7a4a74f8d7
Two results and one retraction, all from the same session. REFUTED: 'an ~8-10 s idle returns to the title' does not apply to the main menu. Held untouched it stayed put for >= 60 s, correlation never leaving 0.9245-0.9249. That timer is real but belongs to the TITLE. It was the only reason 'B leaves the main menu' was classed as authored, so Q5's B rule is upgraded to measured-ordering: B is delivered (canary logs vk=5801) and is the only input in >= 100 s before the return. The PRESS (A) plate: the boot title presents build 4 WITHOUT the plate first -- green-glyph 154, against 159 on the committed no-plate capture and 753/977/1493 on plate titles -- and the plate arrives after. That is the port's third option. RETRACTED: four durations taken the same day. classify_array costs 1503 ms per frame; running it per frame against an 8 fps x11grab drained the pipe at 0.64 fps, so every classified frame was stale and increasingly so. It manufactured 'plate 24.66 s after the title art', 'B->title 15.58 s', 'B->title 25.60 s' and 'A->menu 20.26 s'. The tell: a transition, a press and a fade do not share a duration, and the two B figures GREW across a longer run. A backlog preserves ordering and destroys durations, which is why the sequence results above stand and every timing does not. The ring's period is unaffected and that was checked, not assumed -- ring_period ran at 15.03 fps against a requested 15. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KNR5Y79D1T4bBr6gJQaWFP
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Playing the game: every screen, and how you move through it
Written from the player's chair. What is on screen, what you press, what happens. This is the document you would hand someone who has never seen the game and wants to reach a mission — or who needs to script that journey.
Internal names (ptbtn03, GP_LOAD, build numbers) appear only as footnotes,
because they are how we find things, not what the game shows anyone.
Status: filling in. §1–§4 now carry what the committed oracle frames actually show; what is still ❔ is what no capture answers. This page exists to be filled in by playing, not to look finished.
⚠️ Fill this in from the real game
The oracle is Xenia Canary running the actual title, captured. Not
sylpheed-cli, not the Explorer, not any renderer of ours — those are tools for verifying our decoding, they are hypotheses under test, and they have been wrong. A row here with no capture behind it is a guess wearing a table cell.Describe what you saw. "The cursor starts on the second item" is worth more than any amount of reasoning about the layout data.
Confidence: ✅ seen in a capture · 🟡 inferred · ❔ unknown.
1. From power-on to the main menu
| # | What you see | What you do | What happens |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | SQUARE ENIX in white on black, the two dots in red, ™ after it ✅ |
nothing | fades on to the next logo |
| 2 | GAME ARTS, SETA and studio anima stacked on black ✅ | nothing | fades on into the cinematic |
| 3 | The opening cinematic | Ⓐ skips it ✅ | ends into the title |
| 4 | Title screen — the wordmark appears first, with no prompt; PRESS Ⓐ BUTTON fades in a beat later, above the 2006/2007 Square Enix copyright line ✅ |
press Ⓐ | goes to the main menu ✅ |
| 5 | Main menu | — | see §2 |
Both logo screens are still pictures the game draws, not video — neither is a
.wmv on the disc. Captures:
publisher ·
developer ·
title.
⚠️ One Ⓐ skips the cinematic, and it is worth a lot of time: the title arrived at 57 s with the skip against 193 s without it ✅.
⚠️ The title screen has two states that look identical. The one that ends the boot accepts Ⓐ. The one the attract loop returns to, after the game has sat untouched and looped back, accepts nothing — Ⓐ, START, B, BACK, X, Y, dozens of presses, no response. Nothing on screen distinguishes them ✅. If you are scripting: use the first title after boot, and do not press anything during the boot.
⚠️ The title is not input-ready for about ten seconds after it appears ✅. And even then Ⓐ registers roughly half the time, with nothing yet found that predicts which ✅ — budget retries.
2. Main menu
Five options in a vertical stack, roughly centred, with a highlighted state on the focused one.
