Commit Graph

69 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
sylph-decoder
95ceb70cb5 re: the refuted register ignored the deaths I just wrote, and two false positives shared a cause
Three refutations written as prose under ### headings never entered the register:
check_refuted.py parses * "claim" lines, so the count stayed at 188. Registered
them properly (188 -> 192). A register that parses one syntax silently ignores
every other, and it is invisible from the author's side -- ask the register what it
holds, do not re-read what you wrote.

Both standing false positives were bullets under a header that retracts the whole
list, with no marker in the +-4-line window: scope marks them, not proximity. The
scan now includes the nearest preceding header and matches markers
case-insensitively ('An earlier version' was missed by the marker 'an earlier
version'). Controlled by planting a real revival and confirming it is still caught;
register now runs clean at 0.

Also records sylpheed-port's diagnosis of the phase-lock fallout: a number can be
inapplicable rather than wrong, and a tension built on one is manufactured. Plus
their point that some claims are not registrable in a substring register at all.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2026-08-30 20:02:21 +00:00
sylph-decoder
c5d685ba15 re: the sweep IS drawn on the JP title -- and my gate was phase-locking the shutter
The occlusion hypothesis is refuted: build 7 draws the same three ROT strips at
higher alpha than English, so there was never an absence to explain.

The 0.32-vs-11.9 tension that motivated it was an artefact of my own instrument.
Both JP captures were shuttered on the plate pulse, and the plate's pulse is part
of the animation -- so the gate synchronises the shutter to the animation's phase.
Measured at the shutter instant, the sweep sits 25-26 px apart across two runs in
different locales and different sessions: 1.6 % of a ~1600 px traverse.

So the 0.32 I recorded as between-session capture noise measures my trigger's
repeatability, and I read it as evidence the title is still when it is evidence
the gate works. The era adjudication is unaffected -- margin 16.72 clears even the
un-locked 11.9 -- and unaffected for the reason that file already gave: correlated
noise cancels in a margin.

Refutation attempt on sylpheed-port's positional-mechanism rejection: FAILED, the
claim stands. Its residual sits inside lit logos, and the logo ROI is
byte-identical across five differently-phased frames in two sessions.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2026-08-30 19:52:15 +00:00
sylph-decoder
28b1a4c33c re: eight refutations from this session had never reached REFUTED.md
sylpheed-port audited the documents their brief names and found two stale
blockers in a table they are instructed to consult, having audited everything
else. Mine names eight documents; I had audited MISSION.md and never PROTOCOL,
REFUTED, INDEX or CONTAINER-NOTES.

REFUTED.md is the dangerous one, because a wrongly-dead entry stops someone
re-investigating something live. Checked the keyframe cluster first for the
opposite failure -- entries refuted USING the stale time association, which would
make their deaths unsound. They are sound: the additive-blend and pivot entries
rest on scale values and capture measurements that the association does not move,
and the one entry that did depend on it is already struck through.

The real gap is the other direction. EIGHT claims died this session -- the
fade-out duration "not in the file", the ~14 units as a black hold, the black
interval as a load, "(B) has no black interval", ptloop01/02 not free-running,
the splash dwells running 8.5 % long, EXTRAS's "structural" n=1, and the gap being
determined by the outgoing screen. Every one was recorded in its own page at the
time. NONE of them reached REFUTED.md, the file the brief says to grep before
proposing anything.

Added as a dated section with the true answer after each arrow, following the
file's stated format, and each carrying what made it wrong rather than only that
it was.

METHOD: a refutation that lives only where it was made is not reachable by the
person about to repeat it. The pages are where a refutation is argued; the index
is where it is found -- the same split as docs versus tool, and only the second
one saves anyone. The check is mechanical: after withdrawing a claim, grep
REFUTED.md for its noun.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2026-08-30 19:21:06 +00:00
sylph-decoder
f24304248c re: the plate delay was on the disc all along -- my instruction is refuted
The port caught this with arithmetic off the disc, and it was right: build 2 has
a keyframe group of its own, so "when build 4 has settled, wait 2.13 s, then
composite build 2" puts the plate at settle + 2.13 + 3.97 s. Confirmed build 2's
group here independently of their message: `ptbtn00.t32` reaches a=255 at t=238.

The reconciliation needs no free parameter. Both builds run on ONE clock, started
together, and the premise that fails is `rest.t`:

  rest.t is NOT when a screen settles. It is the last HOLD keyframe before the
  exit. ptlogo1 rests at t=251 and stops moving at t=42.

The title's visible build-in ends at t=118, where pteff01, pteff02.prm and
ptlogoall_eff end their ramps together. 238 - 118 = 120 units = 2.000 s, against
a measured 2.138 and 2.132. So the interval the two runs agreed on to 6 ms was a
DECLARED one and I handed over a wall-clock reading of it.

That reading is 6.7% long, and the corpus already knew why: 120 units in 2.135 s
is the game presenting at 28.06 / 28.14 fps against a nominal 30, and the idle
title was independently measured at 28.5 fps before these runs. Corroborated from
inside the same two runs -- first pixels -> settle is 1.643 s and 2.131 s, a 30%
spread, while settle -> plate is 2.138 and 2.132. Frames are dropped during the
build-in, not during the hold, which a change in the game's own timing could not
do.

So the port authors nothing here. What is unchanged: ScreenView still has to draw
two builds at once and the boot's end state is still not plate-free.

Not settled, and said so on the page: which reading of the keyframe times is
right (it moves the plate by 2 units and I cannot separate them from these
traces), and my settle landmark to better than +/-5 units.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014voBspJ6kFncNErZJuZcLw
2026-08-29 12:43:41 +00:00
sylph-decoder
7a4a74f8d7 re: the main menu has no idle self-return -- and four of my own durations were a backlog
Two results and one retraction, all from the same session.

REFUTED: 'an ~8-10 s idle returns to the title' does not apply to the main menu.
Held untouched it stayed put for >= 60 s, correlation never leaving
0.9245-0.9249. That timer is real but belongs to the TITLE. It was the only
reason 'B leaves the main menu' was classed as authored, so Q5's B rule is
upgraded to measured-ordering: B is delivered (canary logs vk=5801) and is the
only input in >= 100 s before the return.

