The Decoder attached an honest caveat to its reproduction of the tone-curve
refutation -- its bins included the focus-state mismatch, so it was "not a clean
second opinion". Removing that caveat found a defect of mine.
IDENTIFYING THE FOCUSED BUTTON, with a known-answer control. Walking focus
through all five buttons and comparing each against a capture:
vs -options-focused vs live-main-menu
ptbtn01 NEW GAME 6351 531
ptbtn02 LOAD GAME 7087 7094
ptbtn03 TUTORIAL 6230 6237
ptbtn04 OPTIONS 1292 6364
ptbtn05 EXTRAS 6073 6080
The control picks OPTIONS by 4.7x -- the answer its own filename gives -- so the
test is trustworthy, and live-main-menu.png has NEW GAME focused by 11.5x. That
is what the port already focuses. Corroboration, NOT a decode: Q5's instability
stands (four boots gave TUTORIAL, TUTORIAL, NEW GAME, NEW GAME) and this
identifies one frame rather than a rule. Recorded in the authored entry.
THE DEFECT: `verify-capture` rendered menus with `--screen=`, which draws no
focus record, so it had been comparing main_menu to the oracle in a state the
oracle was never in.
main_menu 0.25% differing, RMSE 14.79 -> 0.06%, RMSE 13.21
extras 0.46%, RMSE 15.29 -> 0.20%, RMSE 13.38
A 4x improvement that was entirely my harness posing the port wrong rather than
the port drawing wrong. The first run of a new correctness harness reported a
discrepancy and three quarters of it was the harness.
AND THE DECODER'S CAVEAT RESOLVES TO NOTHING, measured rather than assumed:
re-deriving the transfer curve on the correctly-posed pair gives 1.20 / 1.26 /
1.18 / 1.10 / 1.03 / 0.94 at render 8..48, unchanged from the mismatched run. Its
reproduction stands as a second opinion after all.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01N7FiFFFwbvG2uxdcEh8HyF
Authored decisions
Everything here is a decision we made, not something the disc said. It is
hand-written, committed, and survives a re-export — unlike export/, which is
regenerated wholesale and must never be hand-edited.
Every entry carries a why. When the RE agent decodes the real answer, delete
the entry and let the exporter emit it; that deletion is the measure of
progress.
See docs/FORMAT.md for the schemas and docs/BLOCKED.md for which HANDOFF
question each placeholder is standing in for.