Commit Graph

163 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
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
c364cde476 re: sweep the disc for the ordinal foot-gun -- GP_TITLE was the mildest case
Last iteration I retracted three claims because `--build 10/11` on GP_TITLE are
entries 12/15, and named the untested remainder in my own report: how much else
in the corpus used a build ordinal as an entry index. This is that sweep.

`screen --build N` indexes a predicate-filtered list, so every rejected entry
shifts every later ordinal. Disc-wide: 21 of 24 build-bearing archives diverge,
18 of them at ordinal 0 -- `--build 0` is entry 108 in each GP_MAIN_GAME_*2D,
24/26 in GP_HANGAR_ARSENAL/GP_READY_ROOM. GP_TITLE is the ONLY archive whose
first ten ordinals are the identity, which is the sole reason 207 of the
corpus's 226 build citations are safe. Second foot-gun: `--all` swaps the
predicate and renumbers 18 archives, so `--build N` and `--build N --all` are
not the same object.

The instrument failed its control first. A version using parse_build as the
predicate reported GP_TITLE as 16 builds, ordinal == entry throughout -- it
would have certified the exact bug it was built to find. The shipped version
uses the same predicates screen_builds() uses and reproduces `screen list` on
GP_TITLE exactly.

Audited all 226 citations. One real defect: a five-row table in
ui-keyframe-time-unit.md headed "declared element (build 11)" spans builds 10
and 11 -- palogo_sqex is in 10. All five placements re-verified and correct, so
the linear-ramp measurement is untouched; only the label was wrong. Fixed with a
per-row bundle column. GP_DIALOG --build 0 and GP_DEBRIEFING_PILOTLOG --build 10
re-run and reproduce.

Refutation attempted: sylpheed-port's corrected mid-ramp test rests on
ptlogo_all_eff holding a=127 from t=112 to t=246. Their quote is exact and it is
a plateau. The refutation fails; their correction stands.

METHOD already carried the rule I broke, and ui-splash-addressing already said
the splashes need --all. The failure was not missing knowledge -- it was
addressing a bundle by index without grepping for the index first.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2026-08-30 13:20:41 +00:00
sylph-decoder
dc0b84c87f handoff+index: a .tbm draws, and screen render omits it silently
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2026-08-30 10:53:57 +00:00
sylph-decoder
3c004845fa re: the PRESS A plate PULSES -- measured, and it keeps an authored entry
Answers the port's ask #1, which it had flagged as the only one of its four
that could delete an authored entry rather than confirm one. It confirms one.

Held at the title with no input, the plate oscillates continuously: two windows
in one boot, 58 s and 57 s, ~23 cycles each, no decay. Periods 2.530 and 2.540 s
by upward mid-crossings -- 0.4 % apart.

It never goes off. The plate-absent floor is 159 green pixels, measured on the
committed live-title-build4-no-plate.png; the pulse bottoms at 714, 4.5x that.
So the port's 'flash and nothing after', reasoned from ptbtn00 expiring at
t=244, is wrong on the boot's end state -- ptbtn00f's 120-unit cycle is what
runs.

Instrument controls were run before it was pointed at anything unknown: the
glyph counter reproduces the documented 753 on live-title-press-a.png and 327 on
live-main-menu.png exactly.

Two estimators, and only one replicates. Mid-crossings agree across the two
windows to 0.4 %; a single-sinusoid least-squares fit does not (2.553 vs 2.413),
because the waveform is fast-rise/slow-decay rather than sinusoidal -- its own r2
of 0.468 and 0.228 is the tell. Both were controlled on synthetic sinusoids at
2.24/2.55/3.10 s laid on the ACTUAL timestamps and recovered every one exactly,
so neither is broken; one is misspecified. Recorded as such.

The wall-clock is 13 % longer than the corpus's earlier 2.24 s mean. Same
declared 120 units, different emulator pacing (x1.27 here against x1.12), so
this corroborates 'author the units' rather than disturbing it.

Reach stated: one boot; does not distinguish the boot title from an attract-loop
title; and the glyph count is a thresholded pixel count, so 714/1520 is not an
alpha ratio and no duty cycle can be read off it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2026-08-30 07:37:49 +00:00
sylph-decoder
e94e203a71 re: the A-press fault is SOLVED -- Xenia swallows input, the guest pump is unbounded
The 326 MB log from the failing run was still on disk, so this needed no
emulator time at all.

Mechanism: Xenia's XamInputGetKeystrokeEx returns X_ERROR_SUCCESS with a zeroed
keystroke on every call while a XAM dialog is up (xam_input.cc:197, upstream
Canary). The game's keystroke pump -- sub_82457038, read out of the image -- is
an unbounded 'while (GetKeystrokeEx() == SUCCESS) queue.push_back()'. It queued
8 388 608 empty keystrokes, grew its vector to 64 MB, asked for 128 MB, got a
failed allocation back unchecked, and copied off the top of the guest stack.

Two independent instruments agree to within 7: the Canary counter's last report
before the crash says 8 388 601 swallowed calls; the crash dump's r29 says the
vector held 8 388 608. The reporting granularity is 600.

Retracts this page's own 'r9 is a wild pointer above 4 GB'. Xenia prints
si_addr, a host address; the guest is mapped at 0x100000000, so the fault
address is guest 0x701D0000 -- which is exactly r9 in the register dump.

Also refutes nothing of the port's, but answers its ask #3: the two press-a
captures are different frames (40.84 % of the band's pixels differ at the
best alignment, which has a sharp minimum), so its 0.301 % is not an
instrument floor.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2026-08-30 06:44:49 +00:00
sylph-decoder
6d7bc87b0f re: diagnose the A-press fault -- a wild pointer, and a third failure mode
The blocker on all menu-side dynamic RE in this container, measured over four
runs and traced to an instruction.

A single A press on the title produces a Xenia CRASH DUMP with PC 0x824578A0 and
"Access Violation: write at 0x00000001701D0000", repeating 32 356 times and
writing 326 MB of register dump in about ten seconds. Four A runs faulted; four
no-input runs in the same sessions completed.

REFUTED, my own hypothesis: it is not an unimplemented instruction. The config
carries break_on_unimplemented_instructions = true and Xenia's own message reads
"to skip, disable break_on_unimplemented_instructions", so the flag looked like
the fix. Booting with it false faults identically, and no "Unimplemented instr"
line is ever logged on stdout or stderr in any run -- and since that path emits
its XELOGE BEFORE the guarded DebugBreak, the absence rules the mechanism out
rather than leaving it open. The dump comes from Emulator::ExceptionCallback, a
genuine guest exception.

The instruction, read from the image rather than the database: b0c90000 is
sth r6, 0(r9), the first of four halfword stores at offsets 0/2/4/6 through r9
inside a bne- loop -- code filling an array of 8-byte records with four u16
fields each. So r9 is a wild pointer, and 0x1701D0000 is above 4 GB, outside the
guest's 32-bit address space entirely: not a null dereference and not a small
overrun, but a base that was never a guest address. The database agrees on the
containing function, sub_82457780 at +0x120.

It is a THIRD failure mode. Not the cache-flush crash at 0x82307128, and not the
loader stall documented in canary-scripted-input-traps.md, which logs ZERO crash
dumps. Unlike the stall it reproduced 4 of 4, so that page's "retry whole boots"
does not obviously apply. It does not explain how Q4 and Q5 pressed A
successfully; what differs between those runs and these has not been found.

frame_clock.sh's 300 MB guard killed the run as designed -- the session log's
"EMULATOR GONE at 56s" is the guard, not the crash.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 22:17:45 +00:00
sylph-decoder
29c99e1b3e re: primitive blend mode -- undecodable with reach, and no longer a risk
Looked in four places. The bundle has no field: a primitive has no RATC child at
all and the declaration words are constant across every element of three measured
screens -- the two grounds ui-prm-primitives.md already used to refute a
bundle-side LAYER key, and they apply identically to blend.

The colour census: every full-screen *eff00* primitive on the disc carries pure
black at its various alphas, and the only non-black primitive anywhere is
pbafc.prm, RGB 00e8e0 cyan.

The occlusion constraint cannot reach that one. pbafc.prm looked alarming at a
declared 844x600 and alpha ff; it is a small moving glint. It strobes between
alpha 255 and 124 every 2 units, travels from x=178 to x=291, and is scaled
2%x3%, so it draws about 17x18 pixels. At that size it occludes essentially
nothing.

The oracle is unavailable: GP_READY_ROOM is a recorded no-go and gameplay needs
the A press that faults the guest in this container.

But the consequence closes even though the question does not. For a BLACK quad
-- which is every primitive forced_backdrop touches -- the hypotheses differ only
in whether it hides what is beneath. Drawn first it is correct under both; drawn
last it is correct only under additive. So the rule's verdict is robust to the
open question, and the port's original "layerless sorts last" was wrong under
alpha-over and merely pointless under additive. This is explicitly NOT evidence
for alpha-over.