The PRESS (A) plate: the boot title presents build 4 WITHOUT the plate first --
green-glyph 154, against 159 on the committed no-plate capture and 753/977/1493
on plate titles -- and the plate arrives after. That is the port's third option.

RETRACTED: four durations taken the same day. classify_array costs 1503 ms per
frame; running it per frame against an 8 fps x11grab drained the pipe at
0.64 fps, so every classified frame was stale and increasingly so. It
manufactured 'plate 24.66 s after the title art', 'B->title 15.58 s', 'B->title
25.60 s' and 'A->menu 20.26 s'. The tell: a transition, a press and a fade do
not share a duration, and the two B figures GREW across a longer run.

A backlog preserves ordering and destroys durations, which is why the sequence
results above stand and every timing does not. The ring's period is unaffected
and that was checked, not assumed -- ring_period ran at 15.03 fps against a
requested 15.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KNR5Y79D1T4bBr6gJQaWFP
2026-08-29 11:50:46 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
0ed33bcd38 re(ui): a RATC child's name is stated, not inferred -- and it was hiding every menu background
`ratc::parse` named each child by scanning backwards for the last printable run
of bytes before its magic. The format states the name explicitly instead, in an
`opt ` block: `"opt " | BE32 len | name | NUL | 3 bytes | magic` -- the same
block `ui_layout::opt_link` already read for a button's focus link.

The scan agrees with it 17 918 times out of 17 942 and is wrong 24 times, every
one the same failure: the 3 trailing payload bytes are themselves printable and
beat the real name. For `pteff05.t32` those bytes are `38 41 58` = `8AX`, so the
full-resolution background of all five menu screens registered under a name no
element declares, resolved to no sprite, and `compose` dropped it through an
early `continue` that -- unlike the two arms above it -- records nothing. The
screen lost its background and `screen render` still reported "all resolved".

`8AX` was never a name. Docs that treated it as one are corrected here.

Disc-wide, and the control is the 17 918 the scan already got right: the `opt `
reading reproduces every one of them. Effect on the five screens is the
signature of the same art at twice the resolution -- mean brightness unmoved,
high-frequency detail x1.15..x1.30 -- which is what the separately-measured
`ui-8ax-fullres-background` result said the game draws.

Also closes a long-standing dangling reference: `pmbase.t32`, recorded as "on
the disc nowhere", is the `GP_STAGE_CLEAR` child the scan called `8AX`. RATC
sibling references now resolve 10 148 of 10 148.

Verified: 114/114 sylpheed-formats unit tests (including two new ones pinning
the `8AX` case byte for byte and the no-block fallback), and every disc-gated
integration suite in sylpheed-formats/sylpheed-cli.
2026-08-29 07:26:56 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
04a3ae1389 docs: withdraw yesterday's "paint order is a sequence" -- wrong source
Last iteration I claimed the splash's measured_paint_order [0,2,4,6,1,3,5]
records, between its glow and logo halves, the temporal order they were
seen in rather than depth -- because the halves never share a frame.

The no-overlap measurement is right (glows f94-115, logos f116-211). The
inference is wrong, on two independent grounds:

  * Wrong source. That vector is not a read of the draw capture. It is a
    read of the live screen object's CHILD ARRAY -- ui-screen-runtime.md
    records it literally as "paint order (child slots)". A child list has
    a definite order whether or not its children are ever drawn together,
    so co-occurrence does not bear on it. The capture was the CHECK.
  * The order is in the file anyway. paint_order_audit on GP_TITLE entry
    11: derived == measured, 0 inverted pairs, 0 same-layer-key ties. The
    glows and logos carry distinct T8aD keys (0xa100 < 0xa110), so the
    file orders the halves statically, no capture involved.

I asked the question that started this iteration -- do the title and menu
orders have the same problem -- and the answer is that none of the three
does, for the same reason.

What survives is narrower and now recorded with numbers: how much of each
order its capture actually cross-checks. The title capture is stable (8
draws / 12 quads / 5 textures, identical in all five captured frames
across two logs) and confirms 7 of 24 positions; the menu capture is not
(texture 0x11C30000 present in frame 0, gone by frame 3); the splash
capture cannot cross-check its middle at all.

A counting trap worth the tool: count QUADS, not draws. The menu's draw 9
is indices=24 -- six quads batched from one texture. Counting draws reads
9 where 16 are on screen, and an earlier pass of this analysis briefly
"found" three quads for six declarations that way and concluded elements
were missing. They were batched.

METHOD: check what a "measured" value was measured FROM before reasoning
about its limits. The co-occurrence rule is real, and it is specific to
orders read from draw captures.
2026-08-29 05:19:44 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
a7257c96d6 docs: the splash .prm measured -- and its paint order is a sequence, not depth
ui-prm-primitives recorded that where a .prm paints on a screen without a
measured order is unsolved. For the developer splash it is now measured.

Every frame opens with two full-screen draws before any sprite. The
second is untextured in all 212 frames with a constant vertex colour of
FF000000 -- opaque black -- matching palogo_eff0.prm's declaration
exactly: kind 0x10, pivot (640,360) -> 1280x720, one keyframe, a = 255.
So the splash backdrop is an opaque black full-screen quad from the
bundle itself, painted behind every sprite, which is why a splash render
needs --black rather than the default backdrop.

Not a general rule, and said so: the measured main-menu order puts
pteff02.prm at position 4 and pteff00.prm LAST, the latter being the
screen-transition fade.

And a correction to an existing row. measured_paint_order returns
[0, 2, 4, 6, 1, 3, 5] for the splash, described as "the .prm, then all
three glows, then the three logos". But the glows and the logos never
appear in the same frame -- 0 overlapping frames in 235 -- and two
elements that never co-occur have no observable relative depth. Between
those halves the vector records the order they were SEEN IN, not a
front-to-back relationship.

That does not make the render wrong, and element 0 is a real depth
observation since the .prm co-occurs with everything. But the type of the
claim matters: reading the vector as depth invites compositing all seven
elements at once, which is exactly what does not reproduce the screen.

METHOD: two things that never co-occur have no observable relative order;
when recording an order, note which pairs actually appeared together.
2026-08-29 05:06:37 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
0db76bcc57 re(ui): re-establish selective activation by killing the alternative statically
Last iteration I withdrew "a bundle is a palette" because the evidence
did not choose between selective activation within one bundle and two
compositions shown in sequence. The alternative can be killed from the
disc, which I had not tried.

