Two checks on last iteration's "sequential, not simultaneous" reading.
First, the phases really are disjoint. If glows and logos ever shared a
frame the claim would be wrong. Across all 235 captured frames the count
of frames containing both is ZERO, and the switch is a single clean
boundary -- f110-115 draw 1280x720 + 262x108 + 525x90, f116 onward
1280x720 + 243x86 + 499x72. Two sprites either side, no transition frame.
Second, and larger: a third of the bundle is never drawn. Entry 11
declares three logo/glow pairs and only two appear.
palogo_gamearts / _eff 95 / 22 frames
palogo_seta / _eff 95 / 22 frames
palogo_anima / _eff never
palogo_anima declares the SAME keyframe times as palogo_gamearts. Two
elements with byte-identical data, 95 frames and 0 frames in one run.
Reach: the capture covers frames 1-214, so this is "never in the window".
So a bundle is a palette, not a script. Its elements say what to draw and
for how long; which of them run, and when each starts, is decided outside
the placement data. That is the same conclusion the boot-order work
reached from the other end -- the driver is code, not data -- now with a
per-element measurement behind it.
For the port, concretely: compositing every element of a bundle does not
reproduce what the game shows over time. It is the right thing for a
static screen that settles, and it is not a timeline.
METHOD: two elements with identical data and different outcomes is the
strongest possible evidence that the decision is elsewhere.
Tested whether the splash timeline, played, reproduces the capture --
the last gap in the animation model. Half of it does.
Durations match. At 2 units/frame under the shifted reading, from the
235-frame draw capture of the developer splash:
glows drawn f94-115 (22 frames = 44 units) declared ~0..45 = 45 97.8%
logos drawn f116-211 (96 frames = 192 units) declared 15..210 = 195 98.5%
Each element is on screen for its declared span to within 2%.
Starts do not. Every glow declares the same times 15,30,45 and every
logo the same 15,30,190,194,206,210, so on one clock they would overlap
almost entirely -- and they do not overlap at all. The glows run 94-115
and the logos 116-211, strictly sequential, the logos starting the frame
after the glows end. Fitting one origin needs f0 ~ 93.5 for gamearts_eff
and ~103 for gamearts, about 19 units apart, and aligning one throws the
other off by ~9 frames at both ends.
The obvious candidate is refuted. parse_placements reads each group
header as (element index, keyframe count) plus one undecoded LEAD-IN
WORD -- exactly where a per-group start offset would live. It is
0x00000000 for all seven elements, glows and logos alike.
Reach: not the keyframe times (identical within each family), not that
word (zero), not declaration order (which interleaves logos and glows
where the observed sequencing groups them), not the RATC child order.
What remains is that the sequencing is code-driven, which agrees with
what the boot-order work concluded independently.
For the port: a group says how long an element animates and what it does,
not when it starts relative to its neighbours. The observed order on the
developer splash -- both glows, then both logos -- is measured for one
screen, not a decoded rule, so the sequencing has to be authored.
METHOD: when a model reproduces durations but not positions, the missing
piece is an origin, not a rate.
