
darker than the render") and puts a figure on the ❔ INDEX's texture row
already carried: exact gamma/sRGB fidelity untested because a hue
comparison cannot see it.
Geometry first: cross-correlating the main-menu capture against our
render over +/-6 px puts the best alignment at exactly dy=0 dx=0,
correlation 0.9466. Only the tone differs.
Two methods failed before one worked, and both failures are recorded.
Three dark patches gave "4x darker" -- the whole-frame best linear scale
is 0.914, so three patches from one region are not a transfer curve. A
pixel-wise fit over 854,685 pixels then produced a NON-MONOTONIC transfer
(render 96-127 mapping brighter than render 128-159) with mean abs error
10-14 for every candidate model. That is edge misalignment, not a tone
curve: at correlation 0.947 a bright pixel routinely lands on a dark one.
Flat patches fix it -- 16x16 blocks with std < 8 in BOTH images, a
threshold chosen from the counts (0/83/404/1055/1788 at std<3/5/8/12/20):
main menu 404 patches gamma 1.491 err 0.28 (best linear 0.276, 0.34)
EXTRAS 382 patches gamma 1.493 err 0.22 (best linear 0.273, 0.28)
title 506 patches gamma 1.338 err 1.08 (best linear 0.842, 9.02)
Reach, stated because it is narrow: those patches span only render values
~0-60, where gamma and a plain scale are nearly indistinguishable -- the
two menus decide nothing (0.28 vs 0.34, 0.22 vs 0.28) and only the title
separates them. Nothing constrains midtones or highlights.
The held-out control FAILED TO DISCRIMINATE and is reported as such: the
splash's 2918 flat patches are pure black (render 0-4), so every model
scores ~0.00. That is a test with no power, not corroboration.
Confound left open: this compares our composite to what canary DISPLAYS,
and canary applies kernel_display_gamma_type = 2 (BT.709). The exponent
may be its output stage. The discriminating run -- set it to 0, recapture,
refit -- needs one emulator session reaching the main menu and was not
done.
Classified measured, not decoded; HANDOFF says plainly that a port
applying it is authoring.
Audited what `screen render` silently omits on the port's five screens,
since an element the game draws but we skip is the one defect class the
port agent has actually hit. Everything is accounted for -- kind & 0x4
ghost instances, .prm primitives, loop* animations -- except pteff04.t32
on the title and pteff05.t32 on both menus. Those are kind 0x0, one
keyframe, rest a=255, pivot (640,360): full-screen and opaque.
Cause: the element declares pteff05.t32, but the T8aD behind its `opt `
link is registered under the name 8AX, so build.sprites.get() misses and
compose hits a silent continue. Bytes at 0x0e2035 of GP_TITLE entry 5:
opt ... 70 74 65 66 66 30 35 2e 74 33 32 00 38 41 58 54 38 61 44
p t e f f 0 5 . t 3 2 \0 8 A X T 8 a D
8AX is 1280x720 and present in all six title-family bundles; it is a
sprite in builds 4/5/6 and never an element.
It does not currently show, and that is the useful half. ptbase.t32 is
640x360 drawn at 200% and carries THE SAME ARTWORK: its 2x upscale
differs from 8AX by mean abs diff 2.05 (max 80), and our rendered
background is pixel-identical to 8AX in every patch sampled. So resolving
the name and drawing it in addition would double-draw an opaque
full-screen layer -- invisible as a doubling, which is worse than a
visible bug. Written into HANDOFF as a do-not-do.
The free win, offered and not taken: use 8AX at 1:1 and drop ptbase
instead of upscaling a half-res copy. That is a rendering choice and
ptbase's element carries the keyframes, so it is the port's call.
Not established: which of the two the game actually draws. Both carry the
same art, so pixels cannot separate them; it needs a per-draw capture
recording texture base addresses, since the two differ in size.
Run 3 used the proven path rather than my own probe: launched exactly as
boot_menu.sh does (DISPLAY=:98, --apu=sdl, /dev/shm/xenia_* cleared, the
existing profile signed in) and drove skip_intro.sh, the detector that is
documented to work and that is stricter than mine (glyph >= 800 AND a
static frame).
It classified every one of 20 samples over 604 s as "movie", waited them
all out, and timed out. A direct check at 604 s says it was right: zero
green-glyph pixels, screen_id = other, warm mean (69,53,40), correlation
0.09 with build 7. The game really was playing attract movies for ten
minutes.
Three runs, two locales, two launch paths, ~35 minutes of emulator time,
no interactive title. Either the attract loop is far longer than the
600-780 s windows tried, or something regressed since
live-title-press-a.png was captured -- that one came from a pad-driven
boot (e21a9ab, "booting to the main menu and walking it").
Also settled a discrepancy I had flagged without checking: there is no
contradiction with title_states_capture.sh. It waits on screen_id.py, a
LOOSER oracle than is_title.py, and was written precisely to test whether
the interactive title draws ptbtn00 and the attract one does not. It
never claimed to reach the interactive title.
Stopping this line. The capture blocks none of the five menu screens and
has now cost five iterations. The locale mechanism, the fixed oracle and
the launch recipe are all committed, so what remains is patience with the
attract loop, not tooling. METHOD line on knowing when to stop paying for
a non-blocking answer.
Emulator stopped, lock cleared, locale English.
Two iterations framed the JP title capture as possibly locale-specific.
It is not. Same flags, same oracle, English locale: 75 samples over 734 s,
every one glyph = 0. The English boot does not present the interactive
title either. Canary was alive throughout, polling
XamInputGetKeystrokeEx (1801 calls); the frame at 734 s has content but
correlates 0.15 with build 4's render and 0.05 with the main menu -- an
attract-movie frame, not title art.
So neither locale reaches the interactive title in ~12 minutes without a
pad press. What is actually untested is the pad: pad.py and
nav_to_flight.sh exist, and title_states_capture.sh reaches title states
with a flag set this probe did not replicate (--log_ui_draws
--ui_draw_capture_frames, plus xdotool window focus). It is a capture
problem, not a locale one. MISSION.md updated.
Also resolved a caveat I had given the port agent without checking it:
"rotation is decoded but not rendered" does NOT affect their five screens
at rest. Title, main menu, EXTRAS and both splash halves have ZERO
top-level elements with a non-zero rotation. The only rotations on any of
them are the title's two nested ptloop records (r = 30 and -45), and at
rest those sit at x = 1521 and x = -839 -- a 399-wide sprite entirely off
both edges of a 1280 screen. The caveat now applies only to animating the
title build-in, where the sweeps cross the screen rotated.
Two METHOD lines: run the control before theorising about the difference,
and log every sample so a failure is a measurement rather than a silence.
Emulator stopped, lock cleared, locale English.
Last iteration's "never reached the title in 787 s" was a broken tool
reporting on the world. wait_title.sh was still sampling the single pixel
(625,618) that is_title.py had already been written to replace -- its
docstring says why: a 1280x720 coordinate sampled against the 1279x675
game surface, so it always reads the copyright line. The replacement sat
in the same directory. wait_title.sh now delegates to it.
is_title.py passes its own controls before being trusted here: 753
green-glyph pixels on the committed English title capture, 327 on the
main menu, threshold 400.
Re-ran with the working oracle and the profile flag the English captures
use. The game STILL did not present the interactive title -- but that is
now a measurement rather than an artefact: not one frame showed a single
green-(A) glyph pixel, and content correlation against either build-7
render never exceeded 0.22. Canary was alive and polling
XamInputGetKeystrokeEx (601 calls), sitting in the attract movie.
So the open question narrowed again, and is written into MISSION.md:
whether the attract loop returns to the INTERACTIVE title without a pad
press. title_states_capture.sh claims it does on the English boot with no
pad input; if that holds, the difference is the locale.
Nothing decided about the keyframe-time association or the rest() rule.
Emulator stopped, lock cleared, locale restored to English.
Last iteration I wrote into MISSION.md that a Japanese-locale capture is
impossible here, because user_language is DECLARE_int32 at four call
sites with no DEFINE and no entry in xenia-canary.config.toml. That is
true, and it was not the question. The language is PERSISTED:
kernel_state.cc builds XConfig over <storage_root>/xconfig.settings,
SetDefaults() only supplies a value when the file has none, and the file
is writable. Checking where a setting is stored rather than where it is
configured turned "blocked, needs a human decision" into a two-line edit.
