ambiguous, the sampling was
Continuing last iteration's amber rather than starting something new. The
fix was already named there: stop using 5-second screenshots and record
the display.
Recorded with ffmpeg x11grab at 10 fps and matched every 0.5 s. Across
the 25 consecutive samples from capture 5.0 s to 17.5 s the S00A playhead
is strictly non-decreasing -- 1.0 through 11.0 s, advancing at
essentially real time -- with scores at or above 0.96 and four of them at
0.999 or 1.000 against a runner-up in the 0.78-0.83 range. S00A is the
top match on 23 of the 27 frames carrying signal. So MS00A -> S00A.wmv is
decoded from the manifest AND measured off the game, and the intro begins
about 4.5 s after A on the save slot.
The previous attempt's failure is worth its own METHOD line, because it
did not look like a sampling problem: it looked like weak evidence for
the wrong film. Sparse sampling produced contrast-23 frames, a playhead
that would not join up, and one frame preferring ADV. Sampling does not
weaken a signal gracefully; it turns it into noise shaped like a
different answer.
One aside recorded and not chased: in the S00A 5.5-10 s window, ADV also
scores 0.97-0.99 at its OWN monotone playhead of 33.5-37.5 s. Two films
matching strongly with two consistent playheads is not noise -- it reads
as the boot movie being a trailer cut from the story cutscenes, which
also explains why the sparse run kept flipping between them.
Two corpus claims died in one boot, and both were costing us.
Q9's last row: a movie IS skippable with a single A. One tap ~45s into
the boot put the title up at ~57s, against a ~193s no-input baseline
measured over three boots, and Canary's own keystroke counter went 3->4
so exactly one press was delivered. The skipped-to title is fully
functional -- it draws the PRESS A plate and a second A opens the main
menu. What actually breaks the boot is hammering: the 88-press run in the
traps doc. The scripts' "tapping breaks the title" comment is too broad
and costs every scripted boot two and a half minutes.
Q4's last row: A on NEW GAME does not hang. It opens DIFFICULTY
(EASY/NORMAL/HARD/BACK, focus on NORMAL), then SELECT DATA, and only then
does the guest throw -- at PC 0x82307128, which is inside sub_823070B0,
the cache-manager STL erase this corpus already documents and which has
nothing to do with the menu path. The screen sat unchanged for 90s
because it was a menu waiting for input from a loop that never pressed
anything. That is now a METHOD line: a screen that never changes is not
necessarily hung, and the fix is to look at it and press something.
Also METHOD: never run ps -ef in this container -- all three long-lived
processes carry the entire loop prompt as argv.