The investigation also found forced_backdrop judging coverage from the pivot
alone, ignoring scale -- pbafc.prm is the disc's own proof that a nominally
844x600 element can draw at 2%. Checked before changing anything: all 80 forced
instances are at scale 100% on every opaque instant, so no verdict moved. The
guard now requires scale >= 100 at the instants it counts as opaque. Defensive,
not a fix. 4 + 13 disc tests green either side.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 21:58:25 +00:00
sylph-decoder
1f6e07598e re: the primitive colour census -- and it refutes 38 of my own 80 forced verdicts
A disc-wide census of the ARGB that keyless elements carry.

Every full-screen *eff00* PRIMITIVE is pure black at its various alphas
(ff000000, 7f000000, 40000000, b2000000, cc000000, d4000000, 00000000). Black at
alpha a over content is exactly an alpha-over dim or fade, and an additive black
quad would be a no-op nobody would author -- so this narrows the open blend
question a long way. The only non-black primitive on the disc is pbafc.prm, RGB
00e8e0 cyan at alphas up to ff, and it is 844x600, NOT full-screen, so it sits
outside forced_backdrop's geometry guard. It is now the sole additive candidate.

The census also refutes my own argument for nearly half its verdicts. Of the 80
forced-first instances only 42 are .prm; 38 are .tbm carrying fade ffffffff. A
SOLID white quad at alpha 255 painted first would make the screen white, and no
screen is white -- so a .tbm is a white modulation on a texture, and element
alpha does not establish its coverage.

That is the .t32 error one file extension further out. I guarded that with
el.sprite.is_some(), which fixed the symptom and not the cause: an element's
alpha is not its texture's opacity, and only an untextured primitive makes the
two the same fact.

So 42 verdicts stay decoded and 38 drop to inferred -- still almost certainly
right, since all are named *base*, all are full-screen, and pfbase.tbm's first
position is measured in the running game, but that is a name-and-role argument
which this page elsewhere calls the weaker kind.

The code is deliberately unchanged. Restricting forced_backdrop to .prm would
send eleven screens' backgrounds back to u32::MAX -- last -- which is the
blank-screen bug the rule was written to fix. Downgrading the status is honest;
reverting the position would be wrong. The 42/38 split is pinned by a test so
anyone tightening the rule sees what it costs.

Separately, on the port's black_hold_units ask: four more no-input boots yielded
one usable log, which armed late and missed the publisher splash, so the sample
is still two runs spanning 3 and 4 frames. Their 6.5-9.2 range stands. And a
reason it may not be resolvable this way: the draw log DROPS frame numbers -- in
the 3-frame run, frames 121 and 124 are absent entirely, so "frames with no
sprite" and "span of frame numbers" are different quantities.

Their statistical correction is taken: at n=3 the sample SD (3.893) is the
estimator, not the population SD (3.179), making my run 1.88 sigma from the
corpus mean rather than 2.31.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 21:51:06 +00:00
sylph-decoder
acaacc36e0 re: the boot splash dwells are declared -- and wall clock is the wrong unit
The port asked for two wall-clock timestamps across the boot splashes. Measured,
and the measurement's own result is that timestamps are not the invariant.

The dwells are the bundles' own declared timelines: publisher t=0..255 = 4.250 s
at 60 units/s, developer t=0..210 = 3.500 s. The corpus's independent screenshot
timing over three cold boots gives 4.30/4.60/4.37 and 3.51/3.50/3.37 -- the
developer agreeing to 1.1%, two of its three runs to 0.3%.

A fresh no-input boot with a frame->wall-clock map puts the same two dwells at
5.10-5.61 s and 3.83-4.30 s, 15-20% longer than both the declared values and the
corpus's runs, on the same disc and the same declared timeline. So the
wall-clock dwell is an emulator-pacing artefact that varies run to run, and a
port authoring seconds is authoring one run's pacing.

Boundaries from the draw stream, read per quad: publisher glow frame 1, wordmark
6-119, three frames with NO sprite drawn, developer glows 123, wordmarks
140-209, intro video 216. The 3-frame gap replicates the earlier 4-frame
measurement within the +-1 both are quantised to.

New tool frame_clock.sh, and its limitation found by its own control: it
resolves to one BUFFER FLUSH, not one frame. The capture writes through a C++
ofstream, so tail sees the log in bursts -- 69 of 125 samples showed no advance
and the rest jumped 7-15 frames. Naive interpolation inside a burst made the
apparent rate swing between 0.0164 and 0.0316 s/frame, which is the flush and
not the guest. Frames 119 and 123 fall in one burst, so the inter-splash gap is
not separable by this clock at all. Everything is quoted as brackets and the
point estimates were withdrawn before being reported.

palogo_anima never appears in the log and is NOT reported as undrawn: the
developer bundle batches 7 elements into one draw and only the first two quads
are logged. That is the trap that produced the eff3 false negative, so it is
named rather than claimed.

Also records the port's correction: ptcopyright has 105 instants with alpha >= 1
(t=139..243) against 105.89 units of span; I had quoted the rounded span.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 21:29:06 +00:00
sylph-decoder
78328c5022 re: the top-level clock freezes at the settle point -- closing the 114-vs-120 gap
Measured in the title draw capture, re-read with the per-quad parser.

GP_TITLE build 4 declares t = 0..269, about 120 presented frames at this run's
pacing. The title dwell lasted ~1100. ptcopyright declares alpha >= 1 for 106
units (t=138..244) and is drawn for 1050 frames; ptlogo1 declares an exit at
t=264 and is drawn for 1095. Both vanish within three frames of the dwell
ending.

So the top-level clock advances through the build-in, stops inside the settle
window [160,236], and holds. The exit ramp is not played on a timer -- it plays
when something makes the screen leave. That is ui-settle-time.md's decode seen
from the other side and observed in the running game rather than inferred from
the file. A nested record keeps looping on its own clock throughout.

This closes the 114-vs-120 gap, and it was my arithmetic rather than a
discrepancy in the decode. The 2.231 units/frame was regressed over BUILD-IN
events -- the only stretch in which the top-level clock advances -- and applied
to a period measured over the settled dwell, where that clock is frozen and
only the plate's own record is running. Two different clocks. The declared 120
was never in doubt from the calibration-free dark-fraction test.

The 51.158-frame period is now confirmed by a second independent estimator:
autocorrelation returns lag 51 with clean harmonics at 102 and 154. Its FIRST
version failed its control, returning 48 for a period known to be 51.158,
because it indexed by sample position where the log's frame numbers have gaps.
Recorded, because the failure is the reason the second version can be trusted.

Not settled: the sweeps' period. The same validated estimator disagrees between
two dwells of one screen -- 515 vs 452 frames for the same family -- and a 14%
disagreement within one screen is not a period. The +0x08 field cannot settle
it either, since ptloop01/ptloop02 have zero slack.

Blocker recorded in CONTAINER-NOTES: a single A press on the title faults the
guest. Three menu-capture attempts, two ending in register dumps of 223 MB and
519 MB, against three no-input runs in the same session that all completed. And
a guest fault writes an UNBOUNDED register dump to stdout on a filesystem at
91%, so any scripted button press needs a size guard.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 21:21:27 +00:00
sylph-decoder
cf91ad1dcc re: the forced-backdrop span -- 256 vs 211 is a bundle mismatch, and the hold
decides 55% of verdicts

The port implemented the forced-backdrop rule and reported a discrepancy:
palogo_eff0.prm at 256 opaque instants against this corpus's 211.

There is no discrepancy. palogo_eff0.prm appears on BOTH splashes -- the
publisher (entries 10, 13) runs to t=255, giving 256 instants; the developer
(11, 14) runs to t=210, giving 211. Same definition, different bundle. The page
now names the entries so it cannot recur.

The definition, stated: the span is 0..=max keyframe time over every element in
the build, and an element HOLDS its final pose past its own last keyframe --
which is what pose_at does, and which is decoded rather than assumed (a group
holds at its last keyframe rather than looping; the declared +0x08 never falls
short of the last keyframe, the slack being that hold).

The port's instinct that the hold was load-bearing was right. Over the 130
keyless full-screen primitives with an opaque interval:

  * span = the header's declared +0x08          ->  0 verdicts change
  * span = the primitive's own last keyframe    -> 72 change
  * elements GONE after their last keyframe     -> 72 change

So the hold decides 55% of verdicts -- and dropping it is REFUTED by a measured
order. palogo_eff0.prm is a single keyframe at t=0: without the hold it is
opaque for one instant, no other element is up yet, and the rule calls it free,
against a game measured painting it first. Pinned by a new test that spells out
the counterfactual rather than importing it.

The verdicts that matter are convention-independent: pgloading_eff00.prm is
FIRST under all four conventions and pteff00.prm FREE under all four. And the
header length is interchangeable with the elements' maximum -- zero
disagreements disc-wide.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 21:14:58 +00:00
sylph-decoder
cfcda5501c formats: a keyless primitive that would hide the screen is forced to paint first
Partly closes ui-prm-primitives.md's standing blocker, "where an UNMEASURED
primitive paints". Raised by the port: build_12/build_15 composite to solid
black at every instant of their declared life, because pgloading_eff00.prm -- a
full-screen opaque quad -- sorts last.