Withdrawn from MISSION.md; METHOD and REFUTED lines added.
The field is located from struct landmarks rather than a hard-coded
offset, and the check re-runs on every invocation so it fails loudly if
the layout moves:
music_volume 0.7f at User+449 -> BE float at 2727 -> User base 0x8e6
language at User+44 -> reads 1 (kEnglish) at 0x912
country at User+64 -> reads 103 (US) at 0x926
XLanguage::kJapanese = 2 (xbox.h:307). set_console_language.py wraps it
with a backup and a --restore.
The capture itself is still NOT taken, for a smaller reason than I
claimed. A run with the locale set to Japanese booted fine but never
reached the title in 787 s: wait_title.sh's green-(A) oracle never fired
and burst-sampling found no frame correlating above 0.18 with either
build-7 render -- the run sat in the attract loop. So it needs a longer
or pad-driven run, not a rebuilt emulator. Emulator stopped, lock
cleared, locale restored to English.
Nothing is decided about the keyframe-time association or the rest()
rule; this only changes what standing between us and deciding them.
Two threads had converged on needing one capture this container cannot
take, so this iteration records that and finishes something reachable.
BLOCKED, written into MISSION.md rather than worked around: Q1's keyframe
time association and the rest() rule for plateau-less elements both now
hinge on a running capture of GP_TITLE build 7, the Japanese title. The
console language is not settable here -- user_language appears only as
DECLARE_int32 at four call sites with no DEFINE anywhere in the tree, and
it is absent from the registered cvars in xenia-canary.config.toml. There
is no flag to pass, and guessing one is specifically unsafe: run-canary's
own header records that xenia calls ShowSimpleMessageBox from
ParseLaunchArguments before logging starts, so a bad flag blocks forever
with an empty log. Rebuilding canary to add the cvar would be improvising
around the blocker; it needs a human decision. Neither question blocks
the five menu screens.
FINISHED: the disc-wide top-level rotation count, left running four
iterations ago as a shell loop over `screen info --geometry` that never
completed (it decodes every texture per build). Walking the placement
region directly takes seconds.
top-level elements with a keyframe group 15 493
carrying a non-zero rotation 2 152 (13.89 %)
Both controls pass: GP_TITLE build 4 reports 0 (its rotations are the
nested ptloop records) and GP_DIALOG build 0 reports the expected two.
The control earned its place -- the first version indexed the pak with a
`screen list` BUILD number and got 0 for a screen that has two, because
GP_DIALOG build 0 is entry 2. GP_TITLE maps 1:1, which is how the
assumption survived. METHOD line added.
Two free corroborations of the rotation decode. The rotated population is
dominated by tactical-map ship icons -- pbb_destroyer 444, pbr_destroyer
402, pbr_fighter 276 -- i.e. markers rotated to heading, the single
largest use of the field on the disc. And GP_TITLE entry 7's Japanese
wordmark pieces settle from ALTERNATING tilts:
ptlogo3a r = 0, -14, -4, -1, 0, ...
ptlogo3b r = 0, +14, +4, +1, 0, ...
ptlogo3c r = 0, -14, -4, -1, 0, ...
Same magnitudes, opposite signs, all decaying to upright. A misread field
does not produce that.
blit() and fill_quad() both opened with
let sx_pct = if kf.scale_x == 0 { 100 } else { kf.scale_x };
so an element whose pose is collapsed to nothing rendered at FULL SIZE.
I first described this as "a 1-pixel sliver", reading the .max(1) in the
size arithmetic two lines below -- the guard above it meant .max(1) never
saw a zero. Read the whole function, not the lines you went looking for.
Control run before the change: if 0 meant "unset", something on the disc
would use it throughout. Nothing does.
elements with a keyframe group 15 493
at least one keyframe at scale 0 2 166
EVERY keyframe at scale 0 0
zero is a transient the element grows out of 1 762
ptlogo_eff3.t32 runs 0% -> 200%. An "unset" marker no element ever uses
throughout is not a marker.
Both functions now return without drawing when either scale is 0.
Reach: 24 of 24 renders byte-identical across GP_TITLE (all 16 builds),
GP_PAUSE_MENU and GP_OPTIONS -- additive on every screen the port needs.
195 elements have a guessed rest pose at scale 0 and 126 of those have a
non-zero alpha, so the old code painted them; all 126 are in
GP_READY_ROOM.pak, which S1 already declared a no-go. They are
tactical-map sprites at sx=0/sy=100, mid-horizontal-wipe, that the
coercion drew full-width.
So: a real correctness fix with no visible effect on the menu port.
Suite green, 122 passed / 0 failed across 3 suites at commit time.
Follows up the defect found last iteration: rest()'s dwell fallback is
guessing whenever it runs. Two things were open -- how big it is, and
whether "rest = the last keyframe" is the fix. Both are now answered, and
the second is answered no.
plateau_census.py walks the placement regions directly instead of going
through `screen info --geometry`, which decodes every texture and cannot
do a disc-wide pass in reasonable time. Its control reproduces GP_TITLE
build 7's three fallback elements and names ptlogo_eff3.t32 among them
before counting anything.
elements with a keyframe group 15 493
no plateau -> rest pose is guessed 3 807 (24.57 %)
... current rule returns invisible 1 711 (44.9 %)
... current rule returns scale=0 195 ( 5.1 %)
the two candidate rules agree 1 911 (50.2 %)
195 elements get a rest pose with scale 0%, which is not a pose. And
disc-wide the choice of rule is not cosmetic: the candidates agree half
the time.
But the port's exposure is one element. Across main menu, EXTRAS, title
and the developer splash, 14 elements are plateau-less and the two rules
agree on 13. The single disagreement is palogo_anima_eff.t32.
And "last keyframe" loses there, on a control that needed no new capture:
the splash carries three sibling glows with identical structure and
identical times --
palogo_gamearts_eff 15:a=0 30:a=255 45:a=255 -:a=0 plateau -> visible
palogo_seta_eff 15:a=0 30:a=255 45:a=255 -:a=0 plateau -> visible
palogo_anima_eff 15:a=0 30:a=255 45:a=212 -:a=0 no plateau
-- differing in one byte. "Last keyframe" makes anima alone invisible
while its two siblings stay lit. The capture agrees weakly: box-mean
ratios capture/render are gamearts 0.717, seta 0.723, anima 0.772, and a
glow we drew that the game does not would put anima below its siblings,
not above.
So the defect is measured and the fix is still undecided. Nothing in the
decoder changed.
Last iteration I reported a 13.1% render change in GP_TITLE build 7 as
evidence AGAINST the keyframe-time shift, arguing that language twins
should match in brightness. Withdrawn. Localising the diff to an element
shows it is not about the time association at all.
The element is ptlogo_eff3.t32, a transient bloom:
46: (98,42) 100%,100% a=0
61: (108,72) 0%,0% a=0
103: (108,72) 200%,200% a=255 r=80
-: (108,72) 0%,0% a=0 r=150
No two adjacent poses are equal, so there is no plateau, and rest() falls
through to its longest-dwell fallback. The longest gap is 61->103, during
which the sprite grows from nothing to 200% at full alpha and then
collapses. The rule returns whichever end of that movement the indexing
lands on: the invisible frame as decoded, the 200% peak shifted. An
896x389 sprite at 200% is larger than the screen, which accounts for the
entire 13.1% and the entire 4.9-unit luminance gap. I was comparing a
heuristic against itself.
The defect generalises, and structurally. A dwell gap is time spent
interpolating FROM pose k TO pose k+1; neither pose is held during it
unless the two are equal -- which is a plateau, and the plateau path has
already returned by then. So the fallback is guaranteed to be guessing
every time it is reached, under any reading of the times. Every element
with no two adjacent identical poses has a guessed rest pose, in our
renderer and in anything built from it.
Consequences: the case FOR the shift (26x on the hold:fade-out ratio) is
no longer opposed by render evidence -- 10 of 11 builds byte-identical,
the 11th differing only through this heuristic. It is still not adopted,
now because it flips this element to the visibly wrong answer, so the
shift and a decision about plateau-less elements must land together, and
neither half has a capture to verify against.
Default-mode suite green (122 passed, 0 failed across 3 suites so far).
