re: the boot harness was blinking slower than the title -- diagnosed

Four consecutive runs failed to reach the interactive title, across two
locales, two launch paths and two display-gamma settings. I attributed it
in turn to a stale oracle, to the locale, and to the attract loop. It was
none of those.

  one `screenshot` call, emulator running:  10.8 s
  one `screenshot` call, emulator killed:    0.117 s

92x, measured at a 1-minute load average of 1.80 -- so it is contention
with the emulator through the X server, not background load.
skip_intro.sh takes two grabs per iteration plus a numpy import, giving a
median sampling interval of 41 s in the last run (38/82/41/20/30/30/35/
47/46/45/44/43/21/19). The title lasts "a few seconds" before the attract
loop reclaims it -- wait_title.sh's own header says so. The harness was
sampling slower than the event it was waiting for. That also explains why
runs at 16:43-18:05 the same day succeeded.

Withdrawn as CAUSES, though the observations stand: "the JP run never
reaches the interactive title", "neither locale reaches it without a pad
press", and "the game sat in the attract loop for 604 s". The English
control did control for locale -- it just shared the same defect.

Also recorded: I set kernel_display_gamma_type = 0 for the gamma control
run, which brightens the frame (mid-attract mean 122.8 vs 52.5/82.8 at
type 2) -- and skip_intro classifies movie-vs-static on an ABSOLUTE rmse
threshold, so the gamma change biased the very classifier the run
depended on. Changing a display setting and a capture behaviour in one
run confounds both. Config restored to type 2.

The fix is not applied: make the probe cheap enough to outpace the title
window (small region, no convert round trip, one long-lived process).
Every remaining emulator-side question is waiting on that.

docs/re/REFUTED.md

@@ -430,3 +430,9 @@ neighbourhood, not just the line.
   locale*" → **refuted by the English control.** 75 samples over 734 s with the
   same flags and oracle, every one glyph = 0. Neither locale presents the
   interactive title without a pad press.
+* "neither locale reaches the interactive title without a pad press" /
+  "the game sat in the attract loop for 604 s" → **withdrawn as causes.** Both
+  rest on runs whose polling loop sampled every ~41 s, because `screenshot`
+  costs 10.8 s while the emulator runs (0.117 s idle, 92×). A title lasting a few
+  seconds would be missed. The observations stand; the conclusions drawn from
+  them do not. [`capture-harness-status.md`](capture-harness-status.md)