The rule is a constraint read off the file, not a preference: an element that
covers the screen and is fully opaque at some instant cannot paint above
anything visible at that instant. Where the elements visible during its opaque
span are ALL of them, its position is forced to first.

pgloading_eff00.prm is opaque for 39 instants and all 9 other elements are
visible inside that span -> forced first, 4/4 instances.

Two controls, both measured orders from the running game, and the rule has to
survive both:

  * palogo_eff0.prm is measured painting FIRST -- opaque 211 instants, forced
    below 6 of 6. It is NAMED like an overlay, so a name-based rule sorts it
    wrong against a measured order. Occlusion gets it right.
  * pteff00.prm is measured painting LAST -- opaque for 2 instants at its
    screen's entry and exit, forced below only 3 of 23, so the constraint
    permits it on top where it belongs.

Disc-wide: 80 instances forced first, 50 constrained but not forced, 0
unconstrained. The split runs almost exactly along the names -- every *base* is
forced, every *eff00* is not -- with three families crossing it, which is
exactly why the name is not the rule.

It also explains 36 builds the corpus had recorded as "coming out one colour"
with no cause: pzeff00.prm is forced first in 32 of 32 instances, so they were
wiped by our own sort rather than by the game.

The rule's real limit was found by its own disc-wide test failing. Applied to
any element it claimed 22 .t32 SPRITES must sort first against their own layer
keys -- pneff01.t32 (key 0xd850, #8 of 13) and pbfriendly.t32 (0x9230, #17 of
49). A sprite's ELEMENT alpha says nothing about whether its TEXTURE covers the
screen, so forced_backdrop is now restricted to untextured primitives, which is
also the only case derived_paint_order consults it for.

Reach stated: assumes straight alpha-over (blend mode is still open, and an
additive quad at alpha 255 would not occlude); it is a lower bound, not an
ordering; and there is no new oracle measurement -- both controls are prior
ones, and a loading screen is not reachable from the title path.

3 new disc tests; the 13 paint-order tests are green, including
the_derived_order_matches_the_measured_ones_up_to_ties.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 21:02:17 +00:00
sylph-decoder
47faeaa7a9 re: RETRACT "the game never draws eff3" -- a batched draw merged two quads
The console draws all five title flashes. My claim that ptlogo_back2eff3 is
never drawn was an instrument artefact, and I had reported it to the port with
three alternative explanations "ruled out".

A GPU draw can batch several quads -- indices=4 is one, indices=8 two,
indices=24 six -- and the UI draw log dumps only the first 8 vertices. Taking
min/max over a line's whole vertex list merges quads into one box.

eff3 is batched with eff4, and because the wipe family is right-aligned, eff3
(788..1196) lies ENTIRELY INSIDE eff4 (447..1196). The union is exactly eff4's
own extent, so the merged box matched eff4 to 1 px, eff3 vanished, and nothing
looked wrong.

Parsed per quad, all five fire in both title entries in the declared stagger:
eff1 130-131, eff2 133, eff3 133-134, eff4 133-135, eff/eff5 134+, back2 136+;
and 5953-5955 / 5955-5957 / 5957-5958 / 5957-5959 / 5958+ / 5962+ in entry 2.
Frames 133 and 134 are t=60.1 and 62.3, inside eff3's declared t in (58,64).

Also retracts "the developer splash is one composited quad" -- the same bug,
which the port refuted by arithmetic first (a 259-tall box cannot contain three
logos spanning y 164..585). It draws three logos and three glows as separate
quads in one indices=24 call; the 525x259 was gamearts_eff merged with
seta_eff. The 9-unit black hold is unaffected: those glows are the developer
splash's first draw.

The three "ruled out" explanations were all aimed at the wrong failure. In
particular the invisible-draw check counted draws with NO geometry line, when
the hiding place was draws with PARTIAL geometry. Refuting three wrong
hypotheses is not evidence for a fourth, and a list of failure modes written by
whoever built the instrument is the least likely to contain its blind spot.
Recorded in METHOD.md, along with the tell that was present and explained away:
a merged box carries the first quad's colour, which made one element's alpha
read 255/127/254 on consecutive frames.

New tool: tools/re-capture/quads_per_frame.py parses vertices in groups of four
and warns when the logged quad count falls short of indices/4.

Also guards a double-A-tap in ui_draw_capture.sh: the movie branch ignored that
TARGET=menu had already tapped, so a run tapped A on the title at t=23s and
again at t=27s on the transition; the guest faulted and Xenia dumped registers
to stdout until the file reached 519 MB.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 20:49:27 +00:00
sylph-decoder
1a2f4fdc2d re: the boot splash black gap is ~9 units, measured in draws not luminance
The port found its boot had no black frame between the publisher and developer
splashes and authored 12 units by analogy with the menus' transition quad. On
the boot path that analogy has nothing behind it -- palogo_eff0.prm is a single
static keyframe, so the splash bundles declare no fade quad.

I had agreed with the dismissal that hid the defect: told the residual was
0.03 s against a bound built from two measured ranges plus jitter slack, I said
it said more about the bound than the game. The real gap was 0.2 s.

Measured in the draw stream, which separates true black from a fade tail where
luminance cannot: palogo_sqex is drawn to frame 125 at alpha 7, frames 126-129
submit NO sprite quad at all, and the developer fades in at frame 130 from
alpha 34. Four presented frames, the only such run in the sequence.

Converted with the disc as its own clock rather than a frame rate -- this run
presented at 13.1 fps against 28 elsewhere -- palogo_sqex declares alpha >= 1
for 239.8 units and is drawn in 105 frames, giving 2.284 units per presented
frame, which the title capture independently corroborates at 2.231. So the gap
is ~9.1 units (0.152 s), against the 12 authored; +-1 frame is 6.9-11.4. And
the true black is SHORTER, since both boundary frames still carry picture.

Second finding: the developer splash is ONE composited 525x259 quad at the
bounding box of its three declared logos, none of whose individual sizes is
ever submitted. That is why an earlier pass reported "developer splash: 0
frames".

Declaration sites ruled out: the splash bundles (no fade quad) and the
top-level +0x08 (a family constant, 300/60, slack 12-226 units). The
executable is NOT looked at and is named as the next place rather than
claimed.

Also answers the port's sweep question: +0x08 canNOT settle it, because
ptloop01/ptloop02 have zero slack and a zero-slack record cannot distinguish
"loops" from "runs once and stops". The oracle settles it for the TITLE -- the
sweep oscillates over its whole range and resets hard to the same start, once
in dwell 1 and twice in dwell 2, so it does not park. The MENU is unmeasured
and stays open.

Tooling: GRACE and NOTAP knobs for ui_draw_capture.sh. The script taps A on
"the screen changed a lot", which is also true of a fading splash -- a first
run tapped through the publisher and the developer never appeared. The
instrument was perturbing what it measured.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 20:36:15 +00:00
sylph-decoder
69bc4cd1cd re: the game never draws ptlogo_back2eff3 -- reproduced, with three explanations
ruled out

Last iteration I recorded eff3's absence as unexplained after withdrawing a bad
explanation for it. The previous capture survived on disk with 6907 frames, and
the attract loop returns to the title, so it contains a SECOND build-in at
frames 5942..7025. eff3 is absent there too.

Three alternative explanations tested and failed:

  * sampling phase -- eff3 is non-zero for t in (58,64), SIX units, against a
    2.23-unit step. A window wider than the step cannot be missed; frames 133
    (t=60.1) and 134 (t=62.3) sit inside it and draw eff2 and eff4 instead.
  * a draw the log cannot see -- exactly 2 draws per frame carry no geometry,
    on all 932 settled title frames, always the same full-screen-triangle
    shader, and present on frames where no wipe element is active.
  * a bad position guess -- dropping position entirely, ZERO quads anywhere on
    screen in either build-in window have a width within +-30 of 408. The width
    spectrum jumps straight from 262 to 748.

Draw counts across both entries: eff1 4, eff2 3, eff3 0, eff4 6, against ~5
expected each. The four are a right-aligned wipe (938+258, 788+408, 447+749,
64+1133, all ending at x~1196) -- a left-growing reveal in four widths, of
which the game draws three.

Why is NOT established: nothing in eff3's element record differs from its
neighbours. Classified measured, not decoded, and the port is told that
dropping eff3 means authoring a behaviour I cannot derive from the file.