Follow-up on last iteration's unadopted candidate (+36 holds the NEXT
pose's time, not its own). Two new results, pointing opposite ways, and
both are reported.
FOR, and calibration-free: the observed full-alpha hold : fade-out ratio
on palogo_gamearts is 83 : 13 frames = 6.38. The shifted reading predicts
8.00. The current reading predicts 0.25 -- off by 26x. With the glow's 2
units/frame fixed and nothing else free, the current reading says the
logo holds full alpha for 2.0 frames; the capture holds it for 83. This
is no longer the shape argument the candidate rested on.
Also for: rest()'s plain max-dwell fallback picks a=0 -- a transparent
pose, for a publisher logo -- under the current reading, and the visible
a=255 hold under the shift. Only the rest_plateau special case rescues
the render today, and that is the case the port agent reported a bug in.
AGAINST: rendering every build of six UI paks under both readings, 10 of
11 compared are byte-identical and one changes -- GP_TITLE build 7, the
Japanese twin of build 4, by 13.1% of pixels. Build 4, the one verified
against a live capture, is unchanged either way, so the single build the
shift moves is the one with no capture to adjudicate it. The proxy goes
against the shift: language twins are the same artwork, and build 7 reads
70.94 mean luminance as decoded against build 4's 71.41, but 76.32
shifted. Correlation does not separate them (0.6206 vs 0.6201).
These constrain different things -- timing versus pose selection -- and
rest() is a heuristic layered on the times, so moving the times moves its
tie-breaks. Adopting the shift means revisiting that heuristic in the
same change, with no build-7 capture to verify against.
Default UNCHANGED. Experiment reachable via SYLPHEED_KF_TIME_SHIFT=1.
Shifted-mode suite: 122 passed, 0 failed across 3 suites at commit time.
Q1's gate asks whether the ramp is linear. It is, and that result stands:
it rests on the splash's _eff glows, which reproduce exactly. This adds
the part that does not.
The test is a calibration, not a fit. Fix the clock on
palogo_gamearts_eff -- declared 15-unit fade-in 0@15 -> 255@30 against
captured alphas 34,68,102,136,170,204,238, a constant step of 34, giving
t = 2f - 171 -- then check that against the glow's own next landmark: its
declared hold ends t=45, predicted frame 108.0, observed last full-alpha
frame 107. Then apply it to palogo_gamearts in the same bundle and the
same frames, with no free parameter left:
declared a=232 at t=206 -> frame 188.5, observed alpha 255
declared a= 32 at t=210 -> frame 190.5, observed alpha 255
The logo is still at full alpha nine frames after it should read 32; its
fade-out runs ~17 frames late; its declared 80-frame fade-in is never
drawn. Not culling -- the same element is submitted down to a=7 on the
way out. Calibration-free version: the declared fade-out spends 12 of 16
units dropping 23/255 of the alpha, and the capture has no such plateau.
Candidate, offered and NOT adopted: if +36 held the NEXT keyframe's time,
the fade-out shape fits (RMS 4.05 vs 12.13, two elements) and the
decoder's "last block's time is unreadable" special case disappears --
the last block would simply have no successor. Rejected for now because
it explains neither the missing fade-in nor the lateness, and because the
_eff elements cannot discriminate between the readings at all (with four
blocks the shift only relabels the phases). Decoder unchanged.
Also withdrawn, mine, within the iteration: "the _eff glows hold a
constant alpha 33". They ramp 34 -> 255 in steps of 34. I printed the
series minimum and read it as its range, with a "14 distinct colours"
column sitting next to it saying otherwise.
Two corrections and one new confirmation, all from finishing the sweep I
left running last iteration.
Refuted, by my own sweep, within the hour: "rotation appears to live only
in nested .rat leaf records". That held for GP_TITLE, GP_BUNK and
GP_CHALLENGE -- the three archives the sweep had reached when I wrote it
-- and fails on GP_DIALOG and GP_DEBRIEFING_PILOTLOG, which rotate
top-level elements. Scoping the claim made it cheap to withdraw, but the
sentence should have waited for the sweep.
Those top-level cases are the best evidence on the disc, and they show up
in `screen info --geometry` without a hex dump. GP_DIALOG build 0:
pceff03/pceff04 ramp r = 90 -> 30 -> 10 -> 3 -> 0 while alpha ramps
0 -> 255 and they slide into place -- a swing-in settling upright. Build
6: pzeff02 ramps 43 -> 61 -> 75 -> 90 while scaling 112% -> 200% and
fading to 0 -- a spin-out. Rows committed as reference data.
New: the pivot-anchored scale term in blit, kf.x - pivot*(scale-100)/100,
was implemented and reasoned about but never measured, because every
element previously examined sits at 100% scale where the term is exactly
zero. The ptloop pair scale 600% and 800%, where it is worth 450 and 630
px. Formula predicts centre y = 360.0 for both; capture measures 359.1
and 360.0. Top-left anchoring predicts 810 and 990. Horizontally it makes
t-from-position agree with t-from-alpha to 0.33 / 0.65 units against ~8
without it.
That agreement does NOT prove linear interpolation -- both fields were
inverted through the same linear map, so a shared easing curve cancels.
It shows position and alpha ride one shared parameter. Recorded as such.
The disc-wide sweep is still running; the count is incomplete, the
existence is settled.
The rotated quads on the title screen come from the keyframe block after
all. The earlier negative -- "every GP_TITLE build 4 element has all three
angle words at zero" -- read the right bytes over too small a region: it
walked the top-level declaration table, and the rotated elements are the
nested leaf records ptloop01.rat / ptloop02.rat.
Confirmed against the framebuffer rather than against our own renderer.
The two records declare +12 = 30 and -45; the GPU capture submits their
quads at +30.26 and -45.28 degrees -- magnitude and sign, two different
values. Corroborated by shape in GP_BUNK 117ca14f, where +12 ramps
0 -> 360 with position, scale and alpha constant: a spin in place.
Identifying which draw it was needed edge lengths, not bounding boxes:
400x1076 and 400x1444 against pteff03/pteff03a 399x180 at the elements'
two different declared scales, 600% (1080) and 800% (1440). The same test
names three known-positives in the capture (ptlogo1, ptcopyright,
ptbtn00), so it passes its own control.
Keyframe gains rotation_deg plus unknown_4/unknown_8, carried rather than
dropped. NOT rendered -- ui_layout::blit is axis-aligned only, so the
reference renderer and the port will both draw these upright until a
rotating blit exists.
The census tool ships with the trap that broke its first version: nested
RATC blobs are not 4-byte aligned, so an aligned scan found 0/3 of its
own control blocks and missed 16 341 blocks. Disc-wide +12 is non-zero in
14.50 % of 83 862 blocks.
sylpheed-formats tests, SYLPHEED_DISC set: 131 passed, 0 failed across the
6 suites finished at commit time; the run had not yet completed.
iterations of work were built on
I flagged last iteration that "draw 2 is the swoosh" was an inference I
had never checked. Checking it took one line, and it is wrong.
Converting the quads from NDC to screen space: quad A spans y -209 to
925, quad B spans y -292 to 1012. Both cover the full screen height and
run well off it. The swoosh, ptlogo_back2, rests at (71,126) and is a
234-pixel band at y 126 to 360. Draw 2 is not it.
A candidate offered as one: the two ptloop sweeps. pteff03a is 399x180
with element scale (100,800), so 399x1440, and pteff03 carries (100,600)
-- two long thin sprites, two quads, and the drawn vertex alphas 0xC3 and
0xB6 sit inside the 0x80 to 0xff ramp those records declare. Not
confirmed; no texture or position match was made.
If that is right it matters, and I have written it conditionally rather
than acting on it: our renderer parks those sweeps at their final
keyframe, both off screen, and draws nothing, while the game draws them
across the screen. That would mean the capture caught them mid-sweep
inside their t=150 to 600 window, and that the "groups hold" reading
needs re-examining for those two elements.
What this cost is worth stating plainly. Five iterations -- the additive
blend test, the pivot analysis, the vertex-colour capture -- were built
on an identification made by elimination on one screen and never checked
against the draw's own coordinates. The eliminations themselves stand,
because each was measured against the capture rather than against the
identification. The chain that pointed them at ptlogo_back2 did not.
