d53128151f3d20bad643798f91db2a2b805b6de2
1252 Commits
| Author | SHA1 | Message | Date | |
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sylph-decoder
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d53128151f |
re: F6 unit 6 -- pteff03a is not submitted at any size; the collapsed-scale candidate dies
Unit 5 filtered on height, so a collapsed quad would have been invisible to it by construction. Dropping that filter: across the whole title era, frames >=700, every quad regardless of size -- RIGHT->LEFT travellers (pteff03a's direction): 0 LEFT->RIGHT travellers: 2 (both pteff03) static shapes: 10 degenerate/collapsed quads: 0 Not one quad travels right-to-left in the entire title era at any size, and nothing is submitted collapsed. So pteff03a is absent from the draw stream -- not drawn invisibly, not drawn at zero scale. That strengthens unit 5 from "no tall quad of that size" to "no quad of that motion at all". All three candidate mechanisms are now dead: the zero-alpha skip is weak on its own terms (explains opening frames, not a whole run), the focus/variant link was eliminated by the port's wider survey (linked targets chain across unrelated element kinds -- on one menu a sweep points at a button, so the field is a chain pointer rather than a variant selector), and collapsed scale dies here. Recording that as the state rather than proposing a fourth candidate. Three have been named and three have failed, two by checks that took minutes. A fourth guess before the human's "one streak or two" look would be guessing against an answer about to arrive for free. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
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19757cfec6 |
re: F6 unit 5 -- pteff03a is never drawn; the game shows ONE sweep, not two
Every quad taller than 1.2 NDC in the whole capture, frames 1..2499: h=3.15 travelling left-to-right over 1754 samples (pteff03), and h=2.00 static for 54 frames (not a sweep). Nothing in pteff03a's expected band above 3.4, and only one travelling quad in the capture at all. pteff03a declares 800% scale against pteff03's 600%, so its AABB is ~1303 px ~ 3.62 NDC, travelling right-to-left. It is absent. Not a windowing artefact: ptloop02's leaf reaches alpha 128 at its t=150, which at the unit-3 leaf rate is ~324 frames after its start, well inside the 1754 frames captured. For the port: their renderer draws pteff03a, confirmed on their side at three instants. An extra light streak the game never shows, appearing partway through the build-in, looks exactly like "the sweep starts too early" -- and unlike the alpha question it does not depend on unit 2. One capture, one boot, one window. The scan was over every tall quad in the whole stream rather than a filtered subset, so the absence is strong, but it is still absence in one observation. The five-second human check the port is arranging (one streak or two) settles it faster than another capture and should come before anyone deletes an element. The disc declares ptloop02.rat as element 12 beside ptloop01.rat as 11, identical pivots and keyframe times, so why one is submitted and not the other moves to my side. Untested candidates: its leaf alpha starts at 0 where pteff03's starts at 255; or a focus/variant link means only one of the pair is ever active. Refutation: the port's own challenge to my by-size identification -- that both sprites are byte-identical in size -- they withdrew themselves and correctly. The sprites are both 399x180 but the LEAVES declare different scales, so the drawn quads differ by a third in height. Second time in this exchange a challenge was right to raise and wrong in its stated reason, and both times the check still found something real. The value was in asking. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
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a30761f128 |
re: F6 unit 4 -- the sweep is on screen 41 frames after the title starts, not at the plate
Same capture, counts only. Title's first drawn element is frame 706; the sweep is first submitted at 746 and first ON SCREEN at 747, so +41 frames. For scale, the plate's declared t=236 is frame ~942 at 1 unit/present -- 195 frames after the sweep is already visible geometrically. Named rather than folded in: that comparison assumes the title's first drawn frame is its t=0 and that its clock runs at 1 unit/present. The 41 is a raw frame count and carries neither. What it settles: POSITION does not gate the sweep late. So if a human sees it start when the plate appears, the gate cannot be where the quad is -- it has to be how opaque it is. That puts the whole of F6 on unit 2, which is amber: does the parent's alpha multiply into the leaf? The parent ramps 0->255 across t=70..100, so if it multiplies the sweep is invisible until ~70 and dim to 100 (a real early gate); if it does not, the sweep is fully lit from +41 frames and the human's report has no mechanism yet. The disagreement has narrowed usefully: before this unit "starts when the plate appears" had two candidate mechanisms, position or alpha. Position is now excluded by measurement. Refutes my own unit 1 framing. I wrote that a quad can be "fully opaque and entirely off-screen" and offered the travel as the likely explanation. It is not -- the sweep is on screen at +41 frames, nowhere near the plate. The travel explanation is dead, and I record it because I proposed it and it steered the port's reading of their own renderer. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
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f456c87d06 |
re: F6 unit 3 -- the sweep's POSITION fits the declared track, origin at leaf t=0
Took the port's point and dropped the alpha line. Three exchanges had gone on alpha -- a bound, a refutation, a downgrade -- over 14 usable samples of 1754, when the position travels 2160 px monotonically in the same capture. pteff03's declared leaf track is linear at 4.000 px/unit: -639 at t=0, -39 at t=150, 1521 at t=540. The capture's first clean segment runs frames 746..1913 with x from -641.1 to +1522.1. Both endpoints land within ~2 px on a 2160 px travel, 0.1%. Two independent checks rather than one fitted parameter. A single wrap at frame 1914 confirms the declared 600-unit loop and falls after the segment. Answers the clock origin: the leaf's t=0 is its first drawn frame, so the game does not carry the leaf forward from the title's clock. That CONFIRMS the port's own correction -- they had attributed ~135 units of earliness to the leaf starting at title t=0 and withdrew it on two relayed numbers; the full series says the withdrawal was right. Rate here is 540 units in 1167 presents = 0.463 units/present, flagged as the weak half: one run, in presents, and it does NOT match the 1 unit/present the splash work established. Either the leaf runs a slower clock or one of the two is not what I think. The origin does not depend on it. And the useful negative: a linear fit across all 1754 samples gives max residual 1108 px on 1402 px of travel, 79%, because the trajectory wraps and a straight line through a sawtooth is meaningless. A fit not checked for residual would have reported a slope and a plausible origin from that same data -- which is exactly why the port's tool selftest must reject a wrong-shape series, and why I segmented before fitting. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
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796bc0420c |
re: CORRECT F6 unit 2 -- identification wrong, presentation misleading, claim downgraded to amber
The port challenged the by-size identification: both sweep sprites are the same size, so size cannot separate pteff03 from pteff03a, and the two leaves floor at 128 and 0. They were right, and it is broken a third way. Their discriminator -- the leaves travel in opposite directions -- is in the capture I already had. Both rows drift +2.19 and +2.18 in x, i.e. BOTH LEFT TO RIGHT, so both are pteff03. The 0.7% size difference is per-frame rounding splitting one element across two keys, not two elements. pteff03a does not appear in this capture at all. And my own presentation misled. The "alphas 8 24 33 50 58" I quoted were sorted(set(...))[:9] -- the nine LOWEST DISTINCT values, not the series. Read as a trajectory they look like a ramp from 8. They are a tail. The counts: 9 of 1140 and 5 of 614 samples below 128, so 14 sub-floor samples out of 1754. The bound argument survives in shape and collapses in weight. A sample below 128 is still unexplainable by a leaf flooring at 128, but 14 of 1754 is a thin tail and a tail is where a vertex-grouping slip or a partial frame would show up. Downgraded to amber: not refuted, not established. Settling it needs the same capture read as a SERIES rather than a set -- alpha against frame across t=70..100, where a multiplying parent must produce a monotone ramp on nearly every frame rather than 14 stragglers. One more read of data already on disk. The port was right to hold the renderer. Adopting this would have changed a rendering rule on every screen with a leaf, on 14 samples I had presented as a trajectory. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
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bc241f5d06 |
re: F6 unit 2 -- the parent's alpha IS multiplied into the sweep leaf
Question, look-at and not-covered written before the work, per PROTOCOL's units section. One boot, one A to skip the attract video, then no input so the title builds in undisturbed. The sweeps are the two rotated 600%-scaled strips, identified by size: NDC 1.38x3.15 and 1.39x3.15, matching the corpus's own independently measured AABB height of 1134 px (2*1134/720 = 3.15). Drawn alphas run 8, 24, 33, 50, 58, 74, 83, 100, 107 and 16, 41, 67, 91, 116, 128... pteff03's LEAF alpha is bounded below by 128 (keys 0:255 150:128 540:255 600:255). 8 < 128, so the leaf cannot produce it alone. The parent's alpha is multiplied in. That refutes the port's screen_view.gd decode that "the leaf runs on its OWN timeline and the parent's alpha is NOT multiplied in" -- which is exactly what that file asked for. It flagged honestly that every observation behind it had parent alpha 0, so "the leaf wins" and "the parent is ignored because it draws nothing" were never separated, and named t=100..238 as the separating interval. This capture is in that interval. Bears on F6's original report: the parent ramps 0->255 across t=70..100, so if it multiplies in the sweep is invisible before ~70 and dim until 100. A human reporting it starts late is seeing a real gate -- the parent's ENTRY ramp, not the 238 cluster, which unit 1 showed is an exit. Reach: one boot; quads identified by size against a previously measured AABB, not by name, since the draw stream carries no names. The bound argument needs only that the leaf minimum is 128, which is from the disc. It does NOT establish the combination is plain leaf x parent rather than some other one that also dips below 128 -- only that the parent participates. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
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df41225003 |
re: F6 unit 1 -- 238..250 on the sweep is an EXIT, not a start