Hypothesis 2 needs a bundle declaring the GLOWS WITHOUT THE LOGOS. There
is none. Every GP_TITLE entry carrying palogo elements:

  10, 13 (publisher twins)  palogo_eff0.prm, palogo_sqex, palogo_sqex_eff
  11, 14 (developer twins)  palogo_eff0.prm + all three logos + all three glows

Four entries, and each developer entry declares the complete set of six.
So whichever bundle was active across frames 94-211 -- entry 11, entry
14, or both in turn -- it declared the logos and the glows, while the
game drew two sprites at a time in disjoint phases.

Therefore only a subset of a bundle's elements is drawn at any moment,
whatever the bundle-loading story is. The conclusion no longer depends on
resolving how many bundles are involved, which is why the texture-base
test's failure stopped mattering.

So the claim is reinstated -- this time by eliminating the alternative
rather than by assuming it away. What worked was not a better capture but
asking what the competing hypothesis would REQUIRE on the disc and
finding it absent.

METHOD: a hypothesis that predicts an artefact can be killed by looking
for the artefact, which is often far cheaper than measuring the behaviour.
2026-08-29 04:56:13 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
be937e3d5d re(ui): withdraw the mechanism -- "palette" was an explanation, not a finding
Last iteration I wrote that a bundle is a palette whose elements are
selectively activated. The disjoint glow/logo phases have two
explanations and I asserted one:

  1. one bundle, some elements run then others;
  2. two bundle-loads shown in sequence (entries 11 and 14 are twins
     declaring identical sprites).

The draw log's tex[base=...] looked like it would separate them. It does
not, and the control is in the same table:

  publisher splash  f1-90     0x11C30000, 0x10000000
  glows             f94-115   0x11C30000, 0x10000000
  logos             f116-211  0x11C30000, 0x10000000

The publisher splash is certainly a DIFFERENT bundle from the developer
splash, and it uses the same base. So 0x11C30000 is a reused upload slot,
not a bundle identity, and the test cannot choose between the two
hypotheses.

Survives: a bundle's declared elements are not what gets drawn.
palogo_anima and palogo_gamearts carry byte-identical keyframe times and
in the same run one is drawn 95 frames and the other none -- and
whichever twin was active declares both. The phases are strictly disjoint
(0 overlapping frames in 235).

Withdrawn: the mechanism. The practical consequence is unchanged --
compositing every element of a bundle does not reproduce what the game
shows over time -- but the why is not established and I stated it as
though it were.

What would separate them: a per-draw capture recording the bundle each
draw came from, or a file-IO log showing whether a second RATC entry is
read between frames 115 and 116.

METHOD: a shared resource address does not identify the resource's owner;
and state the mechanism as a separate claim from the observation, or the
weaker one inherits the stronger one's evidence.
2026-08-29 04:51:34 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
c4b5752713 re(ui): the sequencing survives refutation -- and a bundle is a palette
Two checks on last iteration's "sequential, not simultaneous" reading.

First, the phases really are disjoint. If glows and logos ever shared a
frame the claim would be wrong. Across all 235 captured frames the count
of frames containing both is ZERO, and the switch is a single clean
boundary -- f110-115 draw 1280x720 + 262x108 + 525x90, f116 onward
1280x720 + 243x86 + 499x72. Two sprites either side, no transition frame.

Second, and larger: a third of the bundle is never drawn. Entry 11
declares three logo/glow pairs and only two appear.

  palogo_gamearts / _eff    95 / 22 frames
  palogo_seta     / _eff    95 / 22 frames
  palogo_anima    / _eff    never

palogo_anima declares the SAME keyframe times as palogo_gamearts. Two
elements with byte-identical data, 95 frames and 0 frames in one run.
Reach: the capture covers frames 1-214, so this is "never in the window".

So a bundle is a palette, not a script. Its elements say what to draw and
for how long; which of them run, and when each starts, is decided outside
the placement data. That is the same conclusion the boot-order work
reached from the other end -- the driver is code, not data -- now with a
per-element measurement behind it.

For the port, concretely: compositing every element of a bundle does not
reproduce what the game shows over time. It is the right thing for a
static screen that settles, and it is not a timeline.

METHOD: two elements with identical data and different outcomes is the
strongest possible evidence that the decision is elsewhere.
2026-08-29 04:47:05 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
29d59cdb06 re(ui): a group's duration is in the data, its start time is not
Tested whether the splash timeline, played, reproduces the capture --
the last gap in the animation model. Half of it does.

Durations match. At 2 units/frame under the shifted reading, from the
235-frame draw capture of the developer splash:

  glows  drawn f94-115  (22 frames = 44 units)  declared ~0..45  = 45   97.8%
  logos  drawn f116-211 (96 frames = 192 units) declared 15..210 = 195  98.5%

Each element is on screen for its declared span to within 2%.

Starts do not. Every glow declares the same times 15,30,45 and every
logo the same 15,30,190,194,206,210, so on one clock they would overlap
almost entirely -- and they do not overlap at all. The glows run 94-115
and the logos 116-211, strictly sequential, the logos starting the frame
after the glows end. Fitting one origin needs f0 ~ 93.5 for gamearts_eff
and ~103 for gamearts, about 19 units apart, and aligning one throws the
other off by ~9 frames at both ends.

The obvious candidate is refuted. parse_placements reads each group
header as (element index, keyframe count) plus one undecoded LEAD-IN
WORD -- exactly where a per-group start offset would live. It is
0x00000000 for all seven elements, glows and logos alike.

Reach: not the keyframe times (identical within each family), not that
word (zero), not declaration order (which interleaves logos and glows
where the observed sequencing groups them), not the RATC child order.
What remains is that the sequencing is code-driven, which agrees with
what the boot-order work concluded independently.

For the port: a group says how long an element animates and what it does,
not when it starts relative to its neighbours. The observed order on the
developer splash -- both glows, then both logos -- is measured for one
screen, not a decoded rule, so the sequencing has to be authored.

