sylpheed-port found the fifth member of our error family on their own side: their
"visible" test counted any element with alpha > 0, which includes palogo_eff0.
Verified from the disc rather than accepted --
entry 10 [0] palogo_eff0.prm 1 kf t=0 fade=0xff000000 scale=100x100 pos=(0,0)
entry 11 same
Alpha 255 over RGB 000000: full-screen opaque black, drawn from t=0 and showing
nothing. So "any element drawn" reports these screens visible from t=0 while the
frame is black -- "visible" read as "drawn".
Worth having on its own: this verifies from the disc the premise behind
`screen render --black`, which its own help states as "what the game composites
over on a screen carrying its own background". On the splash builds that
background is DECLARED, not assumed.
METHOD gains their amendment, which is the sharpest formulation either of us
reached this week: all five instances are a failure of a NOUN, not of a number.
Extent, bounding box, duration, span, visible. The number was always correct FOR
SOMETHING; what went missing was which thing. Every other check in that file
tests whether a number is right, and not one tests whether it is a number of the
thing you think.
Also teaches fade_quads.py to address a PAK ENTRY directly (`e10`) rather than
only a build ordinal. The splashes are entries 10/11 and are not screen builds,
so no ordinal addresses them -- and writing `e10` states which index space is
meant, which is the standing lesson of build-ordinal-vs-entry.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
sylpheed-port said the port plays the full group (255 and 210 units) rather than
my 240/195, and they are right for a reason sharper than either of us first had.
The _eff elements ramp alpha 0 -> 255 over t=0..15 while the main logo is still
fully transparent:
palogo_sqex.t32 0:a=0 15:a=0 30:a=255 ... 255:a=0
palogo_sqex_eff.t32 0:a=0 15:a=255 30:a=212 45:a=0
So the SCREEN is visible from within t=0..15 and its visible span is the full
group. My "240 units visible" was ONE ELEMENT's visible span, computed while
another element of the same build was already on screen -- which is exactly the
error class I was writing up when I made it.
Recomputed against the screen: publisher 1.011/1.083/1.028, developer
1.002/1.001/0.962, mean 1.0146 with one measurement BELOW unity, against my
1.085 with none below. That is not a clock at 54 u/s. The systematic is gone and
Q1 stands unqualified.
The consequence was wrong too: "a port playing 240 units at 60 shows the splash
0.42 s less" -- it plays 255, so the gap is 0.174 s, and on the developer splash
the port runs longer than my mean. No direction to correct in.
What survives weakly: against the full group the publisher runs long in all three
boots while the developer sits at unity. Three boots per screen is thin and it is
not a systematic.
METHOD: state the number, and state what it is a number OF. Four instances of
this family now -- pivot anchor as extent, centre track as bounding box, cycle
length as motion duration, one element's visible span as the screen's -- and two
of the four arose because the PUBLISHER of the number never said what it spanned.
The reader reasoned correctly from the only definition available each time.
Publishing a quantity's extent in the same breath is cheaper than every check in
that file.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
sylpheed-port reported verify-dwell at 4.28 s / 3.58 s and called it agreement
with my three cold boots. Checked the arithmetic instead of the impression, and
it is not agreement with the DISC.
publisher 240 u = 4.000 s at Q1's 60 u/s measured 4.297/4.604/4.370 mean 4.424
developer 195 u = 3.250 s measured 3.508/3.503/3.366 mean 3.459
All six ratios exceed 1 -- 1.074, 1.151, 1.093, 1.079, 1.078, 1.036, mean 1.085 --
implying 54.3 and 56.4 units/s. The port's own two numbers imply 56.1 and 54.5.
Four estimates, none at 60.
The obvious explanation fails: a detector triggering early and late would lengthen
the interval, but the declared span IS 15->255 and outside it the alpha is 0, so
there is nothing on screen to trigger on. An 8.5 % overshoot is 20 units, ten
rendered frames, which no threshold can manufacture from a blank screen.
Recorded as an open qualification on Q1 rather than a correction: three boots per
screen is thin, and Q1 was measured on a different quantity. It is also NOT the
same discrepancy as the sweep leaf's, which runs ~50 % slow rather than 8.5 %.
For the port: the dwells remain decoded and should still not be authored, but a
port playing 240 units at exactly 60 u/s shows the publisher splash for 0.42 s
less than the game does.
METHOD gains the reusable half of the (A) result, which the port named: a probe
whose observation window is shorter than the effect reports a CLEAN NEGATIVE.
(A) takes 4-6 s; a script that presses and looks 0.5 s later concludes the press
was dropped, with nothing in its log to say otherwise. Check the window against
the latency before believing a null, and sample repeatedly when the latency is
unknown.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
The port flagged docs/re/data/boot-timeline-2026-08-29.tsv, whose label column
runs splash_dev before splash_pub, as a possible boot-order bug in its tree.
Three cold boots, t=0 at launch, no pad input, and the frames looked at rather
than only correlated: SQUARE ENIX 3.05-7.34 / 1.18-5.78 / 1.19-5.56 s, then a
~0.25 s black hold, then GAME ARTS/SETA/studio anima. Publisher first, 3/3.
The TSV is not wrong about any frame; its t=0 is ~7.7 s into the guest's boot,
so the publisher splash had been and gone before the stream opened. The tell is
in the file: its first twelve rows are byte-identical to four decimals -- one
held frame sampled twelve times -- and those exact numbers reappear in my run 1
at 8.42-10.94 s.
Second trap, new: ADV.wmv opens with its own SQUARE ENIX card, bloomed and below
centre, scoring 0.59-0.75 against live-splash-publisher.png. The classifier
fires splash_pub twice per boot and the second one is a movie frame. The real
splash holds perfectly still and scores 0.93-0.94.
And the dwells are DECODED, not measured: the publisher declares 240 units
(4.000 s) and the developer 195 (3.250 s), against measured 4.30/4.60/4.37 and
3.51/3.50/3.37. Measured over declared is 1.085 on average across six spans --
a 30 Hz timeline at 27.6 fps, which is the presentation rate this corpus has
measured independently three times. The port authors nothing here.
Instrument control run first: 11/11 content, 4/4 plate, the two splash
references rejecting each other at 0.035.
docs/re/boot-order-and-splash-dwell.md
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Nsxw1A9JseUw99Yw1ZRQzY