One unit, per the new PROTOCOL section. Question, look-at, and not-covered written before the work. pteff03 and pteff03a -- the sweep parents behind ptloop01/ptloop02 -- declare 0:a=0 70:a=0 100:a=255 238:a=255 250:a=0. So they rise 70->100 and fall 238->250. The brief's own warning was right: 238..250 is a fade-out, the same shape ptcopyright uses, and ptcopyright starts nothing. The sweep is declared visible from t=100, which is 136 units BEFORE the plate reaches full alpha at 236, and is fading out by 238. That contradicts the human's report that the sweep only starts when the plate appears -- and the reason both can be true is the next unit. ptloop01/ptloop02 are .rat leaves whose own timeline is a TRANSLATION: ptloop01 runs x = -639 -> 1521 over a 600-unit loop, so at its own t=0 the sweep sits off the left edge of a 1280-wide screen. The parent's alpha says "drawn"; the leaf's position says "where". A quad can be fully opaque and entirely off-screen. Explicitly not actionable alone: this says 238 is not a start. It does not say the port should show the sweep from t=100, because if the leaf is off-screen there then both renderers can be correct on alpha and differ entirely in what is visible. Refutation of the brief's own lead that "236-238 is a synchronisation point and a human reported a behaviour change there": the synchronisation is real -- pteff02 at 236, ptlogo_back2eff and ptcopyright at 238 -- but the reading is refuted. For the sweep it is where things END. A cluster of keyframes marks a moment; it does not say which direction anything moves through it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
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90b7c6ea26 |
re: F3 -- the title plays BGM cues 1102 and 1103, from seven sites in its GamePart
A human says something is missing on the title. Something is: it plays BGM, and two different cues. Method with the control built in rather than bolted on. R4 wants a negative to show the method finding the menu's cue first; this method cannot produce a false negative for one screen because it does not look at one screen. It finds every call of the play function in the image and reads the cue each passes: 34 callers, cue ids 1103 x24, 1102 x3, 1107 x2, 1108, 1106, 1104, category 4 on every one. 1103 is the cue the corpus already attributes to the menu, and the method finds it 24 times. GamePart_Title's neighbourhood is 0x821C4xxx-0x821C7xxx per the registry page, and seven play sites fall inside it: 1103 at 0x821C52D0, 0x821C5620 (inside the phase handler sub_821C5580), 0x821C6188 and 0x821C6294; 1102 at 0x821C53B0, 0x821C5BA0 and 0x821C6DE0. So the title plays BGM_103 and BGM_102, and 1103 is the SAME cue as the menu's -- which is why a port playing nothing on the title sounds like something is missing rather than merely quieter. The sting is NOT answered and the page says exactly why: this play function carries ids in the 1102-1108 BGM range, the UI stings are SE_* cues with ids 1-322, and not one of the 34 sites passes an id in that range. SE goes through a different call and this method is blind to it by construction. That is a bounded negative about the instrument, not the game, and reading it as "no sting" would be the third time this corpus mistook a blind spot for a fact. Reach: exhaustive over every bl to 0x8217ACF8, so complete for that function. The GamePart attribution is by address neighbourhood and carries the registry page's own "by position and convention, not proven" caveat. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
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1021708636 |
re: F2 CLOSED -- undecodable with reach, all three sites checked
Third and last site: the executable's play path. sub_821C5580's cue-1103 site is li r5,1103 / li r4,4 / lwz r3,0(r29) / bl 0x8217ACF8, i.e. play(this, category, cue_id). No volume is passed and no float argument is set up by the caller at all; the callee's prologue confirms r5 is the cue id with -2 and -1 sentinels. Honest limit stated: the callee saves f30/f31 so it uses floats internally and could look a level up for itself. "No gain is passed" is not "no gain exists" -- but there is nothing at this site for the port to transcribe. So F2 closes as undecodable-with-reach with all three sites checked: tables.pak cue records (exhaustive, passing control, and numbers carry names there so a gain would have had one), sound.pak bank headers (all 9519 entries, no readable header), and the play path (category, not level). The port authors the mix and now knows it is authoring, which is what this question existed to make explicit rather than accidental. The one authored value the game exposes is the user-facing sound options screen -- a runtime master, not a per-cue table. Refutation of the play-test's premise that "a cue record commonly carries a volume beside its wave index": REFUTED for this game across all three sites where it could live. Recorded because it was a good prior -- it is what sent me to the right three places -- and being wrong about where a value lives is different from being wrong to look. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
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654c4f1e99 |
re: F2 second site checked -- sound.pak carries no readable bank header either
Continued F2 at the site the previous page named as the first thing to do. dat/sound.pak is a 114 KB index over ~1 GB of payload across sound.p00-p04. Its 9519 entries carry no readable signature at all: the most common first-four-bytes pattern is "...." on 3830 entries and no entry begins with an ASCII magic. Exactly one entry is under 4 KB (#9454, 533 bytes), where a bank header or wave index would be small and structured. So the SE bank's metadata is not reachable as a header in sound.pak. The entries are audio payload, high-entropy by nature, and a gain beside a wave index is not sitting in front of them. Stated as a negative about REACHABILITY, not existence: a per-wave gain could live inside a container these entries are compressed into and I have not decompressed one. Two of three sites now checked, both negative; the executable around sub_821C5580 remains. Classification unchanged at undecodable-with-reach, but better bounded. Records the shape the answer is taking: if the executable also has no per-cue gain, the honest conclusion is that the game does not author a per-cue mix at all and the levels come from the user-facing sound options screen as runtime state. That makes the port's job authoring a master balance rather than transcribing a table -- undecodable rather than decoded, which it must know, because a mix authored in ignorance and one authored deliberately look identical in the file and differ entirely in how far they can be trusted. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
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02d7f9062b |
re: F2 -- no gain field in tables.pak, with the two unchecked sites named
The port has no gain anywhere and confirm sits 3 dB above the music. Asked the disc rather than choosing a number. Five audio-bearing objects in tables.pak, zero tokens matching VOL GAIN LEVEL DB ATTEN AMP MIX LOUD. Control passes: the same matcher finds 38 SE_UI hits, so "0 hits" is not a broken matcher. The negative is stronger than a name search usually is, and I expected it not to be. Dumping the schema shows the token stream is value-then-key pairs -- "40, LINE_PITCH", "0, Y_OFFSET_ANALOG_STICK" -- so NUMBERS ARE TOKENS AND THEY CARRY NAMES. A gain in this format would have a name, and the name search covers exactly the space where it would live. That turns "I did not find one" into "one is not there in this file". Reach, and it is why this is undecodable rather than decoded: I did not check the .slb bank headers, which is the other conventional home for a per-wave gain beside a wave index -- and is where the play-test's own framing points. No .slb exists as a loose file on the extracted disc, so it costs a pak extraction I did not have budget for; it is the first thing the next attempt should do. Nor did I check the executable, where a mix could be immediates in the sound-play path around sub_821C5580. So this is not "the mix is not on the disc". It is "the mix is not in the table where a cue's fields live". Pointer, not a finding: object #15 lists po_sound_scr.prt -> SOUND among GP_OPTIONS' screens, so a user-facing sound options screen exists and at least one volume is runtime state. Port keeps authoring nothing yet. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
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85d2e93d05 |
re: F1 harness built and committed; the run did not reach the menu
The port needs an initial delay and a repeat interval and has shipped the mechanism with -1.0 rather than invent them. This builds the instrument and does not get the numbers. The vertex stream is the right instrument: C_PAD_DECODER has no timer on any direction path, so the repeat is in the layer above and cannot be read out of that function; a cursor move is a quad changing position, and the guest's vertex buffer carries that with no Canary processing in the path. tools/re-capture/menu_repeat_probe.sh arms the logger, drives the boot with pad-file presses and holds a direction. It ran its whole sequence. But the boot did not reach the menu: in the settled era every quad shape holds a constant y, and the shapes are near-full-screen rects rather than a button list. No cursor, so nothing to repeat. Two instrument errors worth more than the failed run. The first attempt ARMED NOTHING and said nothing -- xdotool search --class ... --window %1 F10 behind a || true. The run completed normally and only the ABSENT log revealed it. The working form looks the window up by name, activates it, and sends F10 to the window and globally; a missing window is now fatal rather than tolerated, because a silent arming failure is indistinguishable from a screen that draws nothing. My first cursor detector measured the wrong change: presents where the SET of quads changed, which fired on 157 of 161 adjacent pairs because during a build-in everything animates. Tracking one quad shape's POSITION instead correctly reports no motion. That is the play-test's own lesson landing on me -- an instrument that measures change can still measure the change of the wrong thing. Next run must not drive the boot blind: gate the presses on a classifier or join with boot_menu.sh, which reaches the menu but takes screenshots rather than draw logs. Blind was chosen because screenshots cost ~10 s each while xenia runs; wrong trade, since a mistimed press costs the whole run. Reach: the negative is about this run, not the game. F1 stays open and the port should keep its -1.0 constants. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
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ad3d14ab26 |
re: a THIRD timed channel in the decoder -- my "only two" was wrong, and +0xC4/+0xC8 are timings not masks
Chasing F1 I examined a counter block I had skipped. this+0x10 decrements every update and fires output bit 0x4 at zero, guarded against the HELD word by cfg +0xA0; it is re-armed from +0xC4 = 10 and +0xC8 = 8. So my statement that "the only two timed inputs in the whole decoder are LB and LT" is false, and two constants I tabulated as ring-word button masks (B|Y and Y) are counter reload values. A number that is a valid mask AND a valid duration cannot be told apart by its value, only by its use, and I classified those two by value. What it does not change: F1 is still not answered. This channel is guarded by cfg +0xA0 = ring bit 1 = B, not a direction. The D-pad and left-stick paths still carry no counter, so "a held DIRECTION has no repeat timer in C_PAD_DECODER" stands, and the human's observation that it repeats in the real game is consistent with the caveat this page already carried: the repeat is in the layer above. Explicitly NOT offering 10 and 8 as F1's two numbers. They belong to a channel on a button that is not a direction, and at 60 units/s they are 0.167 s and 0.133 s -- about 7 moves a second, which does not match "a medium pace, slow enough to see which item is selected". Reporting them as the menu repeat would be the same read-a-config-infer-a-behaviour error this correction is about. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
