# Playing the game: every screen, and how you move through it **Written from the player's chair.** What is on screen, what you press, what happens. This is the document you would hand someone who has never seen the game and wants to reach a mission — or who needs to script that journey. Internal names (`ptbtn03`, `GP_LOAD`, build numbers) appear only as footnotes, because they are how *we* find things, not what the game shows anyone. **Status:** skeleton. Most of it is ❔ and is *meant* to be — this page exists to be filled in by playing, not to look finished. > ## ⚠️ Fill this in from the real game > > The oracle is **Xenia Canary running the actual title**, captured. Not > `sylpheed-cli`, not the Explorer, not any renderer of ours — those are tools > for verifying our decoding, they are hypotheses under test, and they have been > wrong. A row here with no capture behind it is a guess wearing a table cell. > > Describe what you *saw*. "The cursor starts on the second item" is worth more > than any amount of reasoning about the layout data. Confidence: ✅ seen in a capture · 🟡 inferred · ❔ unknown. --- ## 1. From power-on to the main menu | # | What you see | What you do | What happens | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | Publisher and developer logos on black | nothing | plays through 🟡 | | 2 | The opening cinematic | ❔ can it be skipped, and with which button? | ends into the title 🟡 | | 3 | **Title screen** — the wordmark animates in, then a prompt | press **Ⓐ** | goes to the main menu ✅ | | 4 | **Main menu** | — | see §2 | ⚠️ **The title screen has two states that look identical.** The one that ends the boot accepts Ⓐ. The one the attract loop returns to, after the game has sat untouched and looped back, **accepts nothing** — Ⓐ, START, B, BACK, X, Y, dozens of presses, no response. Nothing on screen distinguishes them ✅. If you are scripting: use the *first* title after boot, and do not press anything during the boot. ⚠️ **The title is not input-ready for about ten seconds** after it appears ✅. And even then Ⓐ registers roughly half the time, with nothing yet found that predicts which ✅ — budget retries. --- ## 2. Main menu Five options in a vertical stack, roughly centred, with a highlighted state on the focused one. | position | label | what it opens | |---|---|---| | 1 | ❔ | ❔ | | 2 | ❔ | ❔ | | 3 | ❔ | ❔ | | 4 | ❔ | ❔ | | 5 | ❔ | ❔ | **To fill in, by looking:** read the five labels off the screen and say what each one leads to. ❔ Which item is focused when the menu opens · ❔ does the cursor wrap from the last item back to the first · ❔ does left/right do anything · ❔ what B does here — back to the title, or nothing. *Internals: `GP_TITLE.pak` build 5; buttons `ptbtn01`–`ptbtn05` top to bottom.* --- ## 3. The rest of the menus One section each, in the shape of §2: what is on screen, what the cursor does, what each choice leads to, and what a wrong choice shows you. ### Continue / Load ❔ ❔ How saves are listed · ❔ what an empty slot looks like · ❔ the confirmation prompt and where the cursor starts. Known: `title → LOAD GAME → slot 01 → YES → READY ROOM → TAKE OFF` reaches flight ✅. ### Options ❔ ❔ Which settings exist, what each ranges over, how a change is applied and whether it needs confirming. ### Extras ❔ ❔ What is in it — a movie theatre, a gallery, records? ❔ what is locked at the start and what unlocks it. ### Mission select ❔ ⚠️ **Stage select would not move**: sixteen d-pad presses never left Stage 01 ✅. Whether that is because only one stage was unlocked, or because the list is driven some other way, is unknown — worth settling early, since a scripted run has to get past it. ### Briefing and Ready Room ❔ ❔ What you read, what you choose, and what finally launches the mission. ### Hangar / Arsenal ❔ ❔ How a weapon is fitted, how one is bought, what a purchase prompt says. --- ## 4. Prompts, confirmations and alerts The interrupting layer — and the thing most likely to break a scripted run, because it looks like a menu and does not behave like one. | prompt | when | where the cursor starts | notes | |---|---|---|---| | `Save game?` | after a mission | **YES** ✅ | | | `Do you want to develop this weapon?` | Arsenal, on purchase | ❔ | | | overwrite / delete confirmation | saving, loading | ❔ | | | "not enough points" or similar refusal | Arsenal | ❔ | ❔ does it need dismissing | ⚠️ **A short d-pad tap is ignored inside a prompt.** Sixty milliseconds moves the cursor on a menu and does *nothing* in a dialog ✅. So a script that works through the menus will silently accept the default in every prompt it meets — which is how you end up overwriting a save you meant to keep. **Confirm which side the cursor is on before pressing Ⓐ.** --- ## 5. Flying Not started, and the game teaches it better than we could: **play the in-game tutorials and write down what they say.** They are the game's own explanation of its controls, which is exactly the document we want. To fill in: the control map, and whether there is more than one scheme · throttle and boost · targeting — ⚠️ target select is Ⓐ pressed **twice**; a sweep that only ever tapped once concluded targeting was automatic, and was wrong ✅ · switching weapons · the pause menu and what it offers · what the HUD tells you, element by element · how a mission ends, win or lose, and what you see next. --- ## 6. If you are scripting this Traps that read as bugs but are not, all measured ✅: * **F10 opens Xenia's own menu bar**, and while any emulator UI is up the game is handed an empty keystroke before any pad driver is asked. The controller looks dead and is not. * **A signed-in profile is required** — `--create_profile_if_none`. * **A trace consumer that exits stalls the emulator**, which also reads as a dead pad. * Cold boot is slow; ~25 s once the shader and code caches are warm.