Two further corrections, both to my own earlier claims:

  * "frame 107 is the title composited once" was an over-read. It binds NO
    texture and only 4 of its 27 draws log geometry. The second title entry
    has no such frame.
  * the two build-ins are NOT frame-identical. I had that from a coincidentally
    aligned pair of rows; aligned properly only 4 of 46 frames match. They are
    the same animation at different sampling phases -- which is precisely what
    makes the eff3 result robust.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 20:19:04 +00:00
sylph-decoder
311bd16ad8 re: withdraw the eff3 explanation and the flash advice; add a calibration-free
test that refutes 105

Two claims shipped this morning are withdrawn, and the port had already acted
on one of them.

WITHDRAWN 1: "eff3 was never drawn because a 2-unit flash peak is sub-frame."
eff3's alpha is non-zero for t in (58,64), and the capture's frames 133 and 134
sit at t = 60.0 and 62.2 -- squarely inside that window, with eff2 and eff4
both drawn in the same frames. It should have been submitted and was not. The
absence is real and UNEXPLAINED; it is not sampling phase.

WITHDRAWN 2: "a port drawing all five flashes shows more sweep than the
console". No evidence behind it. The port checked against its own renderer and
found it draws them sequentially at their declared times, never more than two
at once -- which is exactly what frames 131-135 show the game doing. The
pile-up worth warning about was the rest() bug, now fixed.

Kept, at the port's request: a frame-by-frame comparison of the build-in WILL
disagree about which flash lands in which frame -- 2 units per submitted frame
against this run's 2.231 units per presented frame -- and neither side is
wrong. Without that stated, the discrepancy reads as a port defect.

Added, and stronger than the argument it replaces: a calibration-free test of
105 vs 120. The glow's draw is omitted when its alpha reaches zero, and the
smallest alpha actually submitted across 807 drawn frames is 1, so the culling
threshold is read off the data rather than assumed. Measured dark fraction
17.7% (173 of 980 settled frames); a 120-unit cycle with its declared 15-unit
hold predicts 14.4%; a 105-unit cycle predicts 2.2%. 105 is out by 8x and
would need a threshold of alpha 11 out of a peak of 80, while the capture
contains submitted draws at alpha 1..12. No frame rate, no pacing factor, no
wall clock.

Also recorded: a regression of five build-in events against their declared
times (residuals <=0.9 frames) recovers t=0 at frame 106.1 when the composite
spike, not in the fit, is frame 107 -- and that same slope makes the glow's
period imply a 114-unit cycle against a declared 120, which is unexplained.
And the vertex-alpha identity holds for the glow but does NOT generalise:
eff4 reads 255/127/254 on consecutive frames.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 20:03:48 +00:00
sylph-decoder
d98c8214cc re: the title's build-in measured in the guest's draw stream -- the flashes are real
The settle-time decode was confirmed only against a SETTLED frame, which shows
the end state is right and says nothing about whether the five flashes ever
happen. This runs the oracle: a draw capture armed before the title exists,
so the window contains the frames in which the screen is built.

The flashes fire in a six-frame window and are absent from all 155 other
sampled frames. `ptlogo_back2eff1` is drawn in exactly two frames at t = 54.0
against a decoded peak of t54-56; `ptlogo1` first appears at t = 42.2 against
a decoded t42. Units-per-frame was taken from the GLOW's period alone, a
different element, so the timings are not circular. The two holders are
continuous from frame 134.

The plate glow's quad carries a per-vertex colour whose alpha IS the element's
fade alpha, so the ramp is read straight out of the guest: observed range
0..80 against a decoded peak of 80, exact and unfitted; period 51.158
presented frames over 20 cycle starts. Fitting the decoded ramp gives RMS
13.16 alpha levels against 38.18 for the same ramp REVERSED -- if the shape
carried no information those would be equal, so the asymmetry is real and
correctly directed. Further controls: symmetric triangle 15.73, flat 31.13.

`ptlogo_back2eff3` was never drawn, and that is expected rather than a miss: a
2-unit flash peak is 0.85 of a presented frame, so catching one is a matter of
phase. A port drawing all five every time shows more sweep than the console.

METHOD.md gains the trap this cost: a 2D draw's identity is its vertex
geometry, not its bound texture. These sprites sample shared pages, and
matching texture dimensions produced a false negative (no flash is ever drawn)
and a false positive (the intro movie's 640x360 YUV planes read as `ptbase2`)
in the same pass.

Also records the top-level restriction on the settle window, which the port
raised and which is verified here: top-level [160,236] width 76, including the
`ptloop` leaves [269,540] width 271 -- an instant past the end of every
top-level element's timeline.

Evidence committed as a derived per-frame series, not the 7 MB raw log.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 19:56:34 +00:00
sylph-decoder
4c74e579a0 re: 210 focus records pulse, not 2 -- and 8 of them fail in a way that looks right
The port censused focus-record alpha over its own export -- 34 elements, 2
varying, both `ptbtn00f` -- and concluded there is nothing to fix. That is
correct and correctly scoped. This asks the same question of the whole disc.

1 130 focus records, 2 664 timed elements, 210 with a varying alpha. 202 have
`rest()` returning the PEAK, the `ui-settle-time` pathology. By pak:
PILOTLOG 116, MOVIE_THEATER 54, HANGAR_ARSENAL 30, LEADERBOARD 8, GP_TITLE 2.

So the port's 2 is right because GP_TITLE has 2. The scope was load-bearing
and was not stated as a limit -- "only 2 have a varying alpha" reads as a fact
about the format and is a fact about one pak. The pathology is concentrated in
exactly the screens a wider port reaches next.

The 8 LEADERBOARD ones are the worse mode. `py_ranking_btn01f` swings
255->127->255 with no two adjacent keyframes equal, so `rest()` falls through
to its longest-dwell rule and returns 244 -- neither the peak nor the trough.
A glow stuck at its peak is visibly wrong; one stuck at 244 of a 127..255
range looks entirely plausible and nothing reports it.

Verified rather than asserted: two hits dumped keyframe by keyframe, and a
control on `ptbtn01f`, which is genuinely constant across its cycle and is
correctly NOT flagged. `py_ranking_btn01f` also confirms the loop-length
decode independently -- its ramp ends at t=90 inside a declared 120-unit
cycle, holding bright for 30 units.

Reach stated: 210 is a floor. Focus records are matched by the `Xf.rat` name
rule, and elements with constant alpha but varying scale, rotation or
position have the same problem and are not counted.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 19:45:17 +00:00
sylph-decoder
d4a08ad194 re: a nested record's +0x08 is its loop length -- the plate's period is 120, not 105
Answers the question the port agent asked: does the `PRESS A` plate's pulse
group loop from its start, or hold at alpha 0 between cycles? It holds.

A nested record is itself a RATC bundle with its own header, and that header's
`+0x08` is the loop length -- the same field ui_header_time_disc already tests
as an animation length at the top level. Its keyframes need not fill it, and
the slack is a hold at the final pose. `ptbtn00f` is 105 units of ramp inside
a 120-unit cycle, so the glow rests dark for 15 units between pulses. The five
main-menu focus records fill their 120 exactly, which is what shows the slack
belongs to this record rather than to the format.

Disc-wide over 1 781 timed nested records: 92.3% declare exactly their last
keyframe time, 7.7% declare more, and 0 declare less. That last row is the
falsifier -- a cycle cannot restart before its own last pose -- and it never
fires; the 7.7% is what keeps the reading from being an unfalsifiable
relabelling of the keyframes.

Falsification against the running game, using a pacing factor measured
INDEPENDENTLY on the main menu's focus ring (declared 120 units, measured
2.177 s, factor 1.0885): to reach the corpus's four measurements of the plate
pulse (2.12/2.19/2.34/2.31 s), a 105-unit period needs a factor of 1.211-1.337,
which EXCLUDES the ring's; a 120-unit period needs 1.060-1.170, which CONTAINS
it. Predicted 2.177 s against a measured 2.12-2.34. The two elements are in
different bundles and were measured in separate runs; the only thing tying
them together is that both declare 120.

So the port should stop shipping 105. Its 123-vs-129 ambiguity straddled the
right answer without containing it, and 129 only fitted because it was
105 + the exit_ramp_units constant it has since correctly deleted.

Reach is stated: this says where a cycle ends, not which records cycle, and
the TOP-level +0x08 is a different field left untouched -- every GP_TITLE
entry declares 300 while its elements end at 244-269.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 19:40:23 +00:00
sylph-decoder
7b5a4aa041 re: the paint-order tie-break costs one pixel, on one screen we do not ship
Closes the open half of Q3. `ui-paint-order-derived-check.md` bounded WHERE a
wrong tie-break could show -- overlapping same-key pairs -- and said outright
that nobody had measured how many change a pixel.

At the instant the player sees, the answer is: at most 1 px at max channel
difference 1, on the JAPANESE title only (`ptlogo2` x `ptlogo_tm`, 5 px of
shared ink). Exactly 0 px on all five port screens.

The earlier 24-pair bound was counted at `rest()`, and 10 of the title's 11
overlapping tied pairs are between `ptlogo_back2eff1`..`eff5` -- the five
transient flashes from the settle-time finding, transparent on the settled
screen. A tie between two invisible elements cannot cost a pixel.