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e820121d8a |
re: the plate pulses via ptbtn00f on a declared 120-unit loop, not ptbtn00 at 244
The port asked whether the PRESS (A) plate pulses and with what period, framing it as "does the timeline loop at 244 or does something else drive it". Both halves of that disjunction are wrong about ptbtn00. ptbtn00 ramps, holds, extinguishes at t=244 and stays out. The pulse is ptbtn00f -- the plate's focus/glow variant, reached through focus_link and carrying no top-level element of its own -- which declares a 120-unit loop from the disc. A reader looking only at ptbtn00 sees a one-shot because the looping element is the one a declaration-order walk never reaches. Same element that needed the by-name accessor in ui_layout, for the same reason. Cross-check that makes it more than a stopwatch reading: 120 declared units at the rate law is 2.000 s at 60 Hz, against a measured mean of 2.24 s over four intervals -- 12% long, the direction and roughly the size Canary's pacing produces. Stated plainly as what it is not: the port asked for a per-frame series and this is not one. The four intervals come from the screenshot probe, the weaker instrument, carrying a wall-clock duration off an emulator with load-dependent pacing -- the class that has cost this corpus four withdrawn timing claims. The strong instrument has never reached this screen: five attempts, blocked by wall-clock timeout, frame cap, a self-matching pkill, and the title sitting past the 137.7 s attract movie. So the fact and the period are answerable now; the trajectory within a cycle is not, and I am not inferring its shape from declared keyframes when the whole point of the splash exercise was that only a capture confirms shape. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
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dcaa322146 |
re: the decoder's timers are a double-tap latch on LB/LT, not key repeat
Answers H1's first half with a negative, and decodes what the timing constants are for. C_PAD_DECODER's +0xB4/+0xB8 and +0xBC/+0xC0 (10 and 90, twice) are not a key-repeat delay/interval pair. They are two identical channels of a DOUBLE-TAP detector, on cfg +0x74 (LT) and +0x70 (LB), firing output bits 0x20 and 0x40. The mechanism, from the image: both timers tick down once per update; a press arms the short timer to 10; a RELEASE adds 1000 to it as a flag stored inside the counter, which is why the tick watches for exactly 1000 and clears both there; a second press while the flag is set arms the long timer to 90; and while the long timer runs the output bit is asserted on EVERY update, with the short timer re-armed to 1010 each time. So it is a latch, not a repeat: a double-tap opens a 90-update window and the bit is held for its whole duration. That is a dash or barrel-roll shape, which fits the buttons it is wired to. H1: the directions have NO timer. The D-pad and left stick reach the output word through bare mask tests -- the four left-stick literals at 0x8220C458, C474, C490, C4AC, and DPAD DOWN through cfg +0xA4 -- with no counter loaded, decremented or tested on any of those paths. On the evidence of this layer a held direction does not repeat. Reach: one layer. A menu could implement repeat on top of a held bit, and this says nothing about that -- but it does establish the repeat is not in the shared decoder, so it would have to be per-screen. "One step per deflection" stays authored for the port; this narrows rather than settles. Refutation of my own earlier note that a decoder "is where a game normally puts its repeat timing, its edge detection and its button remap": remap survives, edge detection survives, repeat timing is REFUTED. That clause was a prior about how games are written, not a reading of this one. Also commits tools/ppc-dis, the minimal PowerPC disassembler this corpus has been rebuilding in scratch and losing to container restarts three times in one session. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
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cac31deccd |
re: sub_822380B0 is a type-tagged draw-queue walker, not the interpolator
Walked the route the bounded-negative page named -- trace down from the quad emitter -- and got one step. sub_822380B0 is not a geometry emitter. It fetches a vertex pointer from sub_823C2AC0, stashes it at this+0x20, then loops over an array of item POINTERS at this+4 bounded by this+0x0C and this+0x10, loading a type tag from item+8 and dispatching on it. So the object is a draw QUEUE and this function consumes it. That is a partial answer to a different open question: ui-quad-class-foothold.md records that no function iterating screen elements has been found. This iterates UI items and dispatches per item. It is a draw queue rather than a screen's declared element list, so it is not that walk, but it is the consumer immediately downstream and the type tag at item+8 is a concrete field to chase. Still not the interpolator: alpha is already decided by the time an item reaches the queue. The evaluator runs before the enqueue, so the next step is whoever pushes items -- the writer of +0x0C/+0x10 on this object. Recorded as an increment, not a finding: one function identified by disassembly, no behaviour measured, identification resting on code shape alone. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
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b32bcb97ae |
re: CORRECT the resample consequence -- the captures are crops, not resamples
The port pre-registered a test and ran it: against live-splash-publisher.png a cropped render scores RMSE 558.1 (0.85%) and a scaled one 10118.8 (15.4%). Cropping is 18x better. Confirmed here independently, from a different observable: the committed captures are 1279x675, 1280x690 and 1252x754. VARYING heights. A fixed presenter resample produces one size; crops of differently-sized windows produce exactly that spread. And ui-render-tone-curve.md had already recorded every capture aligning at dy=0 dx=0 with correlation 0.9466, which a 0.9375 vertical scale cannot produce -- the evidence was in the corpus before I wrote the claim. So the captures are crops of a 1:1 surface, and every RMSE, glyph count and surface mean against them is pixels to pixels with no filter to caveat. The blanket "everything measured off a PNG carries the resample" is withdrawn. Not refuted: the cvar reading. Canary does letterbox by default. What is refuted is my inference that the corpus's capture path went through it. Whether the presenter is bypassed, the window is 1:1, or the tool crops before saving is open and unestablished. The error is the one this session keeps paying for: I read a configuration and inferred a consequence FOR THE DATA without testing it against the data. The test costs one render and one RMSE and I had every capture needed to run it. Also downgrades my refutation of the corpus's oracle principle from "survives with a qualifier" to "survives, and my qualifier was wrong", kept rather than deleted because the failure is the instructive part. Section 1 (gamma: VdGetCurrentDisplayGamma is kStub, the splash shader has no pow/ramp/lookup) and the two-path distinction stand unchanged. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
515ad205e5 |
re: what Canary does between the guest's draw and a captured pixel
Answers question 3 of the 2026-09-02 play-test, from Canary's own source.
Gamma: Canary applies NONE. VdGetCurrentDisplayGamma is declared kStub and
only reports kernel_display_gamma_type (default 2, TV/BT.709) to the guest
so D3D can build a ramp. And the guest does not apply one either, for the
splash: its dumped pixel shader is four ALU ops -- tfetch2D, three muls, a
max -- with no pow, no ramp, no lookup.
Geometry: yes, the presenter resamples. present_letterbox defaults true and
present_safe_area_x/y default to 100, so the guest's 1280x720 is scaled to
fit the window and letterboxed with nothing cropped. That accounts for a
number the corpus has carried without explaining: captures measure the game
surface at 1279x675, and a single-pixel oracle placed at 1280x720
coordinates read the copyright line instead.
The structural consequence is the useful part. There are two measurement
paths and only one has Canary in it:
pixels guest draw -> EDRAM -> resolve -> front buffer ->
presenter (scale + letterbox) -> X11 -> screenshot -> PNG
=> carries a resample
vertex stream guest CPU writes a vertex buffer -> the draw logger reads
guest memory directly
=> carries nothing
The per-frame alpha series is the second path, which is why it can be
stated as the game's values rather than as pixels we measured. Everything
measured off a PNG carries the resample: every RMSE against a capture,
every glyph count, every surface mean.
Refutation attempt on this corpus's own founding principle, "the oracle is
the real game running in Canary, captured": it SURVIVES but needs a
qualifier it has never carried. A PNG capture is the oracle plus a
resample. Harmless for ordering, counts, durations and change; a filter in
the path for anything pixel-exact. The vertex stream is the stronger oracle
and should be preferred where the question can be asked of it.
Not measured: the resample's actual filter. I read the cvars saying scaling
happens, not the kernel doing it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
|
||
|
sylph-decoder
|
934fbfbbbf |
re: the interpolator is not found, and four routes are excluded
Question 1's behavioural half is answered elsewhere and measured. This is
the other half -- which function -- and it is not found. Recorded as a
bounded negative so the next attempt does not repeat four searches.
Excluded, all by exhaustive scans of the image:
integer lerp shape (divw with mullw and subf within 10 instructions):
28 sites image-wide, NONE in the UI region 0x82200000-0x823FFFFF
mulli by 40, the keyframe record stride: 31 sites, NONE in the UI region
addi rX,rX,40 in the UI region: 43 sites; the screen/bundle ones at
0x823CCA6C and 0x823CCA94 disassemble to a 40-byte container COPY loop
(CTR=10, ten-word copy), a vector reallocation, not an evaluator
fmadd-family in the UI region: 811 sites over 142 pages -- too diffuse to
select on, so float is neither excluded nor narrowed
The first two together say the evaluator does not compute its fraction with
integer multiply-and-divide and does not index records by multiplication.
With the measured steps landing on exact integers, the likeliest remaining
shape is a float lerp with a per-segment reciprocal, converted to a byte --
stated as a hypothesis, not a finding.
Names the route I would take next and did not have budget for: trace DOWN
from the quad emitter. sub_823C2AC0 has exactly 6 callers, four of them
sibling emitters, and sub_822380B0 reads its colour from this+0x04..0x10.
