With the emulator launched correctly and the boot verified by the progress
counter first (counter > 0 = title reached; a flaky boot never leaves 0),
nav_to_flight.sh ran the whole sequence -- main menu at 20 s, mask poke, stage
select, briefing skip, ready room, take-off -- where every previous attempt
stalled.
The game is alive at the end of it: screen liveness 2.13% against 0.00% when
frozen, guest churn 0.288-2.932% against 0.000%. An animating screen and a busy
guest at the point that used to be stone dead.
But no units. DEF_VTABLE (0x820AF844) has no hits on a direct byte search, with
a working control in the same run: searching for the poked cleared-stage mask
0x0001FFFE finds it at 0x828F40C0, exactly where nav_to_flight wrote it. So the
search is sound and the vtable is genuinely absent. Both vtable constants were
also checked against sylpheed.db's vtables table and are real vtables, so they
are not stale. Three minutes of waiting left DEF/INST at 0/0 with the counter
static at 17.
So the run reaches a live, animating state that is not a mission with spawned
units -- most likely the launch cinematic or a post-take-off screen. The freeze
is gone; what still separates this from unit spawn is the remaining work.
915d6adbd9