Sylpheed/tools/re-capture

Runtime-capture harness (sylph-re container)

Screenshot-driven scripts for reading the running retail game's menus under Xenia Canary + lavapipe, headless. They assume the container helpers screenshot, vgamepad, pad are on $PATH and HOME=/sylph-home/re.

Script	What it does
skip_intro.sh	Boot → main menu, unattended. Taps A only while the intro movie is actually playing (frame-to-frame RMSE), then once at the PRESS Ⓐ BUTTON title. Static logo screens are left alone, so a stray tap can never land on NEW GAME.
wait_title.sh	Older variant: wait for the title (green Ⓐ glyph at px 625,618) and tap A. Superseded by skip_intro.sh.
step.sh	One Arsenal navigation step (down/up/next/prev/none) + a compact capture: weapon list stacked over the DATA SHEET.
sweep.sh	Walk a whole weapon-type list, capturing only rows that show a DATA SHEET — locked rows (a "Conditions to Develop" panel) are detected by the brightness of the Range Class label box and skipped.
type.sh	Change weapon-type tab N times (RB) and report the header strip.
hp.sh / cyc.sh	Hangar hard-point carousel: cyc.sh steps it (d-pad down, not left/right) and captures the Name + DATA SHEET.

Input timing under lavapipe: the game polls input at its own low frame rate, so a 60 ms d-pad tap is dropped roughly half the time. 200 ms is reliable; 300 ms starts to auto-repeat (two rows per press).

Findings produced with these: docs/re/weapon-datasheet-runtime.md.

Guest-memory tools (no screenshots)

Script	What it does
gmem.py	Read the live guest address space out of /dev/shm/xenia_memory_* (Xenia's backing file), addressed by guest VA. find / read / words.
weapon_runtime.py	Solve the Weapon/Shell struct layouts against the disc records and read the fields the disc defaults.
unit_discover.py	Find which runtime class carries a set of ID strings, assuming no vtable: tallies the word at pointer_site - k across distinct IDs.
unit_runtime.py	Same solver for the unit\UN_*.tbl definition objects (vtable 0x820af844). Unions several snapshots — unit definitions are per-stage.
schema_order.py	Merge a sub-record's field-declaration order across all tables (topological sort); the layout check that pins fields no table ever values.
order_check.py	Test offset = base + 4*index for one table's sub-record against solver output.
grab_tutorial.sh	Cold-boot Canary, walk to the Nth TUTORIAL entry, wait for the stage load, snapshot guest RAM. One emulator per capture — backing out of a loaded mission wedges it.

Snapshot first — cp --sparse=always /dev/shm/xenia_memory_* snap.bin (~2 s) — and point $GMEM_FILE at the copy; the running emulator pegs every core under lavapipe.

🔴 pgrep -f / pkill -f match YOUR OWN shell

An agent driving this toolkit runs its commands through a wrapper shell whose command line contains the pattern being searched for. So

pgrep -f 'pilot\.py'        # matches the wrapper running this very command
pkill -f 'fly_session|pilot\.py'   # kills that wrapper — the script dies mid-way

This has cost four separate mistakes in one session: two scripts killed mid-execution, and twice a "is it already running?" guard that answered yes because it had found itself. The [p]ilot bracket trick does not help when the literal invocation (python3 pilot.py …) also appears on the wrapper's command line.

What works:

pgrep -x xenia_canary                       # exact NAME match, no -f
ps -eo pid,args | grep 'python3 pilot.py' | grep -v snapshot-bash
kill -9 <explicit pid>                      # look it up first, then kill by pid

The snapshot-bash filter is the reliable tell: the wrapper's command line always contains the shell-snapshot path.

🔴 The emulator does not survive the end of an agent turn

/work/.claude/settings.json defines a Stop hook that kill -9s every xenia_canary when a turn ends, printing "Stop hook killed N stale xenia process(es)".

So:

• never launch a run intending to read it in a later turn — it will be dead;
• an experiment has to produce its evidence within the turn that starts it;
• prefer measurements that land in the first minutes of flight. REMAINING OB steps 4 → 8 → 12 inside the first few minutes, which is why a two-pass differential works in one turn while a 25-minute freeze watch does not.

This cost three iterations of investigating a "mysterious external SIGKILL", complete with cgroup and host memory forensics, before the hook was found. When a process dies at a session boundary, check the harness first.