METHOD takes the general form.
title's rotation
Looking for where the rotated quads come from, the obvious candidates
were the three keyframe words at +4, +8 and +12 that ui_layout.rs
documents as zero.
They are not zero. Across 72287 keyframe blocks disc-wide they are
non-zero in 4.81, 4.56 and 15.82 percent of blocks, and read as signed
values clustering on 180, -180, 90, -90, 120 and 22 -- degrees. Three of
them, so plausibly rotation about three axes. I have marked that amber
because it is the shape of the numbers and nothing more; no observed
rotation has been tied to a value. The doc comment is corrected
regardless: "0 on every frame seen" was an artefact of the sample.
And they do not explain the screen I was chasing. Every element of
GP_TITLE build 4 has all three at zero, element by element, while the
game demonstrably submits rotated parallelograms there. So the title's
rotation comes from outside the keyframe data and is still unidentified.
One correction to my own last write-up, flagged rather than left: I
stated that the skewed draw IS the swoosh. It is the only skewed geometry
in the capture and the swoosh is the only diagonal element on the screen,
so the inference is reasonable -- but I never confirmed it by matching
the draw's texture or screen position to that element, and I should have
said so the first time.
blit cannot
Ran the route I corrected last iteration, and it answered the question I
had classified as undecodable.
First the ninth candidate died: every vertex colour in the whole capture
is <alpha>FFFFFF, white RGB with only alpha varying. The game passes no
colour, so that hypothesis is refuted from the running game rather than
from the file.
Then the geometry gave it away. Draw 2 submits TWO PARALLELOGRAMS,
neither axis-aligned -- edges (0.54,-0.56) and (0.44,0.79), roughly 45
and 61 degrees, both extending to y=+/-1.81 in NDC, well off screen.
That is the diagonal Z stroke. And ui_layout::blit walks rows and columns
of an axis-aligned rectangle; it has no rotation at all. So we blit the
sprite upright where the game draws it skewed, which is exactly the
signature I measured: right on average at +1.83, right in position with
the correlation peaking at zero shift, wrong in structure at 0.70.
Nine candidates, and the answer was never going to be a field, because
the difference is not in the sprite -- it is in how the quad is built.
Two things left open and written as such. The decoded keyframe carries
fade, scale, tint, x, y and time and NO rotation, so where the rotation
comes from is not decoded. And the pink-versus-white reading I have been
carrying was a visual comparison of two differently-shaped renderings; it
should be re-checked after geometry rather than treated as a separate
defect.
iteration
Two loose ends, both on my own work.
The disc-gated suite finally completed: all six binaries, 131 passed,
0 failed, one pre-existing ignored. So the rest() fix and the T8adImage
flags field are fully verified rather than verified-on-three-binaries.
The reason earlier attempts produced empty logs was that the tool
timeout's SIGTERM reached the whole process group; setsid nohup survives
it, which is now a METHOD line.
And a correction that matters more. Last iteration I closed the swoosh as
undecodable from the disc and named a per-draw GPU capture as the next
route, "because it reads the actual blend state". It does not. Reading
command_processor.cc, each captured draw records primitive type, index
count, index-buffer address, VS and PS ucode hashes, the pixel shader's
texture bindings, and vertex attribute 0 of binding 0. There is no
RB_BLENDCONTROL dump.
So the route splits, and I have said so rather than leaving the wrong
version standing: the capture can test a per-draw VERTEX COLOUR today
with no code change, which would explain white-versus-pink directly, and
getting the blend mode itself needs a Canary change to dump the blend
registers. Either way it is instrumentation rather than another field.
The general lesson goes in METHOD too: validate a recommendation before
leaving it as advice. A named next step is a claim like any other, and I
made it without checking.
the disc
Testing my own caveat instead of leaving it hanging. I had worried the
plate-free title capture at t=4.0s was too early, since elements carry
keyframes out to t=600 and I had judged "settled" from mean luminance,
which cannot see a thin sprite still moving.
The plate sits at y 550-600 and the swoosh band at y 112-225, disjoint,
so a LATE capture works even with the plate present. The band correlates
0.7342 at t=4.0s and 0.7353 at t=21.5s -- identical to a thousandth over
17.5 seconds, with the band mean flat at 127. So the band is settled by
4 seconds, the capture I handed the port agent is sound, and my caveat is
withdrawn. It also corroborates the earlier finding that groups hold:
nothing crosses that band in 22 seconds.
That was the seventh candidate for the swoosh and the last one that was
not a format field. Pivot is inert at scale 100 and there is no
displacement anyway; fade is white-with-alpha; tint is white; the texture
is blue-leaning; additive via +0x04 bit 0x02 makes everything worse; the
capture is settled. The residual is stable and modest -- band mean +1.83,
edge-correlation 0.70 against 0.92 frame-wide.
So I have classified it rather than generating an eighth candidate:
undecodable from the disc, with the reach written out. And I have named
where a next attempt should start, which is not another field -- a
per-draw GPU capture of the running guest reads the actual blend state,
vertex colours and draw order for that band instead of inferring them
from the file. That is where static RE stops here.
residual is smaller than I said
Testing the candidate I raised last iteration rather than carrying it.
Blending bit-0x02 sprites additively moves every measure the wrong way --
whole-frame mean diff +0.55 to +1.04, swoosh-band mean +1.83 to +3.98,
band edge-correlation 0.6971 down to 0.5578. So the bit is real and
independent but does not select an additive blend. I reverted the
experiment and kept the word as T8adImage::flags, documented and not
acted on; the render is byte-identical to before.
Second refutation: the swoosh is not displaced. Shifting the band over
plus or minus 80 by 8 pixels peaks sharply at zero, 0.7342, falling to
0.22 at 24 px. So the pivot story is dead twice over -- inert at scale
100, and no displacement to explain anyway.
And I have restated the residual, because earlier sections overstated it.
The +16 to +34 band tiles I quoted were measured WITHOUT --primitives.
With the dim drawn the band's average is nearly right at +1.83; what is
wrong is its structure, tiles running -38.6 then +33.8 and cancelling.
Six candidates eliminated now and none confirmed.
One caveat I owe the port agent about the capture I gave them: it is at
t=4.0s, roughly 174 keyframe units into a screen whose elements have
keyframes out to t=600. I judged "settled" from mean luminance, which
cannot see a thin sprite still moving. It is settled for the bulk of the
screen and not proven settled for every element -- which is a live
alternative explanation for a structural difference in exactly the band
the sweeps cross.
METHOD: cargo build passing does not mean cargo test compiles. Adding the
field built the library in 1.48s and broke two test-only struct literals;
cargo test failed with exit 101.
Continuing the swoosh. Last iteration ended with "the next step is
finding where a blend mode would be encoded, and I do not know the format
carries one". It does carry a candidate.
The kind field is not it -- the swoosh sprites are kind 0x0, the same as
ordinary ones. But the T8aD header word at +0x04 splits the title's
sprites exactly along effect versus normal: pteff01, pteff03a,
ptlogo_back2eff1..5 and both ptlogoall_eff are 0x8832, while ptlogo1,
ptlogo2, ptlogo_tm, ptbase2, ptlogo_back2 and ptcopyright are 0x8830.
One bit, 0x02.
Disc-wide it behaves like a real flag rather than an artefact: 19216
sprites, 18 distinct values, bit 0x02 set in 27.1 percent, and it toggles
against otherwise identical words -- 0x8830 against 0x8832, 0x0830
against 0x0832, 0x0810 against 0x0812, 0x0030 against 0x0032.
Marked as correlation and not decode, because nothing here shows the bit
MEANS additive. The one thing that makes it more than a guess is
ptlogo_back2eff, which carries 0x8830 despite having eff in its name --
so the split is the field's and not my pattern-matching on names. The
test is to blend bit-0x02 sprites additively and re-correlate the title
against the plate-free capture.
METHOD gets the trap that cost the first attempt: searching for a
sprite's name and taking the next T8aD returns the SAME header for every
sprite, because the names all live together in the declaration table. It
failed its own control at once -- different sprites reporting identical
dimensions -- and the fix was to match on width and height instead of on
proximity.
candidate with the check I named
Last iteration I offered the pivot mismatch as a quantified candidate for
the swoosh rendering too thick, and said explicitly that whether it bites
depends on which pivot the compositor uses and that I had not checked. I
checked.
blit takes the drawn size from the TEXTURE and uses the pivot only as the
scale anchor, kf.x minus pivot times scale-minus-100 over 100. At scale
100 that term is zero. And every one of the seven swoosh elements --
ptlogo_back2, its glow and the five eff segments -- reports a single
scale of (100,100) across all its keyframes. So the mismatch, real as it
is in the data, cannot move or resize the swoosh in our render. Refuted,
under my own name.