Whoever writes those fields is one step from the interpolator.
Reach stated: the two opcode negatives are exhaustive over the whole image
rather than sampled, but they do not exclude the interpolator living
outside the UI region, which is an assumption inherited from
ui-quad-class-foothold.md and not independently checked.
Not blocking the port: it needs whether to lerp and how, which is answered.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
|
||
|
sylph-decoder
|
acc6c09632 |
re: the game interpolates every frame, and its splash is ALSO mostly frozen
Answers question 1 of the 2026-09-02 play-test: interpolate or hold. It interpolates, piecewise-linearly, evaluated once per present at one unit per present. palogo_sqex_eff gives 28 distinct alphas over 28 consecutive presents, changing on 26 of 27 adjacent pairs. It is not one slope, and the disc says why: that element declares 0:a=0 -> 15:a=255 -> 30:a=212 -> 45:a=0, three segments with three gradients. Predicted -2.87 and -14.13 per unit against measured modal steps of -3 (x6) and -14 (x9). The declared keyframes predict the per-frame steps, which makes this a prediction rather than a description. So the port must lerp: hold-to-next-key would emit 3 states where the game emits 28. And "eased" is the wrong description -- there is no easing function, the envelope only looks eased because consecutive declared segments have different gradients. Alpha lives in the per-vertex k_8_8_8_8 colour, rewritten into a fresh vertex buffer every frame. Not a PS constant (ps_c[n=0] on 1048/1048), not a blend factor, not a texture swap. 🔴 And the game's splash is ALSO mostly frozen. Measured with the same statistic the play-test used on the port: the game moves 21.2% and 27.8% against the port's 16.4%, and its longest frozen run is 3.34 s against the port's 3.20 s. The publisher declares 205 of 255 units -- 80% -- as a flat hold at full opacity. That refutes the play-test's second clause. "A fade does not hold one picture for 3.20 s" -- this one does, for 3.34 s. Its first clause stands: 26 states for a 45-unit build-in is too few, the game gives 49 and 51. The deficit is the state count, not the freeze: ~100 against 26. Acting on the second clause would have sent the port to remove the one part of its splash that is already right. Not answered: which function does it. This is the behaviour; the image-side half of question 1 is still open. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
||
|
sylph-decoder
|
33a6b4ea6f |
re: the three routes to 60 are one witness in three coats -- audit, and the capture sized
The port observed that the justification for 60 has changed three times while the number never moved, and that three routes sharing an upstream assumption are weaker than they look. Checked. They do share one. Route B needs "the guest presents 60x/s", which comes from the vblank histogram UNDER XENIA'S 60 HZ LIMITER. Route C needs "the vblank is 60 Hz", which is that limiter's cvar directly. Route D is a wall-clock duration that lands on 60 only because the vblank is 60 Hz and Canary roughly keeps up. All three reduce to one fact: the display refreshes 60 times per second on this emulator. I presented them as corroboration and that was wrong. What is actually established, by manipulation rather than agreement: units/second EQUALS the display refresh rate. Forcing 30 Hz gave 30.2 units/s; at 60 Hz it is 59.8/61.3. One factor changed, the output tracked it. It becomes "60 units/s" only via an external fact this corpus has not measured -- that an Xbox 360 outputs 60 Hz. That is a hardware specification and it is solid, but it belongs outside the measurement rather than laundered into a third agreeing route. The conditional form is more useful anyway: it says what to do on hardware that is not 60 Hz, which is exactly why the port's time-based clock at a fixed 60 units/s is the right construction rather than a coincidence. And it keeps the port's `authored` classification correct -- nothing here promotes it. Also sizes the clock-origin capture properly. FRAMES=9000 ran to completion still in the movie at 8999, so the cap really fired this time. Content hashes show 3967 distinct decoded frames against ADV.wmv's declared 4131 -- 96% complete -- at 1.79 presents per decoded frame, not the 2.00 I assumed, which is why the estimate was short. Needs ~294 more presents to clear the movie plus >=236 for the plate, so FRAMES=11000. Free on the way past: 3967 decoded frames over 7091 presents at ~52 presents/host-s is 29.1 movie frames/s against the disc's declared 30.000, a 3% match that ties the present rate to a disc fact rather than a clock. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
||
|
sylph-decoder
|
befcb74780 |
re: the clock rate follows the VBLANK -- reconciling three pages that disagreed
h3 says 2 units per guest frame, units-per-second-measured says time-integrated at 56.8 units/s, and my own page says 1 unit per present. All three rest on real data and one mechanism explains all of them: the clock advances one unit per VBLANK, and presents can be dropped without the clock caring. That accounts for the corpus's steps of +17/+34/+51 (1, 2, 3 vblanks between two logged presents), for the same animation spanning 21 labels in one capture and 33 in another -- which a strict per-present clock cannot produce -- for h3's three plate steps of 23, and for my own 14 consecutive steps of 17 in a run that dropped almost nothing. My "1 unit per present" was nearly right and named the wrong clock. At --framerate_limit=30 Xenia vblanks at 30 Hz and the guest presents ~30/s, so presents and vblanks coincide and the test could not tell them apart. It correctly refuted time-integration; it could not locate the tick. Solid: the RATE follows the vblank rate. 255 declared units take 4.26/4.16 s at a 60 Hz vblank and 8.45 s at 30 Hz -- 59.8/61.3 against 30.2 units/s. A time-integrated clock predicts 4.25 s in both. So a console at 60 Hz gives 60 units/s, and the port's value stands on a third independent route. Not solid: per-vblank vs per-present. My step samples are ~12 per run, which cannot separate them, and I say so rather than reading 18% vs 0% of two events as support. The load-bearing observation for the mechanism is the corpus's 21-vs-33, not mine. The discriminating experiment is named and not run: log Xenia's D1MODE_V_COUNTER beside each present and check every step is exactly 17 x (vblanks elapsed). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
||
|
sylph-decoder
|
a7013a8fe1 |
re: the long capture ran and fell 32% short -- sized the next one from measurement
Attempted the capture this page named: FRAMES=8000, MAXDRAWS=400000, 700 s. Reached frame 5954, still in the movie, zero UI quads after it. Neither cap fired -- 24 213 draws of a 400 000 cap, 5954 frames of 8000 -- so it ended on the script's wall-clock timeout and nothing about the method is wrong. It needs a longer window, not a different approach. Sized from what this run measured rather than guessed: ~460 presents for the splashes, a 137.714 s movie at 30.000 fps from the disc = 4131 decoded frames, 2 presents per decoded frame measured, so ~8700 presents to clear the movie. This reached 5954, about 68%, at ~22 presents/s armed. So FRAMES=9000 and a timeout of at least 1200 s. Also noting a saving I did not take: the h= content hash reads guest memory for every sampled texture and the movie binds three planes per draw, but the clock-origin measurement needs vertex alpha and not hashes. That field is unconditional in canary-patches/0004; putting it behind its own cvar would make this run materially faster. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
e354e11f4c |
method: a finding is only as portable as the tool that produced it
Records today's trap where the corpus keeps its traps, so it outlives the session that paid for it. Four Canary commits existed only inside the container and were cited the way one cites a public reference -- "canary sylpheed-re d90d14e02, already built" -- a line that reads as a complete recipe and is reachable from nowhere but that box. The failure is silent and delayed by design: the recipe looks complete so nobody checks it, and it fails only for someone on a different machine long after its author could say what the flag did. Nothing in the repository disagrees with itself meanwhile, so no consistency check fires. Notes why citation checkers do not cover the class -- they scan repository paths, and an instrument in another container is not a path -- so they catch the recoverable case (a stale pointer to a committed artefact) and slide past the lost one. And that the audit only works pointed at yourself: both agents ran it on the same day, one finding a stale path to a committed artefact and the other four artefacts that existed nowhere else, neither able to find the other's from the far side of the wall. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
3e067decef |
re: the clock origin is blocked -- a 600-present boot capture has no title in it
The clock origin is the last surviving candidate for finding 3, and now that the clock is known to advance 1 unit per present it is directly measurable as a count: observe the plate at a known declared alpha, count presents back to the title's first draw, and the difference is the title's clock value at its own first draw. No capture I have contains the title. Three captures agree on what the boot does: publisher splash (219/228/244 presents), developer splash (186/185/204), then the attract movie at 422/429/463. Two splashes, then the movie. There is no title segment. This re-frames an old blocker as expected rather than mysterious. The corpus records "three runs, two locales, two launch paths, ~35 minutes of emulator time, no interactive title" as unexplained. MISSION's own boot order is splash -> intro video -> title, ADV.wmv is 137.7 s from the disc, and 600 presents at ~50/s is ~12 s. The title is on the far side of a two-minute movie; a capture that never reaches it is behaving correctly. Two ways to settle it. Tapping A skips the movie but risks the save-data probe that crashed the guest on 2026-08-18, per the capture script's own header. Capturing through the whole movie needs ~6900 presents against the 600 used here, needs no pad input and cannot crash the guest, so that is the one to run. Not run this iteration, deliberately: I would rather pre-register the origin prediction than start a long capture at the end of an iteration. The prediction is stated on the page so the next run is not exploratory -- the plate's a=17 must land 215 presents after the title's first draw if the clock starts there, and any shortfall is the offset in units. Reach: the negative is specific. Within the first ~460 presents of boot the title does not draw. It says nothing about after the attract movie, which is where the answer is. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
705a8485dc |
re: the clock is FRAME-based, 1 unit per present -- my own test refuted my claim
Ran --framerate_limit=30 against predictions committed beforehand. Every
discriminating row went to the frame-based column:
frame-based time-based (mine) measured
presents/s ~27 ~27 28.4
modal alpha step 17 unchanged 34 doubled 17 UNCHANGED
units/s ~30 halved ~60 unchanged 30.2 / 30.3
publisher dwell ~8.5 s ~4.2 s 8.450 s DOUBLED
developer dwell ~7.0 s ~3.5 s 6.923 s DOUBLED
Both controls passed first. The limiter took effect (28.4 presents/host-s
against 51-55, interval mass moving from one 60 Hz vblank to two, 422 of
468), and all 8/8 splash quad rects are identical so nothing but the frame
rate differs.