METHOD: when a model reproduces durations but not positions, the missing
piece is an origin, not a rate.
2026-08-29 04:42:55 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
a46a922bc8 re(ui): a static composite is only meaningful for a screen that settles
The model's sharpest prediction, tested with its control. The draw log
says that on the developer splash the _eff glows are drawn on frames
94-115 and the logos on 116-211, so at the moment the reference capture
was taken EVERY glow is already finished -- including the two that have
plateaus and which rest_plateau therefore renders visible. Suppressing
them should help on the splashes and hurt where a screen genuinely
settles.

  publisher splash   +0.9604 -> +0.9982   +0.0377
  developer splash   +0.9659 -> +0.9980   +0.0321
  title    (control) +0.9500 -> +0.9480   -0.0020
  main menu(control) +0.9460 -> +0.8544   -0.0916
  EXTRAS   (control) +0.9440 -> +0.8370   -0.1070

Both splashes jump to about 0.998; all three persistent screens get
worse. The control is what makes this a finding rather than a
coincidence: the same edit helps exactly where the model says it should
and hurts exactly where it says it should not.

So rest_plateau is not over-drawing in general -- it over-draws on
TRANSIENT screens. A plateau mid-animation means the element is held at
that point in the timeline, not that it is on screen once the screen has
settled. Where a screen settles, the held pose IS the settled pose and
the rule is measurably right.

And that answers the question left open several iterations ago -- what
"rest" means for a transient element. It does not mean anything: the
splashes never rest. A static composite of them can match a chosen frame,
and about 0.998 is what these captures' frame is worth, but the format
does not answer a question the screen never poses.

For the port: play the timeline for the two splashes, which the settled
keyframe timing now supports, and composite statically for title, main
menu and EXTRAS.

METHOD: an edit that improves one set of cases is only interesting once
you have shown it damages the cases where it should.
2026-08-29 04:37:59 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
e63efabcfb re(ui): why rest_plateau is right -- and last is right only for a transient
The shifted keyframe-time reading looked like it implied something
simple: the final pose is reached at a definite time and nothing follows,
so rest should just be the last keyframe and the plateau heuristic could
go. Tested by applying it to EVERY element:

  title              +0.9500 -> +0.6819   -0.2681
  main menu          +0.9460 -> +0.6416   -0.3044
  EXTRAS             +0.9440 -> +0.5745   -0.3695
  publisher splash   +0.9600 -> blank (zero variance, corr undefined)
  developer splash   +0.9643 -> blank

Refuted, and the failure supplies the model. A group is entry -> hold ->
exit, and the exit is the screen's DISMISSAL. While a screen is displayed
it has not reached its last keyframe; it is sitting at the hold. So
rest_plateau is the correct primary rule, and the last keyframe is the
post-exit state -- correct only once the screen is gone, which is why
applying it everywhere blanks the splashes.

This does not contradict the shifted reading. That reading says when each
pose is reached; it says nothing about the group being played to
completion while the screen is still up. The step between them was mine.

And it explains why last wins for the two plateau-less elements: an
element with no hold is a transient, it flashes and is over, and at any
settled moment it is gone -- which is its last keyframe. The draw capture
says the same independently: on the developer splash the _eff glows draw
on frames 94-115 and the logos on 116-211, so the glows are already
finished when the logos are up.

Three independent observables -- animation timing, static composites, and
the per-frame draw log -- now agree on one rule: plateau where there is
one, last keyframe where there is not.

METHOD: a blank render is a NaN correlation, not a low score, and that
NaN was the strongest form of the result; and when a model predicts
something the measurement refuses, suspect the step you supplied between
them.
2026-08-29 04:28:19 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
7347db24df re(ui): the rest fallback fires on 2 elements, and "last keyframe" wins there
Scored candidate rest-pose rules by rendering and correlating instead of
arguing, and both results correct something I had published.

First, the exposure. The guessing fallback is reached only by an element
that is plateau-less AND multi-keyframe -- a single-keyframe element
short-circuits at `match len { 1 => first }`. Per screen:

  title (4)               24 elements   2 plateau-less   0 reach the fallback
  main menu (5)           16            5                0
  EXTRAS (6)              18            5                0
  publisher splash (10)    3            2                1
  developer splash (11)    7            2                1

So on the three screens the port cares most about, rest() never guesses.
That is why three different rules render builds 4/5/6 to identical
correlations -- the code is unreachable there, which I nearly read as
"the choice does not matter".

Second, where it does fire, the last keyframe is markedly better:

  publisher splash   dwell +0.9600   last +0.9982   maxalpha +0.9600
  developer splash   dwell +0.9643   last +0.9758   maxalpha +0.9643

That refutes my own earlier refutation. I had killed the last-keyframe
rule by arguing it makes palogo_anima_eff invisible while its two
siblings stay lit, which looked like an artefact. The capture says
otherwise: making it invisible is what improves the match. The sibling
symmetry was my expectation, not evidence.

Caveat kept in front: both captures are single frames of a transient
animation, so this fixes which pose matches THOSE frames, not which is
canonically at rest. Default unchanged -- better on both screens where it
fires and identical on the other three, but it would move 2 305 elements
disc-wide on two measurements. Reachable via SYLPHEED_REST_RULE=last.

Also confirmed: all 195 zero-scale rest poses are inside the corrected
2 305 ambiguous population; none is a single-keyframe element.

METHOD: score a rule where it can differ, or you measure nothing; and an
argument from symmetry is a prediction, not a refutation.
2026-08-29 04:20:27 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
5b218e6887 re(ui): refute my own fix for rest(), and correct the defect rate by 65%
Two corrections from one experiment.

A keyframe group is entry -> hold -> exit, and the exit ends invisible:
on the five port screens the final keyframe is invisible for 21/24
(title), 8/16 (main menu), 12/18 (EXTRAS), 2/3 and 6/7 (splashes). So the
screen as seen is the HOLD, which is why rest_plateau is the right
primary rule and why "rest = last keyframe" would empty every screen.

That suggested a fix: an element with no hold has no representative pose,
so draw nothing rather than guess an endpoint. Tested through compose's
visible mask and correlated against the live captures:

  title       +0.9500 -> +0.6839   -0.2661
  main menu   +0.9460 -> +0.9037   -0.0423
  EXTRAS      +0.9440 -> +0.9094   -0.0346

Refuted on all three, and the reason invalidates a number I published. An
element with a SINGLE keyframe has no adjacent pair, so the plateau test
marks it plateau-less -- but its one pose is unambiguously its rest.
Suppressing those removes backgrounds and full-screen layers, which is
the title's -0.27.

  no plateau (as published)      3 807  (24.57 %)
    ... single-keyframe          1 502  trivially at rest, not a guess
    genuinely ambiguous          2 305  (14.88 %)

So rest() guesses for 2 305 elements, not 3 807 -- the figure I gave the
port overstated the defect by 65%. Corrected in HANDOFF and the page.