It is not harmless everywhere, and I have said where it does bite:
ptlogo1 and ptlogo2 run 100, 101, 103, 112, 150 during the build-in, so
there the wrong pivot really does displace them -- during the animation
rather than at rest.
What that leaves is the blend, by elimination rather than by evidence.
Position and size are the texture's own and right, fade is
white-with-alpha, tint is white, the texture is blue-leaning rather than
pink. Seven overlapping sprites at 5 to 23 percent opacity stacked with
plain alpha-over saturate toward opaque white, which is what we draw and
would read as thicker beside the game's thin coloured stroke. Recorded as
the remaining candidate and explicitly not as a diagnosis -- no blend
mode has been identified in the data.
The scripted HANDOFF edit asserted on text an earlier edit had rewrapped,
so the pivot and colour findings landed in docs/re and not on the page
the port agent reads. Third time this session; METHOD now says the rule
was insufficient and names the mechanical fix.
not in any field I can find
Chasing the swoosh defect. The colour half is a clean negative and the
geometry half now has a number.
Ruled out for the colour: every keyframe of every swoosh element carries
fade 0x??ffffff -- white RGB with only the alpha varying -- and no tint
is anything but white. The texture is not pink either; ptlogo_back2
decodes blue-leaning at (175,174,198) and its glow warm at (255,253,234).
So the magenta edge the game draws comes out of blending, and I have said
that rather than leaving "wrong colour" as an undifferentiated mystery.
The geometry half: the declared pivot does not match the element's own
texture. Build 4's ptlogo_back2 pivot is (500,117), which is exactly half
the JAPANESE sprite at 1000x234, not half its own English one at
1118x262 -- off by 59 px, the right order to make the swoosh too thick
and extend too far right. The layout record is authored once and shared
while the sprites are swapped per language, which ui-rat-layout.md warns
about in general; this is that warning measured on the screen where our
render disagrees with the capture. It cuts both ways -- the Japanese
build's ptlogo1 is off by 40.
Marked as a quantified candidate rather than a diagnosis, because whether
it bites depends on which pivot our compositor uses and I did not check.
One METHOD line, because the first version of that check was misleading:
a pivot-equality test conflates rounding with real breakage. Equality
flagged 74 percent of title elements. Split by magnitude it is 17 exact,
54 off by a pixel from odd dimensions, and 24 genuinely off -- and those
24 are the finding.
lands on the known tie-break group
Chasing the residual I left open last iteration, and it turns out I had
attributed the port agent's slab to the wrong thing.
First the refutation. My hypothesis was that our dim is applied over the
whole frame rather than beneath the UI where its layer key puts it. If
that were true the logo would render too dark. It reads +2.36 against a
background of -0.74, so the compositor honours the paint order and the
hypothesis is dead.
What the residual actually is: with the dim in place the error is not
uniform but concentrated in one band, running -38.6 in one tile and +33.8
three tiles to its right. Cropping that band from capture and render
shows it immediately -- the game draws the logo's Z swoosh thin with a
pink edge, and we draw it thick and solid white. That, not the missing
dim, is the washed-out slab over the title logo the port agent reported.
The dim explains a uniform +13; this explains the slab.
The elements are ptlogo_back2, its glow, and the five ptlogo_back2eff1..5
segments -- which are also the group carrying this corpus's known
unsolved paint-order tie-break at key 0x8083, on the same screen. I have
recorded that as a lead and explicitly not as a diagnosis, because a
blend-order swap is a poor explanation for white instead of pink and I
would expect a second cause.
MISSING dim quad
Both halves of what the port agent could not settle, answered against the
plate-free capture rather than against another renderer.
Rendering build 4 and edge-correlating to the capture of the real screen
gives 0.9163 at zero shift, 0.92/0.78/0.93 per band. The geometry of rest
is the title's arrived pose, so the timeline is not needed there.
The slab is the more useful half, and it is inverted from how it looked.
rest alone renders uniformly +13.14 too bright, R +12.35, G +13.58,
B +13.48. Drawing the .prm primitives collapses that to +0.55. The
element is pteff02.prm, the 25 percent dim at rest t=46 with fade 0x40,
and --primitives is OFF BY DEFAULT. So the washed-out cyan slab is not
something being drawn that should not be; it is a dim that should be
drawn and is not, and because the title art is blue-dominant the
shortfall reads as a cyan wash. Any consumer of screen render that omits
--primitives on this screen gets it.
Two residuals recorded rather than tidied. With the dim drawn the mean is
essentially exact but per-pixel agreement gets slightly WORSE --
edge-correlation 0.9163 down to 0.9066 and pixels off by more than 20
rising from 108051 to 162636 -- so the dim's average contribution is
right while its application is not exactly the game's. And separately the
per-tile map shows a +25 to +38 hot spot on the upper-right Z swoosh,
which a capture from the first iteration of this work already showed pink
in the game and white in ours. Same region, still undiagnosed.
port agent
Closing the two things I flagged as unconfirmed when I committed the fix.
The unit gate is green: cargo test -p sylpheed-formats with SYLPHEED_DISC
set gives 131 passed, 0 failed across six binaries including the
disc-gated ones. The earlier background run that produced an empty log
had died with SIGTERM, which is why it looked like nothing happened.
And the disc-wide check the classification requires. Reimplementing both
rules over every RATC bundle on the disc -- 2859 bundles, 13991 elements
with at least two keyframes -- the fix moves rest for 30 elements, which
is 0.21 percent. Four go invisible to visible. Zero go visible to
invisible, which is the safety property I wanted and did not have when I
committed. The four are ptframe1 and ptframe2 in GP_TITLE entries 5 and
8, the same pair once per language.
That surfaces a discrepancy worth handing back rather than smoothing
over. On the English main menu exactly TWO elements satisfy the port
agent's pose-equality condition, not six, so their six must span the
whole twelve-screen export. That fits their own observation that the
timeline and rest differ in exactly one region, the bounding box of
ptframe1 and ptframe2 and nothing else. But if any of their other four
have a TRANSPARENT trailing run, my alpha rule leaves them alone
deliberately -- that exclusion is what protects PAUSE -- so I have asked
which screens they are on and whether a capture shows any of them drawn.
If one is, the alpha rule is incomplete and needs a third discriminator.
VISIBLE, not when its pose repeats
The port agent's report was right about the defect and about which
elements it hits, and its proposed condition does not survive the case
the exclusion was written for.
Their test -- the final untimed keyframe has the same pose as the last
timed one -- is also true of pgptitle.rat, whose trailing run is two
identical transparent frames. Adopting it would erase the word PAUSE
again, which a committed capture disproves. What separates the two is
alpha: an exit fades the element out so its last keyframe is transparent,
while an element with no exit ends on the pose you can see. So
rest_plateau now accepts a trailing run exactly when it is visible.
Verified against a capture rather than against another renderer, which is
the point their own report made: ptframe1's rest moves from (620,108)
t=16 to (440,108) t=62; the changed pixels are 10082 in a bounding box of
x 440-839, y 108-577, which is exactly the 400x470 at (440,108) they
predicted; and correlation against main-menu-oracle.png over that region
improves from 0.9596 to 0.9748. The PAUSE wordmark is unchanged across
all three pause builds.
This also closes a question ui-paint-order-key.md has carried for a
while, that ptframe1 and ptframe2 rest at alpha 0 while the capture shows
the menu frame plainly.
One trap cost most of this iteration and goes in METHOD: CARGO_TARGET_DIR
is redirected in this container, so ./target/debug/sylpheed-cli is hours
stale and every render I made against it was old code. Byte-identical
before and after reads as "no effect" when it actually means "you ran the
old binary".
The full disc-gated test suite was still executing when this was
committed; the verification above is artifact-based.
than loop
The port agent ranked a plate-free capture of build 4 above any further
static RE, so that came first.