So the UI clock advances exactly 1 unit per presented frame. The step is 17
on every quad at 28.4, 51.4 and 54.8 presents/s, and 255*1/15 = 17 with the
declared T=15. units/second = presents/second, and seconds are not a
property of the game.
The port's 60 stands: the guest presents once per 60 Hz vblank
unconstrained, and 1 unit per present at 60/s is 60 units/s. Same answer as
my first position, finally with a tested mechanism instead of an inference.
This withdraws units-per-frame-is-not-a-constant.md in its central claim.
My "a time-based clock is immune to dropped frames so the dwell is stable"
was a real prediction and it failed -- the dwell doubled. The four-run
agreement I read as evidence was four runs at similar frame rates.
h3-units-per-frame-measured.md's +34 is now the anomaly rather than the
rule: 34 per label at 27.2 labels/s against 17 per present at 28.4
presents/s. Both cannot be presents. Not asserting it is wrong, only that
one of them must explain the disagreement.
Three of my four positions came from inference over a measured quantity;
this one came from changing an input and watching what moved. The
opportunistic comparison pointed exactly the wrong way because nothing
controlled what else differed between those captures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
|
||
|
sylph-decoder
|
5d72bda77d |
re: PRE-REGISTER the forced-frame-rate test of the time-based clock
The time-based-clock claim rests on two captures that happened to run at different speeds. Nobody has changed the frame rate on purpose and watched. --framerate_limit=30 halves Xenia's vblank ceiling. Predictions committed before the run: quantity frame-based time-based (my claim) presents/s ~27 ~27 modal alpha step 17, unchanged 34, DOUBLED units/s ~30, halved ~60, unchanged splash dwells ~8.5 / ~7.0 s ~4.2 / ~3.5 s, unchanged Accept time-based only if the step lands in 30-38 AND the dwell stays within 10% of 4.2/3.5 s. If the step stays 17 and the dwell doubles, the claim is refuted, the clock is frame-based, and the port's 60 is unsupported again. The control is the present rate itself, read FIRST: a doubled step also appears if the limiter did nothing, so if presents/s does not fall to ~27 neither prediction is tested. Second control: the eight splash quad rects must be unchanged, or something other than the frame rate differs between runs. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
73f5f57966 |
re: WITHDRAW 120 -- units per FRAME is not a constant, the clock is time-based, 60 is right
My fourth position today, and it returns to the port's. Splash B's logo quads in this capture step +17 per present, 14 gap-free steps, four quads agreeing. h3-units-per-frame-measured.md measured the SAME elements at +34 and concluded 2 units per frame. Both are right. With the declared T=15, dA/present = 255*(units/present)/T: h3 capture 27.2 presents/s +34 2.0 units/present 54.4 units/s this capture 51.4 presents/s +17 1.0 units/present 51.4 units/s Units per present halved when the presentation rate doubled. Units per second did not move. The UI clock advances by ELAPSED TIME, not by frame count, and "2 units per frame" was a property of a capture that ran at 27 fps, never of the game. So my 120 units/s is withdrawn: it was 2 units/present x 60 presents/s, and the first factor is not a constant. The movie result is re-explained rather than refuted. 2 presents per decoded movie frame at 51.4 presents/s is a movie decoding at 25.7 fps -- a 30 fps movie at 86% under a slow emulator. The measurement held; the inference assumed the movie decoded at 30/s in real time, which it does not when the emulator is slow. Same shape as the first withdrawal. 60 is now positively supported rather than merely undefended. A time-based clock is immune to dropped frames, which predicts the dwell in seconds is stable across runs at different frame rates -- and it is, across four runs whose present rates differ by 1.9x: 255/4.27 = 59.7 and 210/3.46 = 60.7, both within 1% of 60. h3-units-per-frame-measured.md's conclusion needs demoting: its measurement stands, its law is a single-capture artefact, and it is the origin of the constant this question has thrashed on. Finding 3 is open again with no surviving named cause. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
33f141a3df |
re: the dwell corpus does not falsify 120 -- it measures the screen, not the animation
The port raised this as load-bearing and it is answered, without a speed factor. I expected to find the three cold boots slow and argue contamination. They are not. My capture reproduces them: publisher 4.263 s against 4.297 / 4.604 / 4.370, developer 3.457 s against 3.508 / 3.503 / 3.366. Four runs agree, so that defence is unavailable and I am not using it. The flaw is in the comparison. 2.125 s is the publisher's declared ANIMATION length; 4.3 s is how long the SCREEN is up, and the screen holds after the timeline ends. Measured as counts in one capture: the publisher is on screen for 219 presents and animates for about 128 of them. The falsifier would have found a contradiction at any units-per-second. The decisive number needs no speed factor: 51.4 presents per host-second on the publisher splash, 53.8 on the developer. Xenia's limiter marks vblank at 60 Hz and caps presents there. A 30 fps guest presents every second vblank, at most 30 per second, and a slow emulator can only make intervals longer. 51.4 > 30, so a 30 fps guest cannot produce this. A 60 fps guest can: 51.4 is 86% of 60, matching the vblank histogram's 14% drops. So 60 units/s is refuted by a count against a hard limit rather than by a duration against a fitted factor -- the argument the 2.13 s reconciliation could not make. The dwell corpus stands in its own terms. Those seconds are the screen's dwell on this emulator, reproducible, and were never a statement about units per second. Recording what I got wrong on the way: I first segmented the atlas eras as "both splashes then the title" and briefly had a 2x discrepancy that would have let me declare the dwell corpus contaminated. The segmentation was wrong, and the durations matching the corpus to 1% is what exposed it. A convenient answer from an unchecked segmentation is the same trap as a clean answer from an unguarded assumption. Reach unchanged: still one boot for the hash ratio. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
||
|
sylph-decoder
|
60145720ed |
re: the guest presents at 60 fps -- 120 units/s, and the port's plate IS ~2 s late
Answered against the pre-registration committed before the capture, with a content hash added to the draw logger. The buffer rotates three times faster than the content changes: 177 presents carry 3 base addresses but only 102 distinct content hashes, and the modal run is exactly 2 presents per decoded frame. Consecutive presents with changed content = 0.5739, inside the pre-registered R band of 0.40-0.60. That is precisely the failure that invalidated my first answer this morning. The base address changed every present, which I measured and read as one decode per present. The content did not. ADV.wmv is authored at 30.000 fps, so 2 presents per movie frame is 60 presents/s, and 2 units/present x 60 = 120 units/s. Both controls pass, and they are the ones the withdrawn version lacked -- its two guards tested how I READ the buffer, neither tested whether a buffer change meant a decode. Control 1, a static texture must hash constant: the splash atlas changes once, at an era boundary, and never within an era -- 1 change in 403 samples. Noting that I first wrote this control as "must be constant" and it read FAIL; stated that way it was wrong, because a re-upload is real content change and the control has to separate temporal from alternating. A control that is too strong gets waved away, which is its own failure. Control 2, the movie luma hash must not be constant: 102 distinct. Consequence: the plate's t=236 is 1.97 s, not 3.93 s, and the port shows it ~1.96 s late. That is play-test finding 3, and "about two seconds" is the size the human reported. Every declared duration in seconds across the corpus is half what we have been quoting; unit counts are untouched. The 2.13 s third route is explained by emulator speed, and that explanation is labelled POST-HOC and is not offered as support -- fitting a speed factor to close a gap is what this corpus keeps losing claims to. Reach: one boot. This number has moved twice today and a second independent boot should come before the port rewrites a timeline. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
||
|
sylph-decoder
|
56ae05a18b |
re: PRE-REGISTER the decode-vs-rotate test, and add a content hash to the logger
The experiment guest-frame-rate-WITHDRAWN.md named. A triple buffer rotating once per present visits the same three base addresses whether or not anything was decoded into them, so base identity cannot separate "decode per present" (30 fps guest, 60 units/s) from "rotate per present" (60 fps guest, 120 units/s). A content hash can. command_processor.cc now emits h=<FNV-1a over 4096 sampled bytes> beside every sampled texture, omitted rather than faked when the address does not translate, so a missing hash cannot read as a matching one. Incremental build, one translation unit. Predictions committed before the capture: consecutive presents with changed luma content is ~1.00 under decode-per-present and ~0.50 under rotate-per-present, with acceptance bands and "neither" reported rather than rounded. The control is the part I got wrong last time. A STATIC texture must hash constant: the splash sprite page 0x11A50000 is a fixed atlas, and if its hash varies between presents then reading guest memory at draw time races the decoder and nothing in the log may be read. That fails loudly in the direction which would otherwise manufacture the answer I previously reached -- the property my last control lacked. A second control in the other direction requires the movie luma hash NOT to be constant, which would mean hashing the wrong bytes and would manufacture the opposite answer. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