Not a knife-edge. Sweeping every keyframe time and every midpoint between
keyframe times, the live-pair count is flat across the ENTIRE settle window:
1 on the EN title, 2 on the JP title, 0 on all four loading bundles -- whose
tie is live only at t17..t33, during the build-in, which matters because
their settle windows are narrow enough to deserve little trust otherwise.

Controls: every entry reporting zero also swaps an overlapping DIFFERENT-key
pair, which must and does move pixels (25 310 / 268 698 / ~765 000 px). Zeros
are explained by shared-ink counts rather than asserted -- the `ptframe` pairs
overlap by bounding box and share 0 px of ink. Entries 0/1/12/15 have NO live
control and their zeros rest on keyframe data rather than a render; recorded
as the weaker claim it is.

Refutation attempt on the corpus's "24 overlapping pairs": it SURVIVES as a
rest-pose count -- an independent recount reproduces entry 7's 16 exactly.
What is overturned is its interpretation as the risk surface.

`tie_break_pixel_cost` gains a settle-time case and an alpha/scale filter on
its rect test; `tie_cost_over_time` is new. Also strips 611 bytes of captured
cargo warnings from the head of the committed tie census.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 19:35:29 +00:00
sylph-decoder
38b80302b7 re: the title's light arc is five transient flashes, not a tone or rotation error
Records the settle-time decode, and corrects two claims it overturns.

docs/re/structures/ui-settle-time.md is the finding: a settled screen is one
instant every element is posed at, the disc names it (the midpoint of the
longest keyframe-free interval), and the title's arc closes from 33.22 to
11.79 with the clipped-pixel count landing on the console's 1459 within 0.5%.
Includes the disc-wide reach -- only 30% of bundles have a window wide enough
to trust -- and a three-way figure.

Withdrawn in ui-rotation-implemented.md:

  * "Flat. No minimum." was not a property of rotation. `at` posed LEAVES ONLY,
    so the scan moved the light sweeps and never touched the top-level flashes.
  * "our renderer does not draw ptlogo1/ptlogo2 at all" is wrong. Both are
    drawn; the four elements the diagnostic named are kind-0x4 ghosts sharing
    their template's name. Hiding the real ones makes the error WORSE by
    +5.20 and +7.47.
  * Its 10.92 baseline is not reproducible -- 14.07 at its own pre-change tag
    and 14.07 today -- so the "1.7% better" verdict rests on an unrecorded
    recipe. Flagged in title-residual-tone-vs-geometry.md too.

METHOD.md gains two traps: a shared CARGO_TARGET_DIR makes a `git worktree`
build silently replace the binary you run next (it cost three renders here,
caught only because a missing flag was a hard error rather than a wrong
number); and an aggregate computed per-element is not a state of the system.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
2026-08-29 19:29:12 +00:00
sylph-decoder
d71a74f938 re: index and cross-references for the record layout and the loading screens 2026-08-29 14:06:10 +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
f34d24941d formats: a music bank's third sub-wave was its own header
The port hit `sound_bank_riffs("BGM_103.slb")` returning three against a census
that says two, and refused to guess which to drop. It was our reader.

`to_xma_riffs`'s hybrid branch derives a leading packet stream's start as
`first_riff % XMA1_PACKET`. That is right only when the bank header is smaller
than one 2048-byte packet -- true of the voice banks the branch was written for
(1392/1468/1600/1728), false of a music bank, whose header is exactly five
packets. The modulus returned 0 and the whole 10 240-byte header was emitted as
sub-wave 0.

The header states its own length, so the guard needs no threshold: BE u32 0x800
at +0x18 with the bank id repeated at +0x00 and +0x20, header length in blocks at
+0x24. Disc-wide over sound.pak's 9 519 entries, 28 match at offset 0 -- every
music bank, ids 1001-1023 and 1101-1105 -- and on 28/28 the declared header ends
EXACTLY at the first RIFF. Zero have a gap, so a header and a leading packet
stream never coexist here; zero false positives among the other 9 491.

Controlled rather than argued: decoding the emitted region through the same
chain, on the same bank, in the same run gives 0.009 s of PCM where the bank's
real wave 0 gives 87.744 s against a declared 87.75. The region is also 99.1%
zero bytes. And the oracle had already said two -- the XMA probe at the main menu
saw exactly two streams, at BGM_103's two declared wave sizes.

BGM_106-109 are deliberately NOT in the 28: their entries start mid-bank, so they
have no header at offset 0 and their leading region is real audio. The
VOICE_D_453 recovery is untouched and its tests still pass, 10/10 green.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014voBspJ6kFncNErZJuZcLw
2026-08-29 12:30:16 +00:00
sylph-decoder
5fcc89be55 re: the PRESS-A plate arrives 2.13 s after the title settles, measured twice
The one number the port said decides a structural question on its side: whether
`ScreenView` has to draw two builds at once. It does. The boot title shows
build 4 alone, and 2.13 s after build 4 stops animating it composites build 2
over it. Two independent boots agree to 6 ms (2.138 / 2.132), which is under one
sample interval.

Measure from SETTLED, not from first pixels. "First drawn -> plate" is 3.78 s in
one run and 4.26 s in the other, because the build-in animation itself ran 1.64 s
and 2.13 s -- that spread is the emulator's frame pacing, and it is exactly the
kind of number that looks like a measurement.

Ruled out before believing it: that the plate was pulsing all along, too dim for
a thresholded glyph counter. The counter reads EXACTLY 154 -- the committed
no-plate title's own value -- for every frame of a plateau nearly one full pulse
period long, with zero variation, and the surface mean is flat to +/-0.03 across
it. A cycling overlay moves both.

Also settled, and also not:

  * the black hold between two screens is 0.14-0.30 s, which brackets the port's
    authored 0.17-0.23 s and the file's declared 12 units. Their constant stands.
  * the (A)->menu latency is STILL not available, and now the reason is known.
    Both runs freeze one frame for ~1.4 s at surface mean 26.626 -- agreeing
    between runs to six decimals, and reproduced in run 2 with stream restarts
    disabled, so it is not the capture path. It is a guest load stall: the (B)
    path, which loads nothing, has no freeze at all. Any figure from it would be
    an emulator load time.

Refutation attempt, recorded whether or not it survived: navigation.md's "the
title is not input-ready for about ten seconds, and even then (A) registers
roughly half the time". At 7.29 s and 7.28 s after the title settled, (A) was
accepted first press in both runs, as was (B) on the menu. n=2 only makes "half
the time" unlikely (p ~ 0.25); it contradicts the ten seconds outright.

And the standing red banner is withdrawn: the interactive title IS reachable in
this container, twice, with no pad input, in ~3.5 minutes. Why it changed is NOT
established -- this container came up with no Xenia storage root at all, so run 1
created a profile -- and that is written as a correlation for the next session to
test rather than as a cause.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014voBspJ6kFncNErZJuZcLw
2026-08-29 12:15:22 +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
sylph-decoder
3db09a3806 re: the decoder container has no disc -- root-caused to the volume migration
find / -xdev turns up no ISO, no default.xex and no GP_TITLE.pak; /exchange is
empty; SYLPHEED_DISC is unset; sylph-doctor agrees. Everything else in the
container is healthy -- xenia_canary is built, :98 is up, screenshot works,
Vulkan enumerates. There is simply no game to boot.

The cause is in the launcher. Before c58196b, sylph-agent bind-mounted the
human's working tree at /work, and the ISO and sylph_extract/ live in that tree,
so the disc arrived incidentally with the repository mount. c58196b replaced
that with `-v sylpheed-decoder-repo:/work` -- correct for the collision class it
was written for -- and nothing was added to replace the disc. sylph-decoder
still forwards SYLPH_ISO, but as a bare environment variable naming a host path
that does not exist inside the container. sylph-port mounts the disc explicitly,
so the one container that owns the disc and the oracle is the one without them.

This shuts the oracle, every sylpheed-cli call that names a pak, the disc-gated
tests, and -- because the XEX is on the disc -- the static PPC route too. It
does not touch the committed corpus, which is what this iteration worked from.

A second, smaller casualty of the same migration: no git identity is configured
anywhere, so the first commit in a fresh container fails outright. Both are
recorded with their fixes; neither is worked around, since the launcher runs on
the host and this container cannot restart itself.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_013UxPvE5cz7zekXBKi7Xw2r
2026-08-29 10:42:47 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
1a82ade187 re(ui): the 60 nameless RATC children are frames, not children -- .tan decoded
Closes the reach caveat the `opt ` name fix left behind: 60 of 18 002 RATC
children carry no `opt ` block, and it was not established whether they lack one
or sit past our 128-byte window.

Neither. They are not children. `examples/ratc_optless_children.rs` re-runs
`ratc::parse`'s own guards over the disc and reports which one fired: all 60 are
"tag beyond the window", none is rejected by length, gap or charset, none is
child #0, and all 60 live in six bundles of one archive. Within a bundle the
distances back to the nearest tag are an exact arithmetic progression, step
60 600 -- ten different records finding the SAME tag, because there is only one.