METHOD: a predicate over adjacent PAIRS silently misclassifies a
one-element list; and acting on a claim is a better test of it than
re-reading it -- this flaw survived a census, a write-up and a handoff
row, and died the moment the rule was used to change a rendering.
2026-08-29 04:15:58 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
4bdb830671 re(ui): replicate the keyframe-time shift -- three elements, two screens
The case for reading +36 as "the time the NEXT pose is reached" rested on
one element's fade-out shape, then on one element's hold duration. Both
splash halves supply more, and they agree.

  element            screen              observed hold  as decoded  shifted
  palogo_gamearts    developer splash        83 f          8 f       80 f
  palogo_seta        developer splash        83 f          6 f       80 f
  palogo_sqex        publisher splash       >=77 f *       6 f      102 f

  * the capture opens mid-hold at frame 1, so 77 is a floor.

The readings predict opposite structures. For palogo_gamearts, as decoded:
hold 8f, in 80f, hold 2f, out 6f, out 2f -- an eighty-frame FADE-IN and a
two-frame hold. Shifted: in 8f, hold 80f, out 2f, out 6f, out 2f. The
capture shows an 83-frame hold and no fade-in at all.

The elements that cannot discriminate are not contradicted:
palogo_gamearts_eff observed in 7f / hold 7f / out 8f, and both readings
give 8f phases -- with four blocks the shift only relabels which phase is
which. So the glows, which is where Q1's linear law was measured, say
nothing either way rather than arguing against.

The decoder's default is still unchanged, and the reason is now
articulated rather than assumed. The single thing opposing the shift is
rest() on ptlogo_eff3, where the shifted reading makes the longest-dwell
fallback return the bloom's 200% peak. That fallback is unsound whenever
it runs -- it returns an endpoint of a movement, neither of which is held
-- and checked: the shift does not fix it either. So the objection was
never evidence about the times. Timing had three discriminating
measurements; pose selection had a heuristic guessing.

For the port: animation timing should use the shift; static composites are
unaffected and the five screens' correlations stand. Classified measured,
not decoded -- three elements in one screen family, not a disc-wide check.
2026-08-29 04:09:36 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
00431a7a8a docs: the suite is heavy, not hung -- correcting my own "cannot terminate"
Last iteration I wrote that build-reborn test cannot finish in a working
session, from having watched it run 3h26m. That was the stronger claim
and I made it without measuring the work.

Timing `mesh info` on each of the 166 .xpr containers with a 25 s cap:

  files scanned                166
  exceeding 25 s                19   Hangar, 17 Stage_*, ptc_pack
  Stage_S02 to completion      144 s, rc = 0

Nothing hangs. Nineteen heavy containers at roughly two minutes each is
about 45-60 minutes for one pass, before the 147 fast ones. The 3h26m
observed was that hour of work running at a load average of 9-14 --
inflated by the two duplicate runs I had left going, which did not merely
coexist with the slowness but multiplied it.

The practical conclusion is unchanged and only the wording softens: an
hour-scale suite is not an iteration-scale gate, and every "green" I
reported from it this session was partial. But an hour-scale gate can be
run deliberately, whereas a hung one cannot be run at all, so the
distinction is worth having right.

File list committed as reference data so the cost is attributable without
re-scanning.

METHOD: a slow thing observed under contention looks like a stuck thing;
measure the work before choosing between "cannot finish" and "takes an
hour".
2026-08-29 04:02:34 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
cdc3186a80 re(ui): premultiplied alpha refuted for bit 0x02; parking the field
A per-sprite premultiplied-vs-straight-alpha flag would matter a lot to a
port and has a sharp static signature: premultiplied means RGB <= A
everywhere. Over the 170 decoded GP_TITLE textures that pair to a flag
word:

  bit SET    n= 61   mean %(RGB>A) 55.52   median 52.52
  bit clear  n=109   mean %(RGB>A) 33.66   median 30.17

Premultiplied requires ~0% for the flagged group. Both groups are far
from it and the flagged group violates MORE -- the opposite of the
hypothesis. Refuted.

What remains is a weak association: flagged sprites carry more
bright-RGB/low-alpha pixels, which is what glow art looks like. But the
best single threshold classifies 76.5% against a 64.1% base rate -- a
12-point lift with badly overlapping distributions. A tendency, not a
rule, and reported with its base rate so it cannot read as more.

Noted for whoever returns: "0x02 selects an additive blend" was refuted
by blending those sprites additively and finding every measure worse
against the capture -- but that ran through a title render since fixed
twice (rest_plateau, and the 8AX background the composer drops). The
refutation may well stand; it was measured through a renderer with known
other errors, so it is worth one re-run if blit ever gains additive
blending.

Parking the field. Four candidate meanings are dead -- additive blend,
eff name in both directions, transient element, premultiplied alpha --
none produced a positive account, and the bit blocks nothing: the port's
screens composite at 0.947 correlation against a capture without it. The
negative space and the sound attribution method (child order, not size)
are written down so a later attempt starts here.

METHOD: report a classifier's lift over its base rate; and park a field
after N failed hypotheses, saying what was eliminated.
2026-08-29 03:23:40 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
2740cbef55 re(ui): the eff-name implication for bit 0x02 is refuted disc-wide
Last iteration I killed the biconditional and reported that the one-way
reading survived: all 10 bit-set sprites on GP_TITLE build 4 are eff
names, so "bit set => eff name". Checked over the disc, that is false.

  sprites with a resolvable preceding name   14 709
    bit SET   & name has 'eff'                2 338
    bit SET   & name lacks 'eff'              2 657   <-- counterexamples
    bit clear & name has 'eff'                1 399
    bit clear & name lacks 'eff'              8 315

  P(eff | set)   = 0.468
  P(eff | clear) = 0.144

The implication fails more often than it holds. What survives is an
association -- 3.3x enrichment -- and build 4's 10/10 was a local naming
habit in an 18-element bundle, not a format rule.