||
|
sylph-decoder
|
eeb4473b4f |
re: the port's 12-unit bracket does not exclude 120 -- its low end is the sampler's floor
The port kept 60 on a stated constraint: the transition quad is declared black for 12 units, measured at 0.14-0.30 s, giving 40-86 units/s, so 60 is in and 120 is out. Attempted to refute it, and it does not hold. Two reasons, either sufficient. The low end is the instrument's floor. title-plate-delay-measured.md says of that number, in its own words, "at a sampling resolution (0.125 s) that cannot do better". 0.14 s IS one sample. At 120 units/s, 12 units is 0.100 s, which a 0.125 s sampler reports as roughly 0.14 s -- exactly the value read as excluding it. The 86 units/s upper limit is an artefact of dividing by a floored duration. And a wall-clock duration off Canary is not independent of the unknown. Apparent units/s = true units/s x speed factor, and the speed factor is precisely what makes the three routes disagree. The bracket says "if Canary ran at real time, 40-86" and whether it did is the question. What survives is the declared side, and it is a disc fact worth keeping: the transition opens over 12 units, independently confirmed as 6 frames by screen-transitions.md's 255/6-per-frame ramp. That leg has no wall clock in it and is real evidence -- for units per FRAME, which was never in dispute. This does not argue for 120. Nothing supports 120 either. It removes a reason for excluding it, and my position is unchanged: the value is authored until the content-hash experiment runs. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
ca401d8b04 |
re: WITHDRAW "the guest presents at 30 fps" -- the clean result WAS the failure mode
Published this morning, withdrawn the same day. The measurement was real; the inference was not established. My own pre-registration named three ways the instrument could lie and guarded two. The third -- "the guest may be frame-locked to its own presentation rather than to the movie clock" -- is the one that occurred, and a perfect 1.0000 is exactly what it produces: a triple buffer rotating once per present gives run-length 1 at ANY frame rate. So the measurement cannot separate a 30 fps guest decoding one movie frame per present from a 60 fps guest rotating a buffer per present. The methodological error is the part worth keeping. I wrote the guard down, saw a result so clean it had no tail, and read the cleanness as strength. A clean result on an instrument whose key assumption is unguarded is not confirmation -- the cleanness may be the failure mode's own signature. Both guards I did build tested how the buffer was READ; neither tested whether a buffer change means a decode. What surfaced it: the draw log carries a per-frame gtick marker I had not noticed. It is host time rescaled (Clock::QueryGuestTickCount is host_tick_count * guest_tick_ratio, scalar 1.0), so it is a wall clock and cannot be read as a rate -- but its SHAPE has no phase. Xenia locks vblank to 60 Hz, and the present interval is ONE vblank 71.7% of the time and two 24.6%. A guest hard-locked to 30 fps presents every second vblank and would put the mass at 2. I am NOT replacing it with 120. Three routes now disagree: the withdrawn movie cadence says 60, the vblank cadence says ~120, and title-plate-delay's 120 declared units in 2.13 s measured twice to 6 ms says ~56. Two of the three must be wrong and I do not know which. Publishing 120 would repeat the mistake this commit withdraws. The port is told to keep 60 for now, and told plainly that it is an authored value rather than a measured one. The settling experiment is named: hash the movie luma plane's CONTENTS per present rather than its base address, which separates "the buffer rotated" from "a frame was decoded". Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
|
fa27509937 |
formats: teach the reference renderer the additive blend, and re-open 8 claims
The blend bit has been decoded against RB_BLENDCONTROL0 since 2026-08-31, but ui_layout::blit could not draw it, and said so in a comment citing a refutation that is <render-vs-capture> -- this renderer disagreeing with itself while it had a stale keyframe association, no leaf geometry and no rotation. The consequence the port raised: verify-screen compares two renderers, so a renderer that structurally cannot express a declared field makes the check incapable on every screen that uses it -- 12 of 16 -- and the tolerance silently excuses all of them. A quiet check is worse than a failing one. Both equations come off the game's own pixel shader, which premultiplies (oC0 = rgb*A, A), so only the blend register differs: 0x07010701 gives rgb*A + dst*(1-A), 0x01010101 gives rgb*A + dst. Additive therefore saturates rather than wrapping, and a transparent or black source is the identity -- neither is a choice. No plumbing needed: t8ad::parse already stores +0x04 as T8adImage::flags. Four controls, pinned against arithmetic per the rotation precedent. The fourth is the only one that can fail for the right reason: the first three pass just as well if blit ignores the flag and draws everything additive, so the discriminator flips only the blend on one sprite and requires two different answers, each equal to its own equation. That is the same failure class as the port's non-inverting latch check and my own backward scan that resolved every guard to "internal". 120 passed, 0 failed on the full lib suite. 67 sprites over 14 screens were being drawn with the wrong blend, including 10 of 18 on the title and ptbtn00f, the PRESS (A) plate's highlight. R1: tools/stale-instrument render-vs-capture lists 8 claims that died to this instrument, including both legs of the rest() pair and "the plate-free title capture may be too early to be settled", which sits on play-test finding 3. None is re-derived here; this only records that the instrument no longer exists in that form. Also corroborates the port's H5: pgloading_loop5 is an ELEMENT resolving to sprite pgloading_ring.t32, which is additive. I could not find loop5 as a sprite in any pak and nearly reported a false contradiction from the element/sprite name split. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
|
9ea6ee7555 |
re: the blend bit was challenged on pteff10 and SURVIVES; finding 3 loses its second candidate
The port isolated main_menu's 10.88 -> 13.02 regression to pteff10 and asked whether the per-draw log shows it alpha-over, which would be a counter-example to ui-blend-mode-decoded.md. It does not. blend-bit-vs-oracle.txt has pteff10 ADDITIVE on entry 5 (main menu) AND entry 6 (extras), both labels read out of the guest command stream, and HANDOFF states it from three independent menu sessions, every frame. The premise came from a stale coverage table of mine that the same HANDOFF entry had already corrected in place. Recording that: a correction which leaves the wrong table visible upstream of it has not landed. And the regression was predicted on this exact element before adoption -- HANDOFF flagged pteff10 as the one row the port's renderer would not corroborate, because for a dim wholly-semi-transparent glow (max alpha 130) over a dark background additive and alpha-over nearly coincide. A renderer metric getting worse while the render gets more correct is the standing rule with a number on it. Separately, the port answered my finding-3 candidate: a frozen sweep of the plate region rises monotonically across the declared 214->236, so the port fades rather than pops and its t=236 is a completion. That kills the onset branch. Two of the play-test's four named candidates for finding 3 are now dead -- units/s (measured at 60) and the ramp. Finding 3 has no surviving named cause. The clock origin is the one to take next, because every measurement so far is a DIFFERENCE between two events and a difference cannot detect a common offset. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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sylph-decoder
|
27f81d6d91 |
re: the guest presents at 30 fps -- 60 units/s, and the port was right
Answered against the pre-registration committed before the capture.
Units per second was the last open number on the PRESS (A) plate, and both
prior measurements of it were wall-clock readings off an emulator that runs
the guest slow by an unknown factor. They disagreed by 2.9x, because a 30 Hz
guest at full speed and a 60 Hz guest at half speed look identical on a wall
clock.
The ruler here is not a clock. ADV.wmv declares 30.0000 fps in its own ASF
header, so a decoded movie frame is a tick the emulator's speed cannot
stretch. Presented frames per decoded movie frame is guest_fps/30 with no
wall clock in the chain.
predicted H_A 30 fps -> 60 units/s -> 1.0
H_B 60 fps -> 120 units/s -> 2.0
measured 1.0000
Both pre-registered guards pass. Guard 2: a perfect repeating 3-buffer
cycle, 52 uses each (exactly 156/3), 2 chroma planes per luma on 156 of 156.
Guard 1: run lengths are 156 runs ALL of length 1 -- no smear, so the
dropped-movie-frame bias that would have pushed the answer toward 120 is
measurably absent rather than argued away.
So H_A. The port keeps its 60 and changes nothing.
REFUTES the live H3 hypothesis that 120 units/s explains the play-test's
late plate. That hypothesis was well-formed and attractive precisely because
it would have explained the complaint, which is why it needed a ruler that
is not a clock.
Which means finding 3 still has no cause. The strongest remaining candidate
is decoded rather than speculative: the plate's declared onset is t=214, not
t=236 -- a 22-unit fade, matching the T=22 the oracle confirmed by measuring
+23 alpha per presented frame on that element.
The pre-registered control could NOT be run: this logger build emits vb=
addresses, not vertex contents, so there was no alpha to check +34 against.
