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With the pilot finally shooting, the experiment completed both halves. Sample A at counter 12 over 120 entities gave 2 offsets where exactly 12 entities share a value; the counter then went 12 -> 11 and NEITHER survived. So within +-0x400 of an entity's position triple there is no 4-byte word whose shared-value population tracks REMAINING OB. The limits are recorded as part of the result, because they bound it: the test asks which entities share an EXACT 32-bit value, so a single bit ORed into a word that also carries health or a timer would never show up - a bit-level version of the same differential is the follow-on. Anything outside the window, or on entities that entities2 cannot see (it types by position CHANGING, so stationary objectives are invisible), is untested too, and the populations differed a lot between samples - 120 against 194. Separately: REMAINING OB went 12 -> 11, the first decrement of this whole investigation, while pilot.py logged 411 fire=1 samples and the HUD reached YOU KILLED WARPLANES 0003. Stated carefully - it does NOT show the counter counts kills, since an earlier run had the hostile population fall by a third with no movement; it shows some kills close something the counter tracks. Two robustness fixes: ob_flag retries an empty entity sample (one void run was caused by exactly that), and Pad releases everything on interpreter exit - a file-backed pad PERSISTS after its writer dies, so a tool killed mid-press would leave a button held and the game would walk through menus on its own. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01PMRJjbxLqZtsb5Vb7KunPE
Runtime-capture harness (sylph-re container)
Screenshot-driven scripts for reading the running retail game's menus under Xenia
Canary + lavapipe, headless. They assume the container helpers screenshot,
vgamepad, pad are on $PATH and HOME=/sylph-home/re.
| Script | What it does |
|---|---|
skip_intro.sh |
Boot → main menu, unattended. Taps A only while the intro movie is actually playing (frame-to-frame RMSE), then once at the PRESS Ⓐ BUTTON title. Static logo screens are left alone, so a stray tap can never land on NEW GAME. |
wait_title.sh |
Older variant: wait for the title (green Ⓐ glyph at px 625,618) and tap A. Superseded by skip_intro.sh. |
step.sh |
One Arsenal navigation step (down/up/next/prev/none) + a compact capture: weapon list stacked over the DATA SHEET. |
sweep.sh |
Walk a whole weapon-type list, capturing only rows that show a DATA SHEET — locked rows (a "Conditions to Develop" panel) are detected by the brightness of the Range Class label box and skipped. |
type.sh |
Change weapon-type tab N times (RB) and report the header strip. |
hp.sh / cyc.sh |
Hangar hard-point carousel: cyc.sh steps it (d-pad down, not left/right) and captures the Name + DATA SHEET. |
Input timing under lavapipe: the game polls input at its own low frame rate, so a 60 ms d-pad tap is dropped roughly half the time. 200 ms is reliable; 300 ms starts to auto-repeat (two rows per press).
Findings produced with these: docs/re/weapon-datasheet-runtime.md.
Guest-memory tools (no screenshots)
| Script | What it does |
|---|---|
gmem.py |
Read the live guest address space out of /dev/shm/xenia_memory_* (Xenia's backing file), addressed by guest VA. find / read / words. |
weapon_runtime.py |
Solve the Weapon/Shell struct layouts against the disc records and read the fields the disc defaults. |
unit_discover.py |
Find which runtime class carries a set of ID strings, assuming no vtable: tallies the word at pointer_site - k across distinct IDs. |
unit_runtime.py |
Same solver for the unit\UN_*.tbl definition objects (vtable 0x820af844). Unions several snapshots — unit definitions are per-stage. |
schema_order.py |
Merge a sub-record's field-declaration order across all tables (topological sort); the layout check that pins fields no table ever values. |
order_check.py |
Test offset = base + 4*index for one table's sub-record against solver output. |
grab_tutorial.sh |
Cold-boot Canary, walk to the Nth TUTORIAL entry, wait for the stage load, snapshot guest RAM. One emulator per capture — backing out of a loaded mission wedges it. |
Snapshot first — cp --sparse=always /dev/shm/xenia_memory_* snap.bin (~2 s) — and
point $GMEM_FILE at the copy; the running emulator pegs every core under lavapipe.