The counterexamples are the useful part: pv_loading_ring0,
pv_loading_light0-3, pv_loading_line, px_bunk_line, px_top_extra. Rings,
glows, lights, thin lines -- effect-like artwork that does not carry the
eff naming convention. Consistent with the bit marking effect sprites by
authoring intent rather than by name, which is a description and not a
decode, and is labelled as such.

Names here come from the string immediately preceding each T8aD,
validated 17/18 on build 4 against the RATC child order; the single
mismatch is the known pteff04.t32 -> registered as 8AX case, so this is
the element (opt) name rather than the sprite's registered name. That
mismatch is itself an independent confirmation of the 8AX finding,
reached from the opposite direction.

METHOD: a pattern perfect on one screen can be near-chance on the disc;
and when an association survives a refuted implication, the
counterexamples are the finding.
2026-08-29 03:20:24 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
4ef0e30788 re(ui): kill two candidate meanings for the T8aD 0x02 bit, and fix attribution
The bit at +0x04 was recorded as a real field with its meaning "not
diagnosed", noting ptlogo_back2eff is 0x8830 "despite its name". That note
rested on a size match -- and its size is ambiguous, which is the trap
this corpus already records.

First, a sound attribution. T8aD headers appear in the bundle in RATC
CHILD ORDER, verified on GP_TITLE build 4 against an independent property
-- each header's decoded dimensions versus the dimensions the named child
should have: 18 of 18 match, 0 mismatches. Two of those eighteen share a
size (ptlogo_back2eff and ptlogo_back2eff5, both 1133x280), so a size-keyed
lookup cannot separate them; ordering can. Index 12 is back2eff5 (0x8832,
bit set), index 14 is back2eff (0x8830, bit clear). The documented
counterexample is real and correctly attributed -- now on evidence.

Two candidate meanings tested and refuted:

  bit <=> name contains "eff"        REFUTED: ptlogo_back2eff is an eff
                                     name with the bit clear. All 10
                                     bit-set sprites are eff names, so
                                     the implication holds one way only.
  bit <=> the element is transient   REFUTED: pteff03/pteff03a carry the
                                     bit and run to t=250, ramping to
                                     a=255 and holding.

Up close, the exception pair differs in two header words: +0x04
0x8832/0x8830 and +0x08 0x8083/0x8081 -- layer keys 32899 and 32897. They
are NOT duplicates: their alpha summaries agree to one decimal (4.5%
opaque, 86.7% clear, mean 19.3) but a pixel compare gives max abs diff 21.
Two renditions of one image at one size, which is why the summaries were
not trusted.

Still not diagnosed, and said so -- but the search space is two smaller
and the attribution beneath it is now sound.

METHOD: T8aD headers sit in child order, use that not the size; and
identical summary statistics are not identical data.
2026-08-29 03:14:40 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
f2ff24d9f6 re: the GPU trace is compiled out of the release build -- both my guesses wrong
Last iteration left two candidates for why trace_gpu_stream produced no
file: the CLI flag not reaching the cvar, or BeginTracing failing
silently. Neither. Following the code instead of guessing:

BeginTracing only sets trace_state_ = kStreaming ("Streaming starts on
the next primary buffer execute"). The file is opened later, in
ExecutePrimaryBuffer, inside

  #if XE_ENABLE_TRACE_WRITER_INSTRUMENTATION == 1

and trace_writer.h defines that as 0 under NDEBUG, 1 otherwise -- the
trace writer exists only in debug builds.

Confirmed against the binaries, with a control. The format string
"{:08X}_stream.xtr" lives only inside that guard:

  build/bin/Linux/Release/xenia_canary          0 occurrences
  build/bin/Linux/Debug/xenia_canary            1 occurrence
  /sylph-home/re/canary-build/.../Release/...   0   <- what run-canary uses

The debug binary is the control: it proves the test finds the string when
it is present, so the release zero means something.

So trace_gpu_stream is a no-op in this container's emulator -- the cvar
parses, BeginTracing runs, and nothing can open a file. The kill -9 was
not the cause either, though it would have destroyed a trace had one
existed.

The route exists but is not cheap: a debug build with the writer compiled
in sits at build/bin/Linux/Debug/xenia_canary, 253 MB against Release's
18 MB, so a much slower boot plus a trace of every GPU packet on a disk
at 95%. Recorded as available rather than attempted -- what it would
confirm, the DC_LUT write, is already a well-supported inference, and the
cost is out of proportion to the gain.

METHOD: a cvar existing does not mean the feature is compiled in; and
test a compile-time gate against the binary, with a control.
2026-08-29 03:08:57 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
7919ed90e2 re(ui): the gamma confound is refuted from source -- canary applies none of its own
I had parked the tone-curve finding behind "this may be the emulator, not
the game: canary applies kernel_display_gamma_type = 2 (BT.709) on
output", with a planned run setting it to 0 and re-fitting. Reading the
source kills both the confound and the experiment.

VdGetCurrentDisplayGamma_entry is a kStub GETTER the guest calls
(xboxkrnl_video.cc). Its own comment: "Used in D3D SetGammaRamp/
SetPWLGamma to adjust the ramp for the display." The cvar is a value
REPORTED TO THE GAME, which then builds its own ramp. Canary's role is
downstream: the guest writes DC_LUT, command_processor.cc reads it into
gamma_ramp_256_entry_table_, and the swap path applies it via
swap_apply_gamma_pipeline_layout with apply_gamma_table.ps /
apply_gamma_pwl.ps compiled in.

So there is no emulator-side BT.709 post-process to subtract, and any
gamma in a captured frame is a ramp the game installed.

What is NOT established, and the reach is stated: that this game installs
a ramp at all, or that the measured 1.34-1.49 is it. The run logs cannot
say -- kernel exports log at Debug and this harness masks Kernel logging
(log_mask = 13, per boot_menu.sh's own comment), so their silence is
guaranteed regardless of what the game did.

The planned experiment was wrong in design: changing the cvar changes
what the GUEST is told and therefore which ramp the GAME builds, so it
could never isolate a stage that does not exist -- and it perturbs the
capture harness, since skip_intro classifies movie-vs-static on an
absolute rmse threshold that a brighter frame biases. The right run
changes nothing about the output: LOG_MASK=12 LOG_LEVEL=3 and look for
the call and the DC_LUT writes.