Reading a bundle directly: children 1..10 are equal-size T8aD blocks under a
single `opt ` name, `pb_f15_eg_anm.tan`. `.tan` is a FRAME SEQUENCE. One block
declares the resource; its payload is a run of T8aD frames.

Disc-wide, over all 18 718 `opt ` names in all 33 paks: a RATC bundle names
exactly six kinds of resource -- `.t32` 14 756, `.rat` 3 311, `.prm` 367,
`.tbm` 224, `.sbo` 54, `.tan` 6. Six `.tan`, ten frames each = 60, the entire
population with nothing left over. The negative is closed, not narrowed.

Consequence recorded but deliberately not fixed: `ratc::parse` over-reports
there, listing a `.tan`'s frames as anonymous children. Nothing in the menu
milestone reads a `.tan` -- it occurs only in GP_READY_ROOM, which S1 ruled
out -- so no screen the port draws changes.

Also a METHOD entry for this container OOM-killing `slb_leading_segment_disc`
under default test parallelism (SIGKILL, no assertion; 8/8 pass with
--test-threads=1).
2026-08-29 07:39:09 +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
969947e0e6 re(ui): put a number on the render-vs-capture tone difference
Closes an observation I left dangling last iteration ("the capture is ~4x
darker than the render") and puts a figure on the  INDEX's texture row
already carried: exact gamma/sRGB fidelity untested because a hue
comparison cannot see it.

Geometry first: cross-correlating the main-menu capture against our
render over +/-6 px puts the best alignment at exactly dy=0 dx=0,
correlation 0.9466. Only the tone differs.

Two methods failed before one worked, and both failures are recorded.
Three dark patches gave "4x darker" -- the whole-frame best linear scale
is 0.914, so three patches from one region are not a transfer curve. A
pixel-wise fit over 854,685 pixels then produced a NON-MONOTONIC transfer
(render 96-127 mapping brighter than render 128-159) with mean abs error
10-14 for every candidate model. That is edge misalignment, not a tone
curve: at correlation 0.947 a bright pixel routinely lands on a dark one.

Flat patches fix it -- 16x16 blocks with std < 8 in BOTH images, a
threshold chosen from the counts (0/83/404/1055/1788 at std<3/5/8/12/20):

  main menu  404 patches  gamma 1.491  err 0.28   (best linear 0.276, 0.34)
  EXTRAS     382 patches  gamma 1.493  err 0.22   (best linear 0.273, 0.28)
  title      506 patches  gamma 1.338  err 1.08   (best linear 0.842, 9.02)

Reach, stated because it is narrow: those patches span only render values
~0-60, where gamma and a plain scale are nearly indistinguishable -- the
two menus decide nothing (0.28 vs 0.34, 0.22 vs 0.28) and only the title
separates them. Nothing constrains midtones or highlights.

The held-out control FAILED TO DISCRIMINATE and is reported as such: the
splash's 2918 flat patches are pure black (render 0-4), so every model
scores ~0.00. That is a test with no power, not corroboration.

Confound left open: this compares our composite to what canary DISPLAYS,
and canary applies kernel_display_gamma_type = 2 (BT.709). The exponent
may be its output stage. The discriminating run -- set it to 0, recapture,
refit -- needs one emulator session reaching the main menu and was not
done.

Classified measured, not decoded; HANDOFF says plainly that a port
applying it is authoring.
2026-08-29 01:05:25 +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
a4fc129ba3 re: what the game actually reads at boot -- config.ini, and which
GameParts exist at all

Q6's second half, advanced but not closed, and the negative is the point.

config.ini is the disc's ONLY config file -- one find over the whole
extract -- and its own Shift-JIS header calls it the "Application /
GamePart initial settings table". Its [SYSTEM] section, which that same
comment says holds what the game and every game part share, is EMPTY. So
the boot order is not in disc-side configuration at all, and that search
space is now closed rather than merely unexplored.

What the file DOES carry is the language: XC_LANGUAGE_* -> eng/jpn/deu/
fra/esp/ita, defaulting to eng. That is the mechanism behind the EN/JP
build pairs in GP_TITLE and the <lang>.pak families -- a question the
corpus had described but never traced to its input.

Then the registry. Pulling every RegisterToFactory diagnostic string
binds 24 of the 29 GamePart ids to a C++ class, and five ids have no
registration site: 1, 2, 16, 18, 28. Id 1 is GP_ADVERTISE_DEMO, which
agrees with what I measured two iterations ago -- the attract loop is the
TITLE replaying ADV.wmv, not a transition into an advertise part. Marked
amber, not green: it is an argument from an error message, not from code.

Two things fall out for Q4: ids 3 and 4 are the same class
(GamePart_SaveLoad, one part with two ids), and the menu buttons' ids now
match the executable's own class names rather than a list of table names.
Still a name match, one level closer to the code.

What is still missing is the transitions themselves, and I say so: the
manifest gives the boot-side assets, config.ini the language, the
registry which parts exist. What decides to advance is in
GamePart_Title's code and that dig has not been started.
2026-08-28 18:49:19 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
c5fb6682c7 re: the menu's sound events are named on the disc; the binding to them is
not

Q8. The cheapest thing nobody had tried was to look at the SE cue names,
and they are semantic: SE_UI_CURSOR (2), SE_UI_DECIDE (3), SE_UI_CANSEL
(4), SE_UI_IMPOSI (5, the error buzz), SE_UI_SUB_WIN_OPN/CLS, and
SE_UI_SPLASH_IN/OUT. That is exactly the move/confirm/back/error
vocabulary the question asks for, named by the authors after the EVENT
rather than the sound. 322 SE cues committed as reference data.

They all live in one bank: BANK_SE is a single field reading Static.slb,
and the disc-wide check agrees -- 0 of the 322 has an entry in FILES, the
5135-path list that names every voice, briefing and BGM bank.

I am calling the binding a NAME MATCH, not a measurement, and the page
says so in the same breath as it gives the table. It is a stronger name
match than Q4's GamePart ids -- these are the authors' own event names --
but nobody has watched the game emit cue 2 on a d-pad press, and this
container is muted against a dummy device so there is no audio path to
watch either.

One new negative, with its reach. Static.slb's 8 353 472 readable bytes
contain zero RIFF, zero seek and zero WAVE, scanned over the whole
buffer. The boundary marker that works for all 7 620 other banks is
absent, so the cue is named, the bank is named, and the wave inside it is
not locatable. The UI sound effects cannot be exported yet, and that is a
gap in the assets rather than in the naming. The named next step is
Pj_Silph.xgs -- the XACT project SETTINGS points at, which IS in
sound.pak at TOC 9454, though its 533 bytes carry no XGSF magic and its
region's phase says they are probably the previous bank's tail.
2026-08-28 18:33:58 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
d69272e53f re: the boot intro and the attract loop are the same video, and the
new-game intro has a name

Q9, answered twice over -- once from the disc and once from frames I had
already captured and not used.

The movie manifest's first eight slots are the whole boot-side flow, and
the slot key is the role: LOGO1-4 -> logo1-4.wmv (not on the disc, which
is why the splash is a screen), ADVERTISE_MOVIE -> ADV.wmv, STAFF_ROLL ->
the credits reel, MS00A -> S00A.wmv, MS01A -> S01A.wmv. So the new-game
intro is S00A.wmv, decoded -- which is the half I could not test at
runtime, because A on NEW GAME hangs the emulator.

And there is no separate boot-intro slot: ADV.wmv IS the advertise movie,
the boot just plays it first. Confirmed independently by matching 19
attract frames against five candidates -- 15 hit ADV with a playhead that
advances monotonically at the sampling rate and ends at 137 s, its full
length, with the title back on the next sample. So the attract movie
plays to its end; nothing cuts it short.

That corrects me. Two iterations ago I recorded the attract movie as
"~85 s, so probably not ADV.wmv" -- arithmetic on a start I never
observed, since sampling began 39 s in. REFUTED and METHOD both take it,
along with the matcher's real failure mode: a near-black frame has no
signature, and its runner-up is not evidence.

Skippability I did NOT settle, and the corpus contradicts itself: one
page says A skips a movie every time, while the boot harness deliberately
never taps during one because it breaks the title. Named the one-boot
test rather than picking a side.
2026-08-28 18:29:39 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
4820865835 re: S1 -- the Ready Room probe is a no-go, and not for the reason the
question expected

One iteration, as the mission gates it, and no Ready Room work started.

The two criteria it named both pass. It is NOT 3D: the corpus already
holds a capture of the running screen and it is a flat six-item menu in
the same visual language as the title. And unrecoverable paths do not
mean unrenderable screens -- content enumeration finds 60 builds in the
1106 entries.

