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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