Also for the port: the ramp depends on the display type the game is told,
and canary hard-codes TV/BT.709 where hardware uses a console setting. So
this is a display profile, not a fixed property of the game.

METHOD: read what a cvar does before building an experiment around it;
and an absence in a log is only evidence if the log would have shown it.
2026-08-29 02:44:30 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
6c4e5d3d71 re(ui): settle 8AX vs ptbase statically -- the game draws the full-res one
I had parked this as "needs a per-draw capture recording texture base
addresses". It did not. 8AX (1280x720) and ptbase (640x360 at 200%) are
the SAME artwork at two resolutions, which is exactly why comparing
either against a capture is inconclusive -- and why comparing their
DIFFERENCE is not. Compute 8AX - upscale(ptbase), the detail only 8AX
has, and ask whether the capture contains it.

Both candidates are first mapped into the capture's tone domain with the
measured gamma; without that the residual is dominated by the tone
difference and the test is blind.

  main menu  corr +0.0475   controls +0.0032 shift, -0.0075 flip   68% of ceiling
  title      corr +0.0634   controls +0.0095 shift, +0.0086 flip   68% of ceiling

Two independent screens, both at 68% of the theoretical ceiling
(sd of the 8AX-only detail over sd of the capture residual), 7-15x their
matched controls. The controls preserve spatial correlation and destroy
only alignment, so they are what "no signal" looks like.

So the recommendation changes: resolve the name and draw 8AX at 1:1.
Upscaling ptbase 2x is wrong, not merely softer. Still do not draw both --
an opaque layer over an identical one costs fill and hides later changes,
and ptbase's element is the one carrying the keyframes, so a consumer
needs its timing with 8AX's pixels.

Also recorded and withdrawn: a cruder pixel-pair test gave 0.00-0.72 for
upscales, 0.98 native and 1.01 for the capture -- apparently decisive.
Additive noise raises both terms of that ratio equally and drives any
value toward 1; fitting a noise term, both "native + noise" and "bilinear
+ noise" reproduce the observed numbers. The conclusion is right, that
test does not establish it, and it is in REFUTED because the number looks
conclusive and is not.

Not shown: whether ptbase is also drawn underneath. 8AX is ~86% opaque
and carries the same art, so it would hide it either way.
2026-08-29 02:40:53 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
3eba09aae0 re: the port was still being told SE audio is undecodable -- it is not
A resolve-check on HANDOFF's own rows. Q8 read "SE audio is undecodable
from the disc -- no XACT container exists anywhere". menu-audio-cues.md
retracted exactly that ("### Retracting 'cannot be extracted'") and
locates three cues in Static.slb that decode to PCM: d-pad move 0x1ec0
(4 packets), (B) back 0x0ec0 (2), (A) confirm 0x5d6c0 (6), all mono
48 kHz. The retraction landed in docs/re/ and the page the port reads
kept the superseded text -- the fourth time in this corpus.

Writing the rule down has not worked, so there is a tool now.
handoff_lint.py flags every HANDOFF line making a strong negative claim
that links a doc containing retraction language. First run: found the Q8
row, plus one benign false positive (Q3 links a doc whose retraction is
about a sprite count, not about the tie-break -- checked, and HANDOFF
repeats none of the retracted figures). The lint also caught its own bug
first: it reported existing docs as missing because it joined a guessed
repo root, so it now resolves links relative to the file as markdown does.

Separately, EXTRAS's paint-order risk narrows twice more. Of its 15 tied
pairs only 2 overlap, and of those, ptloop01 x ptloop02 are loop*
animations compose skips by default -- so exactly ONE tie can be drawn:
ptframe3 x ptframe4, overlapping 102x132 px. Against live-extras.png that
contested region correlates +0.9622, better than the whole frame (+0.9440)
and inside the range of regions where order cannot matter (+0.8502 /
+0.9903). Consistent with our order, not proof: correlation cannot see a
swap between locally similar art.

15 -> 2 -> 1 -> consistent is now the whole paint-order risk on the five
screens, and HANDOFF says so.
2026-08-29 02:31:37 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
9ff9e8e633 re(ui): the paint-order tie-break is undecodable from the bundle
Q3 was delivered as "decoded: a u16 layer key at +0x0A". The audit last
iteration showed the key does not fully order a screen -- elements
sharing a key are tied, and on the title that tie-break decides two total
occlusions. This searches for what breaks the tie, and closes it as a
negative with reach.

The game paints the five tied ptlogo_back2eff glows in the order
eff1, eff2, eff5, eff3, eff4. Three static structures were searched:

1. The declaration table. Entries 14-18 are byte-identical apart from the
   pivot, which is only half the sprite's own size.

2. The T8aD headers. All five carry identical +0x04 (0x8832) and
   identical +0x08/+0x0A (32899, the key itself), differing only in
   position and tile count. Searched exhaustively -- every offset
   0x00-0x7f, u8/u16/u32, ascending and descending:

     fields sorting to the MEASURED order:              0
     fields sorting to the DECLARATION order (control): 64

   The control is the point: 64 fields can be found that reproduce a
   known ordering, so the scan finds ordering fields when they exist. It
   finds none for the order the game uses.

3. The RATC child order -- a genuinely different permutation on other
   screens -- gives eff1..eff5 here, declaration order again.

All three static orderings give eff1..eff5; the game gives eff1,2,5,3,4.
That agrees with ui-screen-runtime's conclusion from the other direction:
the game builds a reordered child list at load time and paints that.

Q3 now reads honestly: the layer key is decoded and orders 4 of the 5
measured bundles exactly; the tie-break within a key is undecodable, and
a consumer must use a measured order or accept declaration index as an
arbitrary stand-in. The port's exposure remains 2 overlapping tied pairs
on EXTRAS.

METHOD: an exhaustive field search needs a positive control, or "found
nothing" is worthless.
2026-08-29 02:26:19 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
801a9116c4 re: the fast probe stalls -- its own dense negatives are withdrawn
Cross-checked the instrument built last iteration against an independent
grabber while both watched the same screen, and it fails.

