The Decoder captured the Japanese title at rest (310bf86) without comparing it to
either renderer, keeping my diff independent.
Alignment recovered, not inherited: row/column profile correlation with the
English pair as control gives (0,0) for the control and dy=-45 for the JP frame --
their stated offset, measured. My first look said 'no letterbox, content spans all
720 rows', which was true and irrelevant.
The instrument is fair: on a control strip where both renderers agree they tie
(r 0.9751 vs 0.9756). In the disputed 350x396 block at (405,74) the REFERENCE is
closer -- r +0.8727 against the port's +0.7462 -- and the verdict is stable under
gamma compensation at both measured title gammas. The port puts light on 25.6% of
the block the capture does not have, against the reference's 15.9%.
This is the opposite of what I expected: the burst the Decoder describes IS
there, and the port draws more of it than the game does. A qualitative match on
'is the effect present' was about to stand in for a measurement of how much.
Not settled: which change did it. Both render at rest t=10 so the settle window is
not in play; four commits touched that path and I have not bisected them.
title_jp's DIFFERS is now known to be the port's -- the first baseline row whose
direction has been established against a capture.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01N7FiFFFwbvG2uxdcEh8HyF
11dcb3b2a3