B from the main menu returns to the title and the plate fades in a beat
later, which opens a clean window. Recorded at 20 fps from the press: the
art appears at 1.10 s, builds in to 3.70 s, sits settled and unobstructed
until 5.00 s, and the plate arrives at 5.10 s -- the band jumps from 282
to 3755 bright pixels. Committed the frame at 4.0 s as the reference for
the cyan glow slab they report drawing and the game not having.
Their other sub-question -- whether a keyframe group loops or holds --
falls out of the decoded sweeps plus a measurement I already had, and the
two agree. ptloop01's final keyframe parks pteff03.t32 at x=1521 and
ptloop02's parks pteff03a.t32 at x=-839, both off-screen on a 1280-wide
design; and over 18 s of settled title the centre tiles sit at sd <= 0.01
when a looping group would recross the screen every 7.5 s. So groups HOLD
at the last keyframe. The loop*.rat name is misleading.
Also recorded, in the corpus rather than only in their report: the
rest_plateau bug, with their exact identifying condition -- the final
untimed keyframe has the same pose as the last timed one -- the six
elements it misses on main_menu, and the bracket it drops. That closes an
open question ui-paint-order-key.md has carried for a while about
ptframe1 and ptframe2 resting at alpha 0 while the capture shows the
frame plainly. Same two elements, same cause. Not fixed yet; the change
is in ui_layout's rest().
And a METHOD line I would not have written myself: two renderers agreeing
is not evidence the field is right. Their composite and screen render
matched to 3/255 on main_menu and both omitted two elements the game
draws, because both read one field through one decoder.
assumed
Continuing the pulse's cycle length, which I had called a structural
limit of the format. It is, and now I can show it rather than assert it.
Dumping past what I thought was the final keyframe found an EIGHTH block:
fade 0x00ffffff at the same position, so the glow returns to fully
transparent and the pulse is a closed cycle rather than a one-shot ramp.
That is worth having on its own -- the port knows the animation ends
where it starts.
And the eighth block's time slot contains the four bytes "end ", the
record's ASCII terminator. So the corpus's rule that a group's last block
has no time of its own holds here in a second form: not the next group's
element index, but the chunk terminator. The value does not exist. That
goes into ui-rat-layout.md, because it generalises beyond this record.
The measured 2.3 s would need a final step of about 33 units. I have
written that number down explicitly labelled as fitted to the measurement
rather than read from the file, so nobody later re-derives it as a
decode.
One thing I had half-assumed and can now rule out: the word at +0x004 is
not a keyframe count. It reads 60 here with 8 keyframes and 30 in the
loop records with 3. Unknown, and marked so.
Closing the residual I left explicitly unidentified last iteration, and
correcting my own claim twice over in the process.
The cheap test first: is the oscillation global? No -- the bottom-right
corner is flat at sd 0.003 and uncorrelated with the whole frame. So a
per-tile amplitude map over an 8x6 grid, which localises it hard: sd 7.65
in the band x 318..954, y 560..672 at lag 2.3 s, against 0.06 on the
wordmark. That band is the PRESS (A) BUTTON plate's rest position.
Decoding ptbtn00f.rat, the plate's highlight variant, gives the pulse
itself: alpha 0x00 -> 0x06 -> 0x4a -> 0x50, held, then back down through
0x4a to 0x06 across t=6..105. A glow that fades in and out, which is
exactly what a press-start prompt does.
So "the title screen loops at 2.2 s" was wrong in both halves. The title
ART is near-static apart from the two decoded sweeps at 7.5 s and 9.5 s;
what pulses is the PLATE, and the plate is build 2, not build 4. REFUTED
carries it under my own name.
Still amber, and said so rather than rounded off: the cycle LENGTH is not
readable. The keyframe group's last block has no time -- that slot
belongs to the next group -- so the declared span is at least 105 units,
1.75 s, against a measured 2.3 s. Consistent with a final block
extending the tail. Not confirmed.
Second iteration running where a scripted HANDOFF edit failed its
assertion on rewrapped text, leaving the port's page stale while docs/re
had the finding. Patched by reading the file first, and METHOD now says
to check the commit's file count for a silently dropped edit.
Two of my own claims from last iteration die here, and the decode is the
thing that kills them.
Searching for the SHAPE instead of an assumed count found it immediately:
fade words matching 0x??ffffff at alternating strides of 24 and 16, which
is a 40-byte block carrying fade at +0 and tint at +24 -- exactly the
build layout, starting at +0x68. So "a leaf record's keyframes are not in
the build's 40-byte layout" is withdrawn. They are. My scan failed
because I demanded 29 strictly-increasing times, having read the word at
+0x004 as a keyframe count; the records hold THREE.
Decoded, both are horizontal light sweeps. ptloop01 runs pteff03.t32
from x=-639 to x=1521 over t=150..600, which is 450 units or 7.5 s;
ptloop02 runs pteff03a.t32 the other way over 570 units or 9.5 s.
Which refutes the second thing. Last iteration I attributed the measured
2.2 s oscillation to these elements because build 4 declares them --
association, not evidence. A 7.5 s cycle would give about three peaks in
a 22 s capture and I counted eight. So the loops are not what I measured,
the 2.2 s stands as a measurement, and its source is now explicitly
unidentified rather than wrongly assigned.
METHOD gets the general form, because it is what cost the previous
iteration: do not hard-code an expected element count into a structure
scan. Scan for the shape and let the count fall out.
The previous commit's handoff edit failed its own assertion -- the text
had been rewrapped since I wrote the pattern -- so the finding landed in
docs/re and REFUTED but not on the page the port agent actually reads.
An answer not reachable from HANDOFF.md has not been delivered.
Continuing the one gap from last iteration -- turning the title's
measured 2.2 s loop into a decoded cycle. It did not turn.
The record itself is found and partly confirmed. ptloop01.rat is an
opt-linked leaf RATC at 0xbb5966 in build 4, placing pteff03.t32, with
0x1e -- thirty -- in the high half of the word at +0x004, which is the
~30 keyframes ui-rat-layout.md predicts for a loop record. Its pivot
fields read 200 and 90, matching exactly what screen info prints for
ptloop01, so this is the right blob and the header offsets hold.
The times are not there. A build's keyframes are 40-byte blocks with the
time at +36; scanning every 4-byte-aligned start across a 0xC0 window for
29 strictly increasing values at that stride finds nothing, in either
loop record. So a leaf record's keyframe layout is NOT the build
placement layout, which is now a line in REFUTED because it is the
obvious first assumption and it is wrong.
The 2.2 s stays measured and the port hardcodes it. What the next attempt
inherits is the record's address, a confirmed pivot, and one layout ruled
out -- which is the useful part of a negative.
did not work
I set out to do for the title what worked for the splash: measure the
build-in and check it against the declared keyframes. That part failed,
and I am recording the failure rather than the number.
It failed for two reasons, both mine. The title was reached by skipping
the movie with A, which cuts to black and brings the title up on a path
that may not be the normal one. And the visible rise, about 2.7 s, is a
luminance curve -- which screen-transitions.md already establishes is not
the fade quad's ramp. So 2.7 s neither confirms nor contradicts build 4's
declared 16 -> 261, four point oh eight seconds. They are not measuring
the same thing, and I have said so instead of reporting a discrepancy.
What the recording did establish is worth having anyway: the title never
settles. Over 22 s the mean luminance oscillates continuously, peaks at
5.6, 7.8, 10.0, 12.7, 15.2, 17.1, 19.2 and 21.3 s, mean interval 2.24 s.
Marked as about 2.2 s plus or minus 0.4 rather than a precise period,
because peak-picking a low-amplitude signal is coarse.
The mechanism was already decoded and I did not re-derive it: build 4
declares ptloop01.rat and ptloop02.rat, and loop*.rat is a looping sprite
animation rather than a composition. What is new is the period, and that
it runs forever. For the port that matters -- drawing the resting pose
and stopping will look wrong.
Not confirmed, and flagged: that 2.2 s is the loop's OWN declared cycle.
screen info prints the element's placement keyframes but not the frame
count inside the .rat, and I did not open it.
Closing the caveat I left last iteration -- the splash timing was +/-0.5s
because I sampled at 2 fps, and at that rate I could not see ramps at
all, only plateaus.