A single long-lived ffmpeg x11grab stream degrades and then freezes:

  862 frames in 540.1 s = 1.60 fps        (it starts at 3.98)
  t=450/480/510/540 s: surface mean 5.21, identical every time

At that same moment `import` read surface mean 125.65, and a freshly
started ffmpeg stream read 122.43 -- agreeing with import to 3%. So the
acquisition was broken, not the analysis: the stream replayed a stale
frame while the screen was 24x brighter.

That withdraws last iteration's headline. "2391 frames over 600 s from
t=0, max glyph 0" cannot distinguish "the title never appeared" from "the
stream froze early and repeated one frame 2391 times". Its 3.98 fps was
measured over the first 20 s, before the degradation. Sample count is not
coverage unless the samples are known independent.

Fixed: the stream is now torn down and restarted every 30 s. Startup is
~0.3 s, cheap against the title's window, and it guarantees live frames.

Separately, the cache hypothesis was tested and is SUPPORTED. cache,
cache0, cache1, cache_host moved aside (to /tmp/xenia-cache-aside, not
deleted) and the surface renders again: import reads mean 54.8 and 68.6
with 100% non-black warm content, against 0.07 and 0.08% non-black in the
black run; 773 of 862 probe frames had >2% non-black. One run each side
and many kill -9s before the black one, so it is supported, not proven --
the old caches are kept for reproduction.

Still no title, but that number now comes from a stalling probe and
establishes nothing either way.

METHOD: validating a probe on static images tests its analysis, not its
acquisition -- cross-check against an independent grabber during a run.
2026-08-29 02:01:47 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
8f07819b02 re: the game surface is rendering BLACK -- check that before explaining absences
The named experiment was to attach the fast probe at t=0 so the boot
title could not be missed. Done, default config, English:

  2391 frames in 600.4 s = 3.98 fps; max glyph 0; hits 0

Ten minutes sampled four times a second FROM LAUNCH, no green-(A) glyph.
So "the plate only shows in an early boot window I keep missing" is mine
and refuted -- the third explanation refuted in three iterations.

Then the check that should have come first. Splitting the raw root grab
into bands:

  y   0- 44 (GTK menu bar)   100.00% non-black   mean 210.50
  y  45-719 (game surface)     0.08% non-black   mean   0.07

The game is rendering black, reproducibly across back-to-back samples,
while the guest is alive and polling input (XamInputGetKeystrokeEx past
1201 calls) and MEM-WATCH keeps reporting. The crop and every pixel
oracle were correct; there was nothing on the surface to detect.

What this does NOT do is retroactively explain the earlier failures, and
claiming so would be the fourth over-reach in a row. Those runs had
content: run 2 sampled mean 33.1, run 3's classifier measured real
frame-to-frame rmse, the gamma_type=0 run measured mean 122.8. The
failure mode CHANGED over the session; black is the newest and worst.

Hypothesis for the regression, untested: canary's shader/pipeline cache
is 47 MB and was last written 23:49 on Aug 28, during the failed runs,
and this session has kill -9'd the emulator repeatedly. The test is to
move cache* aside and boot again -- one line and one run, not done.

Two METHOD lines: ask whether the screen is drawing anything before
explaining why a feature of it is missing; and a newly found fault does
not retroactively explain older failures.
2026-08-29 01:49:42 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
e492cee8b9 re: build the fast probe -- and it refutes the diagnosis that motivated it
Last iteration I blamed four failed runs on the probe sampling every
~41 s, slower than the title screen lasts, and withdrew three earlier
conclusions on that basis. Building the fix tested the claim and killed
it.

The speedup is real and control-verified. One long-lived ffmpeg x11grab
stream, raw RGB, glyph counted in numpy -- no per-sample process startup,
no PNG encode, no convert -crop:

  wrapper `screenshot`            3.98 s per sample (emulator running)
  import -window root -> PPM      1.20 s
  long-lived x11grab stream       0.29 s          13.7x

The counter is byte-identical to is_title.py: 753 on the committed title
capture, 327 on the main menu.

Pointed at a running game it says the opposite of what I expected:

  332 frames in  85.3 s = 3.89 fps; max glyph 0
  1674 frames in 420.0 s = 3.99 fps; max glyph 0

1674 consecutive samples over seven unbroken minutes, four per second,
zero green-(A) pixels. Sampling rate was a real defect that happened not
to be the cause.

So "neither locale reaches the interactive title without a pad press" --
withdrawn last iteration for want of evidence -- is reinstated, now as a
dense measurement, with its reach stated: a MID-RUN window only, silent
about the boot title.

Leading hypothesis, unconfirmed: the PRESS (A) plate appears only in the
boot title window and the attract loop's title carries none, which is
exactly what title_states_capture.sh was written to test. The experiment
is to start the fast probe from t=0 rather than attach to a run already
in progress.

METHOD: fixing the instrument is how you test the explanation that blamed
it -- a plausible mechanism is a hypothesis, and the fix is its
experiment, not its proof.
2026-08-29 01:34:40 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
924d4953d5 re: the boot harness was blinking slower than the title -- diagnosed
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.
2026-08-29 01:18:05 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
105ed4d3e2 re: the English control removes the locale from the title-capture problem
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.
2026-08-29 00:35:49 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
23f12a3710 re: fix wait_title.sh's stale oracle; the JP title still is not reached
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.
2026-08-29 00:21:44 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
948273883f re: the JP-locale capture is not blocked -- I stopped one grep too early
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.
2026-08-29 00:05:58 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
d6a24f40f7 re(ui): scale 0 means collapsed, not "unset" -- stop drawing it full size
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.
2026-08-28 23:38:37 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
786ca36c97 re(ui): size the rest() guess disc-wide, and refute my own proposed fix
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.
2026-08-28 23:23:55 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
c65c564ac9 re(ui): withdraw the render evidence -- rest()'s dwell fallback is unsound
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).
2026-08-28 23:10:41 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
d18a99a055 re(ui): the keyframe-time shift is favoured 26x by timing, rejected by a render
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.
2026-08-28 23:03:55 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
8c1a5669b8 re(ui): Q1 -- the interpolation law holds, the group timeline does not
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.
2026-08-28 22:56:17 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
f5097779e4 re(ui): rotation is not nested-only, and the pivot-anchored scale is measured
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.
2026-08-28 22:46:44 +00:00
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
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
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
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