✅ The focused option carries a small ring to the left of its label, and the ring turns — continuously, about once every 2.2 s. It has a bright head, so you can see it go round. It is the only thing moving on this screen once it has settled: the labels, the bracket and the footer are all completely still (temporal std exactly 0.000 over 20 s). Ⓑ five frames, 4 s apart · the measurement
| position | label | what it opens |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | NEW GAME | a DIFFICULTY prompt, then SELECT DATA ✅ |
| 2 | LOAD GAME | the save-slot list ✅ |
| 3 | TUTORIAL | the lesson list ✅ |
| 4 | OPTIONS | the settings menu ✅ |
| 5 | EXTRAS | a three-item submenu ✅ |
Read off live-main-menu.png;
destinations off
q4-destinations.png and
newgame-difficulty.png.
The screen is the title art gone dim, with the wordmark ghosted behind the list and a bracket of glowing rule-lines drawn around it. The focused item is bright white with a spinning ring to its left; the others are dim blue. Every item carries a small dot-in-circle at the left end of its underline — that is on all five all the time and is not the cursor.
Moving around ✅
| you press | what happens |
|---|---|
| ⬆ / ⬇ | one item, and it wraps at both ends |
| ⬅ / ➡ | nothing |
| Ⓐ | opens the focused item |
| Ⓑ | 🟡 back to the title — see the warning below |
❔ Which item is focused when the menu opens is not fixed. Four boots of the
same harness opened on TUTORIAL, TUTORIAL, NEW GAME, NEW GAME. Do not
assume the top item, and do not assume the middle one either.
⚠️ The main menu is the one screen whose footer does not offer Ⓑ. It reads
⊙ : Select Ⓐ : OK— every submenu addsⒷ : Back. Measured: zero red-Ⓑ glyph pixels anywhere in the frame, on two captures, with the same detector finding the glyph onEXTRASandDIFFICULTY✅. ✅ But Ⓑ does leave it, and the objection that stood here is refuted (2026-08-29). This page used to say the title "returns on its own after ~8–10 s idle", so an observer could not tell Ⓑ from the timer. That timer belongs to the title, not to this screen: the main menu was held untouched for ≥ 60 s and never moved. Ⓑ is delivered and is the only input in ≥ 100 s before the return, so the ordering is measured — the latency is not (the measurement).
Internals: GP_TITLE.pak build 5; buttons ptbtn01–ptbtn05 top to bottom.
3. The rest of the menus
One section each, in the shape of §2: what is on screen, what the cursor does, what each choice leads to, and what a wrong choice shows you.
New game ✅
Ⓐ on NEW GAME does not start a mission. It opens DIFFICULTY —
EASY / NORMAL / HARD / BACK, opening focused on NORMAL ✅ — and Ⓐ
there opens SELECT DATA, a save-slot picker headed
Current Storage: Dummy HDD that asks you to choose a file for the auto-save.
Pick one and a movie plays ✅.
DIFFICULTY
Load game ✅
A vertical list of numbered slots, 8 rows visible, scrolling as a carousel —
one capture shows the order 19, 20, 01, 02, 03, 04 with 01 focused, so the
list runs past the end and back round to the start ✅. Each row shows
Difficulty, Flight Time and Clear Ratio; a Details panel to the right
gives STAGE, Game Status, Points and Times Cleared, and an empty slot
leaves every one of those blank ✅. Current Storage: Dummy HDD sits along the
top.
Its footer offers more than the other menus:
⊙ : Select Ⓐ : OK Ⓑ : Back Ⓧ : Delete Ⓨ : Select Storage ✅.
capture (left panel)
❔ Still open: the overwrite / delete confirmation, and where its cursor starts.
Known: title → LOAD GAME → slot 01 → YES → READY ROOM → TAKE OFF reaches
flight ✅.
