Sylpheed/docs/port/RUNNING.md

Running the port

P5's gate is "a human clicks through it", and until now there was no page telling a human how. The commands existed — in boot.gd's header comment and scattered through a twelve-thousand-line DECISIONS.md. A capability that lives only in the record is, to the person who needs it, absent.

Everything below has been run. Where a number is quoted it was measured in this container, and where the container distorts it that is said rather than left for the reader to discover.

1. Build the asset tree

The Godot project reads export/, never the disc.

cargo run --release -p sylpheed-export -- export --disc /disc --out export

Roughly four minutes, most of it transcoding two movies. It rewrites export/ wholesale — never hand-edit anything in there; hand-written decisions live in authored/ beside it, and survive a re-export.

2. The P5 walk, from a cold start

godot --path port -- --boot --play

This is the one a human should judge. It boots the way the game does — two splashes, the ADV intro, the title — hands over to the menu on Ⓐ, and then stays live and waits for input.

you press	what should happen
Ⓐ on the title	the main menu opens on NEW GAME
⬆ / ⬇	one item, wrapping at both ends
⬅ / ➡	nothing — measured, and implemented as an explicit no-op
Ⓐ on EXTRAS	the EXTRAS submenu, opening on MISSION SELECT
Ⓑ in EXTRAS	back to the main menu, on the item you left
Ⓑ on the main menu	back to the title
Ⓐ on the title again	the menu, still on the item you left

That last row is the one worth checking deliberately: the main menu remembers its cursor, and every submenu resets to its own opening item. Both are measured, and they disagree on purpose.

⏱ The intro is ~157 s. To skip straight to the menu:

godot --path port -- --menu=main_menu

and to drive it unattended:

godot --path port -- --menu=main_menu --script=down,down,accept,cancel

🔴 --script without --play or --menu refuses and says so. It used to parse, be stored, and do nothing.

3. What is knowingly missing — not bugs

Four of the five main-menu destinations are measured but not in this export: they live in other archives (GP_SAVE_LOAD, GP_OPTIONS, …). Pressing Ⓐ on them prints what it would have opened and why it cannot:

(LOAD GAME) opens a screen this export does not carry:
   The save-slot list is GP_SAVE_LOAD, not in this export. Destination MEASURED.

EXTRAS is the only Ⓐ-into-a-submenu this milestone can walk, which is why the P5 gate rests on it.

NEW GAME is a deliberate gap of a different kind: the real chain is NEW GAME → DIFFICULTY → SELECT DATA → the S00A movie, and the port jumps to the movie, printing the two screens it skipped. That is a gap, stated out loud; nobody should read the port's behaviour there as the game's.

4. What this container distorts

• No GPU. 720p Theora decodes +6.7 % … +6.9 % slower than real time here (5 runs, both movies, on a quiet box). The boot's printed seconds carry that deficit. It is a property of the machine, not of the port.
• No sound card. Godot falls back to a dummy driver, so you will hear nothing. The audio is present and measurable — docs/port/AUDIO-VERIFICATION.md answers every audio question without a device, and tools/port/verify-menu-audio asserts it — but "I heard it" is not available in here.
• A leaked-object warning at exit is engine-side, not the port's. Measured: releasing every reference the port owns moves the count from 8 to 8.

5. Modding

data/mods/ shadows export/ by path. Each override is announced as it is read, and at the end of a run any file that can never apply is listed:

mod:   sprites/title/main_menu/ptbase.png  <-  data/mods/...
mods:  1 file(s) in data/mods can shadow NOTHING -- no such path in the export:
  inert: sprites/title/TYPO_menu/pteff05.png

A file whose path exists in the export but was simply not read this run is not listed. See docs/port/MODDING.md for the five rules the asset tree keeps.

6. Where the work is, and what P5's gate is waiting on

P5's gate is the only one that needs a person, and it is not waiting on code.

Everything above runs from auto/port-p6-audio. That branch is 256 commits ahead of origin/main and 0 behind, so a merge is a fast-forward — main is an ancestor, there is nothing to resolve. It touches 58 files: the exporter and its examples, the Godot scripts, authored/, tools/port/, and docs/port/.

Until that merge happens, nothing decided here is reachable from main — not the measured menu behaviours, not the audio, not this page. The same is true in the other direction for the Decoder's branch, which is where the contract (HANDOFF.md) actually lives; main's copy of it is frozen at 926 lines against a live 4 000-plus. Neither agent can close that: PROTOCOL.md says a human merges.

What a person is actually being asked to do

1. godot --path port -- --boot --play, then walk §2's table.
2. Say whether it behaves as described. Not whether it matches the game — that comparison is the oracle's job and is already asserted by tools/port/check-all.
3. If it does, P5's gate is met and nothing else is blocking P6, which asserts its own audio and has no human step.

⚠️ You will hear nothing (§4), and the intro takes ~157 s. --menu=main_menu skips straight to the part being judged.