What kills it is something the question did not ask. GP_READY_ROOM.pak
does not appear to hold the Ready Room's own menu at all. Two signals
agree: the four largest builds composite to briefing panels -- a planet
readout, unit markers, direction arrows -- and, much harder, the 902
bundles declare 317 distinct element names of which NONE matches any of
the six labels on the screen (takeoff, brief, hangar, pilot, option,
mission, ready all return nothing). The pak is the briefing /
tactical-map content behind the BRIEFINGS item. If this is ever picked
up, the first job is finding where the menu lives -- GP_BUNK.pak is the
obvious place -- not naming this pak's keys.

The probe also reaches back into something already delivered: kind ==
0x3002 finds ZERO buttons across all 902 bundles here, while GP_TITLE has
16. 0x3002 is one member of a 0x3000 family with sub-bits, and this pak
uses 0x3000/0x3004/0x300c/0x3008. Nothing in the milestone changes --
every screen in scope is GP_TITLE -- but the handoff now says not to ship
that equality as a general button test.
2026-08-28 18:24:48 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
c848668b1f re: a music bank is two stems that play together -- not intro+loop, and
not something to concatenate

Q10, and it starts by withdrawing the question's own premise. BGM_001 is
not three sub-waves of 10 KB / 4.47 MB / 4.67 MB: the 10 KB is the bank
header. A bank is exactly TWO waves, and across all 32 BGM banks on the
disc the two always have the SAME duration -- equal to 0.01 s over
lengths from 37 s to 277 s. That alone kills intro+loop and kills two
halves of one piece, both of which require unequal lengths.

Four banks appear to break the rule and do not: BGM_106-109 are the known
leading-region straddle, and the giveaway is that the entry named
BGM_107.slb contains BANK id=1108. The seek packet counts pin each join
exactly, so they realign to the same two-equal-waves shape rather than
being dropped as noise. That trap goes in METHOD.

Then the roles, by decoding both waves to PCM. They are
sample-synchronous: transient-envelope correlation searched over +/-5 s
peaks at lag +0.00 s, and both waves stop at the same millisecond,
167.663 s. Two stems of one performance, meant to sound at once. Wave 1
is quieter, has almost no bass and is far more L/R-decorrelated, which
reads as a surround-rear pair or a second intensity layer -- I cannot
separate those two from the file, and say so: ChannelMask is 0x0002 on
both, and this game's channel metadata is already documented as
meaningless.

Two things the port needs that are NOT on the disc, both marked as
authored: the track is not a seamless loop (BGM_001 fades out and is
followed by 6.15 s of silence, no loop-point field found), and nothing
names which bank the menu plays -- all 32 BGM cues are numeric.
2026-08-28 18:13:10 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
43dba9d6e0 re: the transition between screens is a fade through black, and most of
its timing is on the disc

Q7. Every title-side screen carries a full-screen black .prm quad that
paints last, and its keyframe group IS the transition: black at T0, clear
by T1, clear until T2, then back to black on exit. Read with the corpus's
start-of-a-ramp rule and Q1's time unit that gives 0.87s for EXTRAS,
0.97s for the main menu, 4.08s for the title -- from the file, not from a
stopwatch.

The disc-wide check is per-pak all-or-nothing rather than the 41% the
headline count suggests, and GP_TITLE's 6 of 12 is the useful row: the
six builds carrying a fade quad are exactly the six SCREENS, and the six
without are exactly the six overlays. GP_DIALOG is 0 of 133. That is
independent corroboration of the overlay finding from two iterations ago.

One piece is NOT on the disc and says so: the fade-OUT length. The fourth
keyframe has no time slot, because a group's last block stops four bytes
short. Measured instead, at 30fps, ~0.4s and the same both directions.

And a warning I earned: the luminance rise after a transition is NOT the
quad's ramp. The incoming screen's own elements animate in after the quad
has cleared -- 1.47s observed against a declared 0.97s. Time the fade
from where the frame is pure black.

Rig: screenshot samples at 0.5 Hz and cannot see a 0.4s fade at all,
which is why an earlier burst called this an instant cut. ffmpeg x11grab
at 30fps instead; both go in METHOD.
2026-08-28 18:05:19 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
4dbfa22a0b re: the title menu wraps -- Q5 measured, Q4 driven, and one of my own
method lines withdrawn

Q5, measured off two boots: up/down move one item and WRAP at both ends
on the 5-item main menu and the 3-item EXTRAS alike; left/right do
nothing; B goes up one level and restores focus to the item you came
from (4/4); B on the main menu returns to the title; B on the title does
nothing. The menu opens on TUTORIAL -- the middle item -- 2/2, though a
third recorded run implies NEW GAME, so that one is reproducible rather
than invariant and says so.

Q4 by driving: LOAD GAME opens the save-slot list, TUTORIAL the lesson
list, OPTIONS the settings menu, EXTRAS build 6, MISSION SELECT the stage
list. NEW GAME is not tested -- A on it hangs the emulator and this
iteration needed the session. The GamePart ID behind each is NOT
measured: it is the entry of the decoded id table whose name matches the
screen I saw, and the page says so rather than wearing the badge.

And the withdrawal. Last iteration I wrote that these menus drop d-pad
presses shorter than ~0.3s. They do not. Once wrap is measured, every
press count I had is exactly right -- four presses moved four steps
THROUGH the bottom, which lands one above where a non-wrapping menu
would. I invented hardware flakiness instead of testing the ends of the
list. METHOD keeps the withdrawal rather than deleting the line.

Also: label brightness is not a cursor oracle here -- the background art
outshines the highlight on some rows. menu_focus.py reads the focus ring
instead, 254 vs <82, no tuning.
2026-08-28 17:53:46 +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
Sylpheed RE agent
65b8946c6b re: a keyframe time is worth half a rendered frame, and the ramp is linear
Q1 of the menu port, measured against the running game rather than reasoned
about. The developer-logo splash is the cheap target: it is the first thing the
guest draws and its bundle declares short, unambiguous ramps.

Two results, both frame-exact and both emulator-speed-independent (frame numbers
are VdSwap counts, the guest's own frames):

  * the ramp is LINEAR. A declared 15-unit fade lands on round(255*k/15) for all
    seven of its samples with zero error, k stepping 2,4,6,8,10,12,14. No ease
    can reproduce a constant step of 34 at both ends.
  * the animation clock advances 2.000 time units per submitted frame, over six
    consecutive intervals with no residual, with 1 unit as the quantum
    underneath (one frame in the fade-out advances by 1).

The conversion to seconds is one step further and is flagged as such: 300 frames
took 10.87 s = 27.6 present-frames/second, which reads as a 30 Hz title at 92 %
under the emulator and gives 1 unit = 1/60 s -- the title build 4.2 s, the main
menu build 1.1 s. That reading is not proven, because the rate was measured
while the guest was still streaming from the ISO; the page names the one test
that would settle it and says what changes if it goes the other way.

Committed beside it: the raw draw capture and the per-frame quad CSV, so the
numbers can be re-derived without a disc or an emulator.
2026-08-28 15:56:33 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
b56f1bf1da docs/re: finish the INDEX merge I left unresolved
Commit 56deb56 ("Merge branch 'auto/idxd-unnamed-keys'") shipped INDEX.md with
live conflict markers. My check was worthless in a way worth naming: I ran

  git add docs/re/INDEX.md ; git status --short | grep -E '^(UU|AA)'

in that order. Staging a conflicted file is exactly what marks it resolved, so
the grep found nothing and reported "no unmerged" -- the control passed BECAUSE
of the action it was meant to gate. Both halves of the hunk then went into the
tree verbatim, leaving two competing IDXD rows.

Resolved as a union, which is what it always was:
  * HEAD's "IDXD object/table" row -- the 2026-08-25 record/index-region decode
    -- supersedes the branch's older one-line version of the same row;
  * the branch's "IDXD nameless field keys" row is new and is kept.
2026-08-28 15:55:18 +02:00
Sylpheed RE agent
797765a0b2 agent: move the loop prompt's memory into the corpus, and let it push
The autonomous agent's loop prompt had grown to ~9 000 words of accumulated
findings, refutations and traps. That is a symptom, not a style: it was doing
the job the corpus should do, in the one place that dies with the container.
Three concrete failures followed from it, and each gets a structural fix rather
than a louder instruction.

1. IT REPEATED WORK IT HAD ALREADY DONE.
   The "do not revive" list and the method traps existed ONLY in the prompt, so
   nothing pointed a fresh iteration at them. Extracted verbatim into two
   tracked files:

     docs/re/REFUTED.md  105 claims tested and dead, grouped by subject so a
                         grep for your noun finds the neighbourhood
     docs/re/METHOD.md   the traps already paid for -- controls, inference,
                         searching, reading data, runtime

   Both are linked from INDEX.md, and the loop prompt now opens by requiring
   them to be read. This is the fix for "re-derived something already known":
   the knowledge is now where the next iteration looks, not in a context window.