Re-recorded at 10 fps: the splash FADES, both in and out, rather than
cutting. And the bundles declare it. palogo_sqex.t32 carries keyframes
[15 30 235 239 251 255] and palogo_gamearts.t32 [15 30 190 194 206 210],
each with an _eff glow child on [15 30 45]. Under Q1's 1 unit = 1/60 s
that is a 0.25 s ramp in, a 3.42 s or 2.67 s hold, and a 0.33 s fade out
-- against measured holds of about 3.5 s and 2.4 s and fade-outs of about
0.3 s. The constant 0.35 s offset between declared and measured start is
just that my recording's t=0 is when the WINDOW appears, not when the
guest starts drawing.
So the first screen's animation moves from measured to decoded: the port
reads it off the disc instead of trusting my stopwatch.
It also explains something the capture showed and I had no account for.
The brightness overshoots on the way in -- peaks at 0.8 s, settles by
1.1 s -- which reads as a bloom. It is the _eff glow child, whose
keyframes run 15 -> 30 -> 45, ramping in after the logo and back down
while the logo holds. Mechanical, not a rendering artifact.
Closing the amber I raised last iteration: the splash renders had no
framebuffer capture to diff against. Recording the boot from the moment
the window appears, at 2 fps, catches it before the movie.
Both halves match their own render at zero shift, each with the OTHER
half as a negative control: publisher frame 0.9146 against entry 10 and
0.027 against entry 11; developer frame 0.9792 against entry 11 and
-0.033 against entry 10. The EN/JP twins score 0.876 and 0.966, so the
test tells a screen from a different screen but cannot tell a pair apart,
and I have said so rather than implying it discriminates.
The recording also times the front of the boot, which Q6 and Q7 only had
from the title onward: SQUARE ENIX from about 0.5 to 4.0 s, black,
developer logos from about 5.0 to 7.5 s, black, then ADV.wmv from about
9.5 s.
One trap avoided and written into METHOD. The frames around 9.5 to 12.5 s
show SQUARE ENIX again in cyan, and read from the capture alone that is a
third logo screen. It is not -- it is the intro movie's own opening,
which the milestone-2 notes describe as white SQUARE ENIX plus cyan glow
plus red diamonds. A logo appearing twice may be two different things.
Two pages of this corpus disagreed. MISSION says the splash "is the RATC
screen, which already renders"; ui-paint-order-key.md says it "cannot be
rendered by screen render at all". Running the tool both ways settles it.
screen list --all shows all 16 GP_TITLE entries instead of 12, and the
four the default listing drops are the splash, each half shipped twice:
entries 10 and 13 are the white SQUARE ENIX publisher logo, entries 11
and 14 the GAME ARTS / SETA / studio anima developer logos. Entry 11's
seven elements are the three logos, their three _eff glows and the
palogo_eff0.prm backdrop -- exactly the composition ui-paint-order-key.md
had measured for the splash without being able to draw it.
So the "cannot be rendered" line is wrong and is corrected in place. What
is true is narrower and worth keeping: the splash is invisible to the
DEFAULT listing because is_build wants a .rat child, so anyone who does
not pass --all concludes it is missing. That goes in METHOD -- a default
filter can hide a whole screen and the corpus will record it as absent.
The payoff is for the port rather than for the RE: the first of the five
screens now has a reference composite, which it did not have. Marked
amber on one point -- there is no framebuffer capture of the splash in
this repo, so the match to the running game is by description against the
milestone-1 notes, not by pixels.
because the test probed the wrong state
Nine stores to the phase field this+132, control-gated on the 136 query
returning at least the 18 known ones. Attributed to the handler each
lives in, they give the phase graph: entry -> 2, then 2 -> 0 (splash),
2 -> 3, 3 -> 4, and 4 -> 2 on event 0.
That last edge is the problem with what I did last iteration. The event-0
block sets TWO fields one instruction apart -- stw r28,136(r30) for state
0 and stw r11,132(r30) with r11 = 2 for phase 2. So B from the menu lands
in PHASE 2, the same phase as the boot title, and the test I ran
believing it probed phase 4 state 0 probed nothing of the kind.
So the refutation is withdrawn. Worse for me and better for the idea: A
working on the B-returned title is exactly what the hypothesis predicts,
since phase 2 is the phase that references BUTTON. The hypothesis is back
to untested, now consistent with two observations rather than one, and
what it still needs is the attract-returned title's phase -- which no
test so far has read.
The measurement from that iteration stands, because it does not depend on
the phase: the B-returned title accepts A, so only the ATTRACT-returned
title is inert. I have said so explicitly in the page rather than letting
the withdrawal take the good half down with it.
METHOD gets the lesson: before testing "state X behaves like this", check
your route actually reaches state X. When a transition writes more than
one field, read the whole block and not just the store you were looking
for.
this corpus thought
Last iteration I proposed that the boot title is phase 2 and the
attract-returned title is phase 4 state 0, and that only phase 2 wires up
A -- a candidate answer to the oldest open question in
canary-scripted-input-traps.md. I marked it untested and named a test
that needed reading this+132 at runtime.
There was a cheaper one. The decoded graph says B from the main menu is
the edge 4 -> 0, so the B-returned title IS phase 4 state 0. If that
state were the inert one, A would not work there.
A works. Control first -- A on the boot title opened the menu -- then A
on the B-returned title opened it too. So phase 4 state 0 handles A and
the hypothesis is refuted, one iteration after I raised it. Recorded in
REFUTED under my own name, and the conditional stated: the edge is
decoded, but which title it produces is my inference.
The test earned something better than it cost, though. That page frames
the problem as "the boot title accepts A, a later title does not", and
that is too broad -- the B-returned title accepts A perfectly well, a
case nobody had tried. Only the ATTRACT-returned title is inert. Whatever
causes it is tied to the attract cycle specifically rather than to the
title having been shown before, which is a much smaller haystack.
Also reproduced in passing: 4 s after B the plate is absent and fades in
after, the same near-miss this corpus has already been caught by once.
to this corpus's oldest input puzzle
Continuing Q6 on the phases left unread. Strings each phase handler
references, plus whether it carries its own jump table:
phase 0 sub_821C5690 LOGO no switch
phase 2 sub_821C5818 BASE_INFO, BUTTON, TITLE_SCREEN no switch
phase 3 sub_821C5EC0 (none) one switch
phase 4 sub_821C6458 BASE_INFO, LOADING, TITLE_MENU, TITLE_SCREEN
Phase 0 referencing LOGO is a second independent confirmation that it is
the developer splash -- the iterate3E notes reached the same function
from the guest side and named the splash's LOGO items. Phase 2 draws the
title WITH the PRESS A plate, which the archive side had already
established is a build of its own.
Which produces something worth more than either: the title is installed
from TWO places, phase 2 and phase 4 state 0. Same screen, different
code. canary-scripted-input-traps.md has recorded for months, and never
explained, that the boot title accepts A while the attract-returned title
accepts nothing, with the giveaway that a draw capture in each is
identical. Two code paths installing one screen is exactly that shape. I
have written it into that page as a candidate with the cheap test named
-- read this+132 on each title -- and marked it untested, because it is.
One query in this iteration failed its own control and I threw its half
away: counting stw rX,136(r30) per phase returned 0 for phase 4, which
has 18, because the operand text has a space the pattern did not allow.
The bctr half passes its control and is reported. METHOD gets the
underlying trap: instructions.function is unpopulated for most rows, so a
query scoped on it silently returns nothing.
confirmed three ways
Chasing where the event code comes from, sub_821C5580 turned out to do
two things worth having.
For Q6 it arms the outer gate: li r11,3 ; stw r11,16(r28) is exactly the
value sub_821C7850 tests before dispatching, which answers the "what does
this+16 == 3 gate on" question I left open last iteration. It then passes
r5 = [r27+4], an event read out of a structure, so the vocabulary is
still not enumerable. Of the four callers of sub_821C7850, three pass
constants -- 0, 0 and 5 -- and this one does not.
The accident is a few instructions earlier: li r5, 1103 into a sound-play
call. 1103 is a BGM cue id, BGM_103. That closes a residual I had written
off as undecodable: which bank the menu plays. The cue table genuinely
cannot say, since its BGM entries are numeric -- but the code can, and it
checks out three independent ways. The census says BGM_103.slb is two
waves of 3876864 and 3930112 bytes; the XMA probe at the main menu saw
two stereo streams of 3876864 and 3930112 bytes. Byte for byte on both.
