Commit Graph

21 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Sylpheed RE agent
ffd1a30ba7 re(ui): decode keyframe +12 as screen-plane rotation in degrees
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.
2026-08-28 22:42:00 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
abe7477476 re: the skewed draw is not the swoosh -- refuting the identification five
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.
2026-08-28 22:21:42 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
e6ad72c7a0 re: three angle fields found in the keyframe -- and they are not the
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.
2026-08-28 22:17:14 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
65a4fe0b32 re: the swoosh is solved -- the game draws it as rotated quads and our
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.
2026-08-28 22:13:50 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
e482add1f5 re: full suite green, and correcting the route I recommended last
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.
2026-08-28 22:09:07 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
d981d9fa35 re: the capture is settled after all, and the swoosh is undecodable from
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.
2026-08-28 22:02:32 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
4cee06c07f re: additive blending refuted, the swoosh is not displaced, and the
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.
2026-08-28 22:00:55 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
9dd2948d3e re: the pivot mismatch cannot be the swoosh's cause -- refuting my own
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.
2026-08-28 21:40:46 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
06cbc17ecc re: the swoosh's pivot belongs to the Japanese sprite, and the colour is
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.
2026-08-28 21:37:24 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
e802ca3442 re: the title "slab" is the logo swoosh drawn white and thick, and it
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.
2026-08-28 21:31:52 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
43d9045bff re: the title's arrived pose is rest, and the washed-out slab is a
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.
2026-08-28 21:27:04 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
dcf2090d0f re: build 4 captured without the plate, and keyframe groups hold rather
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.
2026-08-28 21:05:35 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
a72e7c614e re: the last keyframe time is the chunk terminator -- observed, not
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.
2026-08-28 21:02:14 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
2614cb1192 re: the 2.3 s pulse is the PRESS (A) plate, not the title
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.
2026-08-28 20:58:49 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
3cb9298e5d re: the loop records decode -- and they are not what I measured
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.
2026-08-28 20:53:08 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
7f12f5474b re: the loop record is located, its cycle is still not readable
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.
2026-08-28 20:49:11 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
7a77740feb re: the title loops at about 2.2 s -- and the build-in test I intended
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.
2026-08-28 20:45:53 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
945f131427 re: the splash's timing is decoded, and the fade-out matches to 0.03 s
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.
2026-08-28 20:39:17 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
00ca130363 re: the splash confirmed against the running game, and timed
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.
2026-08-28 20:35:10 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
91efa66e9c re: the developer splash renders -- screen 1 of 5 finally has a composite
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.
2026-08-28 20:29:33 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
e21a9ab138 re: which GP_TITLE build is which screen, measured against the game
Q2. The archive is eight screens shipped twice, English and Japanese --
not the "build 4 title, 5 main menu, 6/8/9 submenus" the handoff claimed.
Build 8 is the JAPANESE main menu; 6 and 9 are the EN and JP EXTRAS, and
EXTRAS is the only submenu GP_TITLE holds. The PRESS (A) BUTTON plate is
its own build (2/3), composited over the title art and faded in a beat
later, not a state of build 4.

Confirmed by booting to the main menu and walking it: title, PRESS (A),
main menu and EXTRAS each match their render element for element. Builds
0/1 and 10/11 -- a DELTASABER / SYLPHEED A.I. plate -- were looked for in
the whole boot filmstrip, every title-side screen and the attract loop,
and appear in none of them; the reach of that negative is written down
rather than filled in with a guess.

Two rig traps went into METHOD: the menus drop d-pad presses shorter than
~0.3 s, and a grab 2.5 s after a transition can catch a screen mid-fade
-- which nearly wrote "the returned title has no plate" into the corpus.
2026-08-28 16:55:33 +00:00