Two separate reasons the scripted route stopped, both measured rather than guessed:
* LOAD -> READY ROOM is not 28 s. Both runs on 2026-08-23 overran it, so the next
press was eaten by the transition and the run ended up in OPTIONS once and
BRIEFINGS once. wait_screen.sh now waits for the screen, with an optional
--tap that clears a dialog the caller cannot know about (a freshly restored
profile inserts "Auto-Save is active. OK?" here).
* The READY ROOM is DRAWN long before it is USABLE: it comes up with a
"Preparing to Sortie" spinner and TAKE OFF greyed out. The two states differ by
1.7 units of blue whole-image, so screen_id.py cannot separate them and should
not try. take_off_armed.py tests the label instead: 0.0000 bright pixels while
preparing, 0.1633 once armed, on three captures from two runs. It carries its
own position check - the always-enabled BRIEFINGS label below reads 0.1027 in
all three, to four decimals, so if that reference is dark the boxes are off the
labels and the answer is "unknown", not a confident wrong one.
screen_id.py gains a "readyroom" class from the same measurements; nothing else
reclassifies.
Verified end to end and unattended: boot -> title -> LOAD GAME -> slot 01 ->
READY ROOM -> TAKE OFF -> "IN FLIGHT at 34s", pilot bound and engaging.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01PMRJjbxLqZtsb5Vb7KunPE
screen_id.py called the main menu "other". Its menu rule required a near-white
fraction above 1.5%, measured in 2026-07; the menu reached from the boot title
measures 0.03% (mean 13,26,59 — dark, strongly blue, essentially green-free).
That is worse than a cosmetic miss: a script that waits for "menu" and never
sees it reports the navigation as failed while the menu is on screen, which is
exactly what happened here. Both measured signatures are now documented in the
code and both classify.
menu_draw_capture.sh now taps ONCE on the first title rather than up to 40 times:
repeating was measured to be useless (the attract title accepts nothing) and the
first title accepts a single press.
title_states_capture.sh is new — it captures the draw list in both title states
in one run, which is what refuted the "the attract title omits the button plate"
theory.
WIP toward the residual flight-speed-law question (does a 1 s burst reach the
steady angular rate, or is there a per-axis multiplier?). The write-up already
concluded that host-side polling cannot answer it and named a Canary-side hook
as the tool required; that hook now exists (--frame_probe_log, committed as
auto/re-frame-probe in xenia-canary-native) and this is the harness for it.
- `rebuild_canary.sh` -- the surgical rebuild the box can actually do, kept in
the repo this time instead of in /tmp: compile only the changed objects, `ar`
them into their archive, and re-run the link command lifted out of the
generated ninja. A full `ninja` is impossible here (several TUs need dev
headers the image lacks) and the build cache cannot be re-configured. 31 s.
- `frame_burst.py` -- points the probe at the player craft's transform block
(pos-112, the three 16-byte-strided rows plus the position) and drives full
stick holds, recording each hold's start and end in the same clock the probe
stamps its lines with.
- `frame_session.sh` -- the whole run as ONE blocking foreground call, per the
session-lifetime rule; REUSE=1 drives a Canary that is already up.
- `nav_to_flight.sh` -- fly_stage.sh's navigation, split out so a live emulator
can be re-used. A boot to the title costs minutes under lavapipe and a run
that only failed to NAVIGATE should not pay for it twice.
The navigation change is the one worth reading. Every screen oracle here tested
named pixels ("648,221 is white"), which is only valid while the game image sits
at a known place on the root window -- and it does not: xenia's GTK window has a
menu bar, so on this display the image is ~25 px lower and every constant reads
the wrong row. Nothing errors. One run sat 300 s in front of a plainly visible
MAIN MENU reporting "no main menu"; the next missed the title screen entirely
and let the attract movie loop for ten minutes.
So `screen_id.py` identifies screens by WHOLE-IMAGE statistics instead -- the
fraction of green UI-text pixels, the fraction of near-white pixels, and the
per-channel means -- which no vertical shift, scale or letterbox can move. It is
calibrated against known-good captures and classifies all of them correctly:
title, three different menu screens, in-flight, and four movie frames as
"other". `bin/screenshot` additionally crops the menu bar off saved evidence
shots, deriving the offset from the window's own height rather than a constant.
Not yet a finding: the run has not reached flight, so no rate has been measured.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