That also corrects me. bgm-two-stems.md said those observed sizes matched
no bank's declared waves and inferred the decoder gets a window rather
than a whole wave. Wrong on both counts -- I had checked only the BGM_0xx
rows of the census because that was the block on screen. METHOD gets it:
check a measurement against the whole reference set, not the part you
happened to be reading.
Chasing where the event code comes from turned up the level above and
corrected my own framing three sections running.
sub_821C6458 has exactly one caller, sub_821C7850, and that caller is
itself a dispatcher -- on a SECOND, outer state field at this+132, five
phases, gated on this+16 == 3. Phase 4 is the title/menu machine I have
been decoding. Phase 0 is sub_821C5690, which the iterate3E notes had
already fingered as the splash mechanics from a completely different
direction. That agreement is the useful check here.
So GamePart_Title has two nested state fields: a phase at this+132
choosing which sub-machine runs, and the state at this+136 inside phase
4. Everything I decoded over the last three iterations -- ten states,
eighteen edges, the event dispatch -- is phase 4 ONLY. Phases 1, 2 and 3
are untouched. I have called that out in REFUTED against my own earlier
wording rather than quietly restating it.
And the event code is forwarded, not created: all five phase handlers are
called with the same (this, r29, r28), where r28 is sub_821C7850's own
third argument passed through untouched. So the event vocabulary is
defined at least one level further up, and finding what 3, 5, 8, 10 and
25 mean means going up again. Not done.
Continuing Q6's last item: the condition on each edge.
sub_821C6458's third argument is an EVENT CODE, and state 4 -- reached
straight after the main menu is installed, so the input-waiting state --
dispatches on it through a second jump table at 0x821c6b7c, 26 cases.
Six are handled and twenty fall through changing nothing:
event 0 -> state 0 (TITLE_SCREEN, back to the title)
events 3, 5, 8, 25 -> state 8 (LOADING)
event 10 -> state 5
So the edges I listed last iteration as "4 -> 0, 5, 8x4" are each now
attributed to a specific event, and the input state's graph is complete.
One thing I deliberately did NOT promote. The main menu has five items, B
returns to the title, and this table has one event to the title, four to
LOADING and one elsewhere. That is a tempting fit -- B plus four items
that load an external archive plus EXTRAS staying inside GP_TITLE -- and
it matches everything measured. It is also a count-match and nothing
more: the events are unnamed, nothing shows event 3 is a particular menu
row, and state 5 installs no named screen so the EXTRAS half has no
support at all. Written down as an observation with that said plainly,
because the same shape of reasoning already cost me DIFFICULTY and
EXTRA_MENU two iterations ago.
Still open: what the event numbers mean, the conditions on edges out of
the other states, and what states 1/3/5/6/7/9 do.
Q6's last open piece was which state leads to which, and it turned out to
be a plain switch.
state = this+136, compared against 9, dispatched through a jump table at
0x821C6498. The ten words at that address disassemble as lwz r16,N(r28)
instructions and are nothing of the kind -- they are the table. That is
the same "self-reference" I flagged two iterations ago as looking like a
jump table; it is one, and the disassembler was decoding its data.
Three states install a named screen: 0 is TITLE_SCREEN, 2 is TITLE_MENU,
8 is LOADING. Eighteen transitions, every one a literal li/stw pair into
the state field, giving the full graph.
It lines up with the behaviour measured weeks of iterations ago without
either side knowing about the other: boot reaches state 0 and A opens
state 2; B at the main menu returns to the title, and 4 -> 0 is the ONLY
edge back to state 0, reached from 2 -> 4; entering a submenu goes
through LOADING and comes back, which is 4 -> 8 at four separate sites
then 8 -> 2. I have marked that as corroboration and said plainly it is
me matching a graph to observations -- the conditions on the edges are
not decoded, so nothing here proves which input picks which branch.
Still open and written down as such: the condition on each edge, what
states 1/3/5/6/7/9 do, and the fact that state 3 is never a destination
in this function, so something outside sets it.
own corroboration from last iteration
Last iteration I listed a candidate name vocabulary from "upper-case
strings the callers reference", marked it amber because those are not
proven arguments, and named the check: confirm per call site which string
actually lands in r5. Ran the check. It fired.
The first extractor FAILED ITS OWN CONTROL -- a backward scan for
addi r5 recovered 7 of 48 sites and missed both title sites I had already
read by eye, because there the name is built in r27 and reaches r5 via a
later mr. Rewritten as a forward register simulation it reproduces all
three known sites and recovers 46 of 48, giving 28 distinct names.
Two of my own claims die. DIFFICULTY and EXTRA_MENU are NOT arguments at
any site -- they are strings that merely live in the same functions, so
the "independently corroborated by measurement" line I wrote was an
artifact of the loose filter. Only TUTORIAL_MENU survives. And
sub_821CC860 is not a screen factory at all: its real arguments include
BG, BLACK, FADE, FILE, KEY, PAD, SOUND and GAMMA_RGB. It is a generic
name-keyed lookup, mostly config, which the title part happens to call
with its three state names.
The title finding itself is untouched -- sub_821C6458 really does
transition by calling this with TITLE_SCREEN, TITLE_MENU and LOADING.
What is gone is the inference that the 28 names are a screen vocabulary.
Two METHOD lines, both earned here: strings a function references are not
arguments it passes, and a backward scan for a destination register
misses arguments staged through a scratch register.
Continuing Q6's last residual -- the control flow I left unread.
All three state-name sites in sub_821C6458 compile to the same shape:
load the name, then bl 0x821CC860 with it in r5 and 0 in r6, then hand
the result to sub_82187B78. So a transition is lookup-by-string then
install: sub_821CC860(this+88, this+24, "TITLE_SCREEN", 0). Not a numeric
id and not a table index. That also explains something that had been
sitting unexplained -- GP_ADVERTISE_DEMO having zero xrefs -- because at
this level the screen graph is keyed by name rather than by GamePart id.
sub_821CC860 has 28 callers, and the upper-case identifiers in that
neighbourhood split cleanly into screen names and config keys. Three of
the screen names are corroborated by measurements I took before ever
opening this function: DIFFICULTY is what NEW GAME opens, EXTRA_MENU is
the EXTRAS submenu, TUTORIAL_MENU the lesson list. That is the static
side agreeing with the dynamic side on names neither knew about the
other.
Held at amber deliberately. The 35 strings are what those callers
REFERENCE, not proven arguments, and the list plainly mixes screen names
with things like TEXT_FONT and GAMMA_RGB. Confirming it means checking
per call site which string actually lands in r5, and I did not do that.
Still unread: which state leads to which. The three lookups sit in
different branches and TITLE_MENU's is guarded by a cmplwi/bne, but I did
not trace the branch structure, so the ORDER still comes from measurement
rather than from the code.
TITLE_MENU, LOADING
Taking the one residual I had ranked as worth doing: sub_821C6458, which
the previous note left explicitly unread.
It is the title part's screen-state function -- 4460 bytes, has EH,
called from exactly one place, sub_821C7850, which sits beside the
creator the registration site points at. Its string references are
TITLE_SCREEN, TITLE_MENU, LOADING and BASE_INFO. Those are precisely the
states measured off the running game, in the game's own words, and
BASE_INFO is this corpus's own marker for a screen-config lookup rather
than a table read.
That sharpens Q6's negative rather than overturning it. The title part
DOES ask for configuration keyed by TITLE_SCREEN and TITLE_MENU, and
config.ini -- the disc's only config -- has no such sections, only an
empty [SYSTEM] and [LANGUAGE]. So the game asks the question, the shipped
disc does not answer it, and the defaults live in code. The port can
transcribe the state names even though it must author their contents.
Marked amber, not green: this is characterisation from string references
and call counts, not a read of the control flow. Two self-references
inside the function look like jump tables, which is what a state machine
compiles to, but I did not confirm that and nothing here shows which
state leads to which.
One refutation recorded because it looked like a find for several
minutes: the {func, func, ptr} triples at 0x820a3b48 read convincingly as
a state/handler table and are nothing of the kind -- the bytes before
them are the tail of a RegisterToFactory diagnostic string and the data
column is zero-filled descriptors. Static-init records, not dispatch.