2. IT FORGOT TO ARM THE NEXT WAKEUP.
   The prompt tried to solve this by shouting at itself in the first line. The
   real fix is to stop asking: `loose` now defaults to a FIXED interval (45m),
   so the harness owns the cadence and a forgotten ScheduleWakeup cannot end the
   run. SYLPH_LOOP_INTERVAL= (empty) restores self-pacing.

3. IT COULD NOT PUBLISH, SO THE WORK ONLY EXISTED IN THE CONTAINER.
   New `push-work`, plus a read-only credentials mount
   (SYLPH_GIT_CREDENTIALS, default ~/.sylph-git-credentials). It pushes the
   CURRENT branch only, refuses anything that is not auto/*, and never
   force-pushes -- so the consolidated line stays a human's decision and a
   confused iteration cannot rewrite history. The loop prompt now requires a
   push on every iteration that commits, rather than at the end of some longer
   arc, which is exactly when a container dies.

The prompt itself drops from ~9 000 words to 85 lines and, more importantly,
stops accumulating: findings go in the corpus, and the prompt points at it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-28 15:46:59 +02:00
Sylpheed RE agent
56deb5612f Merge branch 'auto/idxd-unnamed-keys'
# Conflicts:
#	docs/re/INDEX.md
2026-08-28 15:27:51 +02:00
Sylpheed RE agent
b39dd46bdd Merge branch 'auto/slb-loader'
# Conflicts:
#	docs/re/INDEX.md
#	docs/re/structures/slb-data-offset.md
2026-08-28 15:27:46 +02:00
Sylpheed RE agent
465de4b530 Merge branch 'auto/regn-reader'
# Conflicts:
#	docs/re/BACKLOG.md
#	docs/re/INDEX.md
#	docs/re/structures/regn-map-grid.md
#	tools/re-capture/regn_decode.py
2026-08-28 15:26:35 +02:00
Sylpheed RE agent
c966e65ba7 Merge branch 'auto/isl-builtins-26-28-29'
# Conflicts:
#	docs/re/INDEX.md
#	tools/re-capture/isl.py
2026-08-28 15:24:55 +02:00
Sylpheed RE agent
cdd4af98bd re: S28 does have an asteroid definition - it borrows Stage 14's
Withdrawing my own repeated claim that S28_p1 has an asteroid volume with no
definition. It came from a set-difference over FILE NAMES, which cannot see
reuse. Joining the fields per PHASE settles it:

  S28.Phase_1   MapMesh = S28_p1_AsteroidVolume_wp.col
                AsteroidDefinition = S14_p2_asteroid.tbl

S28 scatters Stage 14 phase 2's rock list inside its own volume. Nine
definition tables and nine _AsteroidVolume_wp meshes, with one table shared by
two phases: S14_p2_asteroid.tbl -> S14.Phase_2 and S28.Phase_1.

The earlier census's own arithmetic already contained the answer: the four
values counted x12 (2 per language pack) were S01, S04, S05 - two phases of ONE
stage - and S14_p2, which is two phases of TWO different stages. The count was
right; reading x12 as "two phases of the same stage" was the error.

test_s8p1_asteroid.tbl is not test-only either - it is what S02.Phase_1 ships
with. A test_ name here is a leftover, not a dead table.

The true residual is two phases and it is the opposite pairing to what I
recorded: S01.Phase_3 has the volume and no definition (S01 keeps its volume
across all three phases but scatters rocks only in 1-2), and S02.Phase_1 has a
definition and no volume (MapMesh is the plain mapmesh_box_500km).

All fifteen artefacts byte-identical.
2026-08-28 03:44:14 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
01fbb42eb6 re: the 8 values per asteroid are index, quaternion, position
Measured over every Frame_*Asteroid* record on the disc - 384 records, 37518
items (6253 per language pack x 6; the remaining 380 per pack belong to the
seven record-less Alpha frames, the same 57-vs-64 split as before).

  slot 0    equals the running index 0..N-1   37518 / 37518, max 587, and the
            largest FrameCount is 588, so the last index is N-1
  slots 1-4 a unit quaternion                 37518 / 37518 within 1e-4 of 1.0
            (min 0.999999, max 1.000001)
  slot 4    sign of the real part             min +0.001, never negative -
            canonical w-last, so the order is (x, y, z, w)
  slots 5-7 position in metres                -163858..+79572, -114308..+76422,
            -105224..+110263 - inside the +/-250 km half-extent of
            mapmesh_box_500km

len(anonymous fields) == 8 * FrameCount on 384 of 384, zero mismatches.

The unit-norm test is the control: an arbitrary 4-tuple has no reason to sit on
the unit sphere and every one of the 37518 does. Two further cross-checks fell
out - the maximum index is exactly max(FrameCount) - 1, and every position lies
inside the 500 km box the corpus already knows (world unit = 1 metre).

There is no scale slot: an asteroid's size comes from its group's
AsteroidModelName, which is why a group is one model plus one placement list.

Not settled: whether the quaternion is object->world or world->object and its
handedness - a norm test cannot separate those; and why S28_p1 has an asteroid
volume with no definition.

All fifteen artefacts byte-identical.
2026-08-28 02:03:23 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
da71897d03 re: EnumAsteroid counts the rocks, and the hash join was mine to fix
EnumAsteroid is the frame record's FrameCount - 57/57, zero mismatches. Each
AsteroidFrameName is itself an IDXD record name; those records carry one named
field, FrameCount, plus a run of anonymous ones, and the anonymous fields
number exactly 8 x FrameCount on all 384 occurrences (ratio histogram
{8.0: 384}). The frame record is the placement table, 8 values per asteroid,
and EnumAsteroid counts the rocks. The frame-name -> EnumAsteroid map is
single-valued for all 64 names.

mission-wave-arrivals already met these records - they were the outliers that
broke its route-speed measurement, filtered out by name. regn-map-grid already
guessed the link and said so honestly ("a reading, not a measurement; nothing
here counts objects"). Neither says the count is exact.

The abandoned table lost its placement data too: exactly 7 of 64 frame names
have no record, and they are exactly the seven groups of the unreferenced
tenth object (Frame_Alpha_S01_Asteroid_{01,02,04}, Frame_Alpha_S01_Haze_
{01,02,03}, Frame_TAlpha_S01_Asteroid_03). 57 + 7 = 64, zero partials.

Withdrawing the previous commit's red flag: the hash join works and my call
was wrong. AsteroidDefinition values resolve to their objects' pak entry keys
as name_hash("stage\" + name), 9 of 9, each landing on the object the
frame-prefix join independently predicted. I had hashed the bare file name;
archive_naming.py hashes prefix + name over a path-prefix list. Two
independent joins, 9/9 agreement, both leaving the same tenth object
unreferenced.

Not settled: what the 8 values per asteroid are; why S28_p1 has a volume and
no definition.

All fifteen artefacts byte-identical.
2026-08-28 01:48:52 +00:00
Sylpheed RE agent
a6e8eca436 re: the asteroid-field tables (AsteroidGroup_00N) decoded
New doc docs/re/structures/asteroid-fields.md, indexed.

Half the chain was already in the corpus: stage-definition-table and
stage-mission-tables record the per-phase AsteroidDefinition naming a .tbl,
and unit-datasheet-static partitions Generic and finds 10 per pack whose only
field is {EnumAsteroidGroup}, "an asteroid-group file". Neither says what is
inside them.

The table: 10 objects per pack x 6 packs = 60, 384 AsteroidGroup_* records,
4 or 7 groups per object. Every record carries exactly three fields, all 384,
no partials - AsteroidModelName (28 distinct; mob_n050..n056 x24 each,
mob_n040..n043 x18), AsteroidFrameName (64 distinct, Frame_S<NN>[_pN]_
Asteroid_NN, the same names regn-map-grid reports the Route tables showing),
and EnumAsteroid (37 distinct, 1..588, 6633 per pack summed).

Enum<Thing> is a COUNT; Enumerate<Thing> names a TABLE. EnumAsteroidGroup
equals its object's group count in 54 of 60 and EnumAsteroid is a plain
integer - the opposite of the Enumerate* join rule. The -erate is the
difference. Count-style fields still are not safe: the 6 failures are ONE
object repeated per language pack, declaring 4 while holding 7.

The tenth object is unreferenced and it is the one that miscounts. Joining by
frame prefix, nine objects match the nine AsteroidDefinition values one to
one; the tenth carries Frame_Alpha_S01_Asteroid, Frame_Alpha_S01_Haze and
Frame_TAlpha_S01_Asteroid and is named by nothing.

S28 has an asteroid VOLUME but no asteroid DEFINITION: mcol-collision lists
nine _AsteroidVolume_wp meshes (…, S28_p1); the nine AsteroidDefinition values
are those eight plus test_s8p1. Eight shared, one different each way.

Not settled: what EnumAsteroid counts of; why S28_p1 has a volume and no
definition. The name->object join did not reproduce by hash under name_hash,
mod 0x00FFF9D7, or a 24-bit mask - the join used is by frame prefix.

All fifteen artefacts byte-identical.
2026-08-28 01:32:52 +00:00