A weaker control is substituted and labelled -- the splash shader/blend
census, which validates the log's structure (what this measurement uses) and
not alpha extraction (which it does not).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
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sylph-decoder
|
f0185fba52 |
re: PRE-REGISTER the guest frame-rate test -- the movie is the ruler
Units per second is the one number left on the PRESS (A) plate, and both existing measurements of it are wall-clock readings off an emulator that runs the guest slower than real time by an unknown factor. They disagree by 2.9x, which is what that method is worth here. ADV.wmv declares 30.0000 fps exactly in its own ASF header (stream #2, avgTimePerFrame = 333333 x100ns). That is a disc fact, so a decoded movie frame is a tick of a clock Canary's speed cannot stretch. The measurement is a ratio of counts with no wall clock in it: how many consecutive swap labels bind the same movie luma texture base. H_A guest 30 fps -> 60 units/s -> 1.0 labels per movie frame H_B guest 60 fps -> 120 units/s -> 2.0 labels per movie frame Committed BEFORE the capture so the number cannot be chosen afterwards, with acceptance bands, the three ways the instrument could lie, a guard for two of them, and a named control (the splashes' established +34/frame must reproduce in the same log, or the log is not comparable). Noting the trap I nearly fell into: stream #1's avgTimePerFrame is a packet rate and reads as 3.05 fps. Reading the wrong stream is the obvious way to get this wrong, so it is written down. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
4518b5c76a |
re: the pad word is REMAPPED -- my own bit table was mislabelled throughout
input-pad-read-path.md says of the word the C_PAD_DECODER reads: "There is no shift and no remap on the way in -- the bit positions are XINPUT's own." That is wrong. sub_8220D500 rebuilds the word out of XINPUT_GAMEPAD before anything else sees it, into the game's own numbering. bits 0-3 A B X Y bits 4-7 left stick UP DOWN LEFT RIGHT (+/-20000 of 32767) bits 8-11 right stick UP DOWN LEFT RIGHT bits 12-15 D-pad UP DOWN LEFT RIGHT bits 16-17 START, BACK bits 18-19 LB, RB bits 20-21 LT, RT -- digital, threshold >220 of 255 bits 22-23 L3, R3 Extracted mechanically from the image, no row typed by hand. The control is the shape of the result: the 24 assignments land on bits 0..23, each used exactly once, none repeated. A misdecode does not produce a bijection over a contiguous range, and coincidence does not put the stick and D-pad directions in the same order in two aligned nibbles. So every mask in that page's tables names the wrong button. The 0xE000 x18 site, read there as "B | X | Y", is "D-pad DOWN | LEFT | RIGHT" -- eighteen sites testing a menu cursor, which is what 18 sites should be. And its headline negative is REFUTED: "LB and RB are not menu inputs" is false. They are bound at config fields this+0x70 and this+0x84, LT/RT at +0x74/+0x80. The negative was searched for 0x0100/0x0200 -- LB and RB in XINPUT's numbering -- in a word where they live at 0x40000/0x80000. Right function, right buttons, wrong bit positions, so it could only come back empty. A negative is only as good as the numbering it was searched in. Also decodes the ring record: +12 HELD, +16 PRESSED, +20 RELEASED, +28/+32 raw trigger bytes. Edge and level are one struct four bytes apart, which displaces that page's guess that press-vs-hold was split between GetState and the XamInputGetKeystrokeEx queue. The superset claim in that page survives and is untouched: sub_82457038 really does compare every XINPUT_GAMEPAD field, and it really is XINPUT-layout. This page depends on it. Not decoded: which output bit means which ACTION, and per-screen sets. 5 of 18 output-bit sites did not resolve to a pad guard, so the output map is a lower bound -- in particular "START is not tested" is NOT claimed. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
e263041337 |
re: the splash blur is a TEXTURE -- palogo_*_eff is a baked 10-px glow
Play-test finding 4, answered as a mechanism and from the disc, so it generalises instead of describing one boot. ui-splash-draw-pass.md excluded a post-process from GPU state and closed with "that softness is in the texture or in which quads are drawn, not in a pass", leaving the two unseparated. It is both, and they are one fact: each logo ships a second texture that IS the blur -- the same artwork outset by exactly 10 px per side, concentric to <=1.5 px, drawn as its own alpha-over quad. Three results, each with its control: * The capture's eight anonymous quads are NAMED from the disc. Predicting each NDC rect from declared position + decoded sprite size matches all eight bijectively; every match <=0.0061, every runner-up >=0.0272, a 4.5-8.9x margin. That margin is the control -- eight similar boxes would match anything. * REFUTES splash-quad-timeline.txt's "the same three rects scaled slightly larger" (my own earlier wording). The x and y scale factors differ by up to 0.28; a uniform scale cannot do that, a fixed 10-px border can. The conclusion it supported (draw all six quads) stands; the model was wrong, and the wrong model tells a port to scale a sprite. * The T8aD blend bit tested OUT of sample on entries 10/11, which were not in its 35-row fit and are the screens under complaint. Pre-registered additive=false for all eight against 0 additive draws in 1048; held 8/8, with the control still reporting 9 additive on entry 6. Also resolves a REFUTED.md 🟡 <our-reader> in the reader's favour: the prediction is ours and the target is the oracle, so the agreement is evidence about the reader rather than a claim resting on it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
df51101faf |
handoff: withdraw the splash rate, and strike the section that carried it
Told the port plainly: their arithmetic was right, the 35-40 is withdrawn, keep 60 for every screen, and do not average or split anything. Struck the previous section's heading in place rather than deleting it. Carried the instrument lesson across, because it is worth more than the number: the guest timebase does not remove the pacing artefact, since the game's animation clock is frame-coupled rather than being the guest timebase. My control verified capability -- does this clock track real time -- when the question was configuration: is the quantity I divide by coupled to the frame rate. Also told them what this leaves: both halves of the human's finding 4 that were mine are answered and neither points at their export, so their own unbound-A observation is now the strongest candidate and it is theirs. |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
c1c8aa4288 |
re: WITHDRAW 'the unit rate is per-GamePart' -- it was the emulator's frame rate
The Port's arithmetic was right: a 160-unit sub-interval cannot outlast the 210-unit group containing it, and my hold (4.514 s) outlasted three cold-boot measurements of the whole group (3.37/3.50/3.51 s). My own capture says why, once asked the right question. The three numbers I quoted came from three regions of ONE run, and I never asked how fast the emulator was going in each: splash B (the hold) 3.39 labels/guest-second -> I reported 35.4 splash A (publisher) 15.33 -> I reported 40.0 the title (the plate) 23.20 -> I reported 56.8 Monotonic. The 'per-GamePart rate' is the pacing of the region it was measured in. Splash B was captured at 3.4 fps, an eighth of the title region. And the corpus already had this. boot-splash-dwells-are-declared.md says in its own words that the wall-clock dwell is an emulator-pacing artefact that varies run to run, with a no-input boot 15-20% long on the same declared timeline. I re-derived a documented artefact as a discovery and drew a false conclusion from it. The instrument lesson, which is the part worth keeping: I believed the guest timebase removed the artefact. It does not. The game's animation clock is not the guest timebase -- it is frame-coupled -- so a slow run advances less animation per guest second and no clock can see that from inside. My control asked 'does this timebase track real time', which is capability. The question that mattered was 'is the quantity I divide by coupled to the frame rate', and nothing I ran asked it. That is PROTOCOL's own warning, which I quoted at the other agent two iterations ago and then walked into. Restated: the clock is neither purely frame-counted (21 vs 33 labels for one animation) nor purely time-integrated (rate scales with frame rate). Consistent with a clamped per-frame delta, untested, and now the real open question. Consequence: no rate measured on this emulator is the console's; all are biased low. Best estimate stays the declared timeline against the fastest runs -- 60 units/s, 1.1% on the developer splash. The port keeps 60 for every screen and nothing needs averaging. Untouched: section 1 of splash-declared-vs-captured.md. It compares a disc table against vertex alphas at integer t and never divides by a duration, so the pacing artefact cannot reach it. |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
227d9b0439 |
handoff: one units-per-second cannot be right, the splash timeline is confirmed, and H5 refuted
Three sections, the correction first. The rate is per-GamePart: title ~57, splash ~35-40. I gave them 56.8 an hour ago and said the reach was the title; the splashes now have their own number with T read off the disc. The hold is what makes it safe to hand over -- 160 declared units in 4.514 guest seconds, with no T, no alpha slope and no interpolation in the arithmetic, agreeing with the same screen's ramp which shares none of its algebra. Told them a splash played at 60 runs 1.5-1.7x too fast, which is a TIMELINE cause for the complaint we had both filed under blur. Classified measured, not decoded, and told them not to extend either number to any other screen. The R1-re-opened 'declared timeline reproduces the captured splash' settles in favour of the timeline: 39/50 exact under truncation, worst error one alpha level in 255, nothing off by more than one. So their export's splash keyframes are right and the rate was the defect. Refutation attempt on their H5, recorded whether it survived or not: it does not. build_12 and build_15 have identical declaration bodies, so identical statistics is one fact rather than two coincidences -- as do 0/1, 2/3 and 11/14, while 4/7, 5/8, 6/9 and 10/13 genuinely differ. Also recorded the trap I hit first: the dump header carries the build number, so the compared text contained the label distinguishing the subjects and every pair read as different. A self-comparison control caught it. |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
4b5ac88f0a |
re: the declared timeline DOES reproduce the splash -- and the unit rate is per-GamePart
Two results, one of which corrects me. 1. The R1-re-opened 'declared keyframe timeline reproduces the captured splash' resolves in FAVOUR of the declared timeline. Instrument is a disc keyframe table against the guest's vertex stream -- no renderer in the chain, which is what the 'our-reader' tag demanded. Calibration-free test: is each captured alpha an exact member of the declared piecewise-linear value set at integer t? 39/50 exact under truncation, 30/50 under rounding, and the worst error under either rule is ONE alpha level in 255. All 11 non-exact samples are low by exactly 1 and all are on falling segments. The old refutation rested on 'still at a=255 nine frames after its declared a=32' -- under the fixed layout a=32 is at t=206, four units from the end of a 210-unit timeline. That was the off-by-one association. 2. The unit->seconds rate is PER-GAMEPART, which corrects what I told the port an hour ago. Title ~57 units/guest-second; splash ~35-40. The splash figure is confirmed two ways that share no algebra: a 15-unit ramp (T read off the disc, not borrowed) and a 160-unit HOLD, which is a declared duration with no T, no alpha slope and no interpolation in it. And my 'the borrowed T=15 does not apply' was wrong in the other direction: the disc says T=15 plainly. What failed was the premise of a single global rate, not the T. Noted at the foot of that page rather than by editing it. The trap worth recording: all four elements give 650-679 alpha/s, agreeing to 2%, which reads exactly like one clock. It is a coincidence -- T differs 22 vs 15 and the rates differ 57 vs 37, and the ratios nearly cancel. A quantity that looks constant across screens is not evidence of one clock when the thing that would vary is inside it. The hold breaks the tie. For the port: a single keyframe_units_per_second cannot be right, and a splash played at 60 runs 1.5-1.7x too fast -- shorter, sharper fades than the game's, which is the direction the play-test reported. |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
