A human played the port on real hardware for the first time (2026-09-01) and
found four things. Two were port defects, fixed. Two are open and are now both
agents' focus: the PRESS (A) plate arrives late, and the splash fade/blur is
weaker than the game's.
Their verdict on method is the reason this is a brief change and not a ticket:
"the agents were essentially guessing and trying to copy what one would see,
but while they did get close it still is not quite right"
Close-but-not-right is the signature of reproducing APPEARANCE instead of
deriving MECHANISM. So the Decoder's focus block asks, in order: is there a
post-process pass at all, what is it, where do its parameters come from -- and
only then what curve. Both routes, dynamic (GPU state, shader constants, render
targets; add logging to Canary, it is theirs read-write) and static (.pe, the
DB, the paks), with each fact labelled by which produced it.
TEMPORAL-VERIFICATION.md is the other half, and it generalises past the
splashes. We have been photographing the game at time t, and t is never the
same twice: emulator speed varies with host load, Canary presents at ~28.1 fps,
the capture path costs a variable 0.1-10.8 s, and a long-lived x11grab stream
degrades and then freezes. The register already carries FOUR refutations of
exactly this shape. The replacement rule: record a film, not a photograph;
align by CONTENT, not by clock, and report the lag as a measurement rather than
minimising it away; prefer ordering, counts, durations and shape over any value
at a wall-clock instant; anchor on an event; report achieved fps against
requested fps.
Also into both briefs: the input set. The port had no joypad binding for (A) or
(B) and nobody noticed for a whole milestone, because --script sends
InputEventAction, which BYPASSES the input map -- so every check asserted the
code below the map and nothing about the map. The Decoder is asked to DECODE
the full set the game reads rather than discover it by pressing buttons; the
Port is told input is verified at the device level or not at all.
And both briefs now point at the R1 register reclassification, because two of
the ten re-opened entries land on this focus: "the declared keyframe timeline
reproduces the captured splash" is 🟡 our-reader, and the rest() pair is open
in BOTH directions -- while the two splashes are the only screens that reach
that fallback.