Tutorial ✅
A list of lessons in two headed groups, with a one-line description shown on the
left for whichever is focused ✅ — e.g. BASIC CONTROLS reads
"Learn how to move and attack". Opens focused on the first entry.
| group | lessons |
|---|---|
| Level 1 | BASIC CONTROLS, HEADS-UP DISPLAY, RADAR |
| Level 2 | SUPPLY AND SPECIAL MOVES, RADIO ORDERS, ADVANCED CONTROLS |
| — | BACK |
capture (middle panel)
Options ✅ (one level in)
GAME SETTINGS · CONTROL SETTINGS · SOUND SETTINGS · SCREEN SETTINGS ·
BACK, opening focused on the first ✅.
capture (right panel)
❔ Still open: what is inside each of the four, what each setting ranges over, and whether a change needs confirming.
Extras ✅
Three items: MISSION SELECT · MOVIE THEATER · BACK, opening focused on
MISSION SELECT ✅. The cursor wraps here too — it is a menu rule, not a
per-screen one ✅.
capture
❔ MOVIE THEATER has never been opened.
Mission select ✅ — and the "stuck cursor" is explained
The stage list on the left (8 rows visible of 16, with a scrollbar), a detail
panel showing the stage's name, a picture, High Score and Best Time, and a
Wide Area Space Map on the right with the named systems on it. The chosen
difficulty is printed top-right. Footer:
⊙ : Select Ⓐ : OK Ⓑ : Back Ⓨ : Difficulty ✅.
⚠️ "Stage select would not move" — sixteen d-pad presses never left Stage 01 — is now explained: the other fifteen stages were LOCKED ✅. A locked row is drawn dimmer than an unfocused one: measured, the labels sit at three distinct brightnesses — focused 254, unlocked 183, locked 104 — and on a save with the story unlocked the same rows read 183, with the cursor able to reach Stage16 at the bottom of the scrolled list. the measurement · locked · unlocked · at Stage16
So: if you are scripting a run, check what the save has unlocked before concluding the list is broken. ❔ Whether the list wraps past Stage16, and whether a locked row is skipped or simply unreachable, is not settled.
Briefing and Ready Room ❔
❔ What you read, what you choose, and what finally launches the mission.
Hangar / Arsenal ❔
❔ How a weapon is fitted, how one is bought, what a purchase prompt says.
4. Prompts, confirmations and alerts
The interrupting layer — and the thing most likely to break a scripted run, because it looks like a menu and does not behave like one.
| prompt | when | where the cursor starts | notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Save game? |
after a mission | YES ✅ | |
Do you want to develop this weapon? |
Arsenal, on purchase | ❔ | |
| overwrite / delete confirmation | saving, loading | ❔ | |
| "not enough points" or similar refusal | Arsenal | ❔ | ❔ does it need dismissing |
⚠️ A short d-pad tap is ignored inside a prompt. Sixty milliseconds moves the cursor on a menu and does nothing in a dialog ✅. So a script that works through the menus will silently accept the default in every prompt it meets — which is how you end up overwriting a save you meant to keep. Confirm which side the cursor is on before pressing Ⓐ.
5. Flying
Not started, and the game teaches it better than we could: play the in-game tutorials and write down what they say. They are the game's own explanation of its controls, which is exactly the document we want.
To fill in: the control map, and whether there is more than one scheme · throttle and boost · targeting — ⚠️ target select is Ⓐ pressed twice; a sweep that only ever tapped once concluded targeting was automatic, and was wrong ✅ · switching weapons · the pause menu and what it offers · what the HUD tells you, element by element · how a mission ends, win or lose, and what you see next.
6. If you are scripting this
Traps that read as bugs but are not, all measured ✅:
- F10 opens Xenia's own menu bar, and while any emulator UI is up the game is handed an empty keystroke before any pad driver is asked. The controller looks dead and is not.
- A signed-in profile is required —
--create_profile_if_none. - A trace consumer that exits stalls the emulator, which also reads as a dead pad.
- Cold boot is slow; ~25 s once the shader and code caches are warm.