3d1c3c9564 |
re: fix the stale headline on the units-per-second page
The title still said 'not yet a number' after the second half resolved it to 56.8. Kept the failed first half in place and in order -- the borrowed T is the lesson -- but a reader must not stop at the header. |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
d67aaaf30b |
re: the rate is 56.8 units per guest second -- both predictions hold, control passes
The capture reached the title AFTER the harness stopped classifying, so the plate's ramp was in the log with tick stamps after all. ptbtn00: alpha 11->231 over 334.4 guest ms = 657.9 alpha/s. With its independently attested T=22 that is 56.8 units per guest second, inside the pre-registered 55-65 band. The final step of every ramp is excluded because it clamps at 255 and reports more elapsed time than it consumed -- including it drags the plate to 633.0 alpha/s, a 4% error entirely inside the clamp. Control passes at 1.15%: ptcopyright gives 650.4 alpha/s, and at one shared clock that makes its own segment T=22.25. Two elements agreeing on a rate AND independently landing on a round declared length is stronger than either. Why my earlier 29.9 was wrong, and it is the failure the page predicted: it used T=15 borrowed from a row that is about A element with a 15-unit fade, generalised to splash B's quads, which is not what that row says. At 56.8 the splash elements' implied T is 23-34, none of them 15. And the step quantum does not rescue 15: splash steps are multiples of 17 = 255/15, which is what made 15 look confirmed, but at T=28.5 a step of 17 is simply TWO units of 8.9. A quantum fixes T only if you already know the step is one unit. 60 is NOT refuted -- 5.6% away against ~5% quantisation resolution -- so the port keeps it. But this DOES eliminate the unit constant as a cause of a late plate: at 56.8 units/s t=236 lands at 4.15 s against the port's 3.93 s, so the port is fractionally early. |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
781a70af9a |
re: the animation clock is TIME-INTEGRATED -- one prediction held, one failed
Reported against the pre-registration, failure first. HELD, and by a cleaner argument than the regression: the clock is NOT frame-counted. The same animation takes 21 frame labels in one capture and 33 in another, and splash A's logo steps +136,+34 in one and +17,+51,+34,+34,+17,+17 in the other. A fixed per-frame increment cannot do that. Steps are always integer multiples of 17 (255/15 = one unit), so the clock advances in whole units at a rate set by how long the frame took. That retires '2 units per submitted frame' as a MECHANISM -- including my own page from two hours ago. The measurement stands; 2 was that run's frame pacing. units = 2 x frames computes an emulator artefact. Recorded as a proposal against the register, not enacted, and noted at the head of the H3 page rather than by editing it. FAILED: predicted 60 units per guest second, accept 55-65. Measured median 29.9 over six elapsed-ratio estimates (25.2-36.6). Prediction 3 said 30 was excluded and 30 is what came out. Why the rate is not a number yet: units/s = (d_alpha/dt) * T/255, and T is the load-bearing term. d_alpha/dt is measured cleanly six ways. T=15 for these elements comes from a corpus row whose usual derivation is circular with the thing just retired -- a step of 34/frame implies T=15 only GIVEN 2 units/frame. T=30 would give ~60. No amount of re-measuring alpha settles it. Settles with ptbtn00, whose T=22 is attested by two independent readers with no clock anywhere in the chain. That capture did not reach the title in 531 s of attract loop against 243 s in the previous run -- the variable attract loop capture-harness-status.md already documents at up to 604 s. Instrument built and control-passed; one run is missing. Instrument: guest timebase, 50 MHz per emulator.cc:225, scalar 1.0 per clock.cc:37, so no host wall clock enters any number. Control: 123.24 guest seconds across a capture running ~118 wall seconds. Told the port to change NOTHING today: ~30 rests on an unverified T, and retiring 2 x frames does not by itself supply a replacement. |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
60b05bcd90 |
re: the game blends in the ENCODED space -- no gamma render target, anywhere
The Port asks whether the blend is evaluated on sRGB-encoded values or linearised and re-encoded. It is answered by one register field I already log, and the answer is the same on every draw of two full captures. RB_COLOR_INFO.color_format is k_8_8_8_8 (0) on 2402/2402 splash draws and 33779/33791 draws of the boot-through-title capture; the other 12 are k_32_FLOAT and k_16_16_FLOAT and are not colour passes. k_8_8_8_8_GAMMA (1) appears ZERO times, and color_exp_bias is 0 everywhere so nothing stands in for a gamma either. The mechanism is Canary's own source, not our inference: k_8_8_8_8_GAMMA is the ONLY colour format around which a piecewise-linear gamma<->linear conversion is applied (spirv_shader_translator.h:510 PWLGammaToLinear / LinearToPWLGamma, render_target_cache.h:720, dxbc_shader_translator_om.cc). With k_8_8_8_8 there is none, so the blender operates on the stored values as they are. So a renderer that linearises before blending and re-encodes after is doing a different operation -- and the difference is gamma-shaped and exactly zero on unblended pixels, which is the divergence signature the port reports. Also renamed my units-per-second pre-registration off the 'h4' prefix: the Port's BLOCKED.md numbers this blend-space question H4 and two different H4s in one corpus is how a citation goes wrong. |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
8dac5aa264 |
re: pre-register H4 -- is the animation clock frame-counted or time-integrated?
H3 pinned 2 units per guest FRAME. The port needs units per SECOND, and that decomposition is only valid if the clock counts frames. If it integrates elapsed time then units/second is the invariant and units/frame is an artefact of whatever rate the host managed. Evidence it is time-integrated is already in hand and is the caveat H3 had to quote: across empty label 5376 the plate's alpha moved +82 where three adjacent labels each moved +23. 82/23 = 3.57, not an integer number of ticks, and a fixed per-frame increment cannot produce a fractional multiple of itself. Instrument: the draw logger now stamps each frame boundary with Clock::QueryGuestTickCount() and guest_tick_frequency() -- the GUEST's timebase, 50 MHz per emulator.cc:225, scalar 1.0 per clock.cc:37. No host wall clock enters the calculation. Discriminator, within one run: regress alpha step against the label's guest duration. Flat => frame-counted. Proportional => time-integrated, and the slope is the answer. Predicted before the run: time-integrated with r>0.9, at 60 units per guest second, accept 55-65, 120 and 30 excluded. Stated honestly as a CONSISTENCY prediction -- it is what the previous capture's run average implies -- not a blind one. Control: the same regression on ptcopyright's ramp, a different element with a different declared segment. Two elements must agree under the time-integrated model and need not otherwise. |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
0565098fa2 |
handoff+index: H3 answered, the settle anchor, and the pad's full field set
Three rows the port is blocked on: H3 -- 2 units per guest frame, measured on the plate's own ramp against a pre-registration. Their 5 excluded by >2x, and the reason named: an alpha step is not a clock rate without the element's declared T, and my own splash-quad-timeline.txt published alpha against frame with no T column. That file now warns at its head. The title settle anchor is t~160, not t=118 -- it is ptcopyright, the last build-in element and the only glyph one. Said plainly that this is the reading under which their clock:'shared' collapses, and that a consequence is not a counter-argument. Told them NOT to change their 60 units/s yet: units/second is untouched by this and two of my own captures disagree ~2.9x on frames->seconds. The pad: sub_82457038 reads every field of XINPUT_GAMEPAD, 14/14 loads verified against the image, plus a second keystroke-queue path. Flagged as the superset the game can SEE, not the per-screen set, so it is used to check a binding table and not to write one. |
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|
sylph-decoder
|
6aab30253a |
re: H3 answered -- 2 units per guest frame, and the settle anchor is t~160
The Port asked which of two of my measurements to believe, 55 units/s vs ~150, a factor of 2.7 off one game. Measured on the plate's own declared ramp, against a pre-registration committed first. PREDICTED 11 frames at 2 units/frame, 4.4 at the Port's inferred 5, +/-1. MEASURED 10 labels, and three consecutive gap-free steps of EXACTLY 23, which is 255*2/22 on the nose. 5 units/frame is excluded by >2x. Why the splash read as 5: an alpha step is not a clock rate. For a linear segment d(alpha)/frame = 255*(units/frame)/T. Splash B's quads step 34 with a declared T=15; the plate steps 23 with a declared T=22; ONE clock, two steps 1.5x apart. And the Port's intervals start at each quad's first submission, which on splash A is already alpha=85 -- not the element's t where alpha=0, and biased by a different amount per element because T differs. My own splash-quad-timeline.txt published alpha against frame with no T beside it, which is the column that makes the conversion possible; it now carries the warning. The other half: the 'title settled' anchor is ptcopyright reaching full alpha -- the last build-in element and the ONLY glyph one, which is what a glyph counter settling means. Calibrated on the plate's own ramp it lands at t~168 (t~176 at a flat 2.0/label). The Port's candidates are 118 and 160, 42 units apart: this is 8-16 units from 160 and 50-58 from 118. It is 160. Instrument fact that bounds all of it: labels with zero draws exist, ~1 in 5, and the clock does NOT advance a fixed amount across them -- across label 5376 the plate moved +82 where three adjacent labels each moved +23. So an empty label is a real advance, not a logger artefact, and spans that cross one are approximate. The conclusion rests on the gap-free steps. Also recorded: the sweep leaves never settle. They translate monotonically through every label examined and are still moving when the plate arrives, so 'settled' can only mean the build-in elements are done. NOT answered, and it is what the port actually needs: units per SECOND. units/s = (units/frame) x (guest fps); this pins the first at 2 and says nothing about the second, and 2x30 vs 2x60 differ by exactly the ~2 s the human reported. My own title-plate-delay-measured.md's 2.13 s does not reconcile with this capture's 20 labels for the same two anchors -- a real ~2.9x disagreement, now localised to frames->seconds rather than units->frames. Settling it needs the guest's own frame counter, which neither capture read. |