Claude (auto-RE)
3ef2c438ae
With word A = 2 the screen lists Stage01 SELECTABLE, carrying a High Score and a
Best Time, and Stage02-Stage08 GREYED OUT. One cleared stage, one selectable
entry, at the bit index that names it -- the mask's meaning is now visible on
screen rather than inferred from disassembly.
Two runs, identical navigation, fresh boot each:
control word A 0x00000002 -> MISSION SELECT opens normally
poked word A 0xFFFFFFFF -> MmAllocatePhysicalMemoryEx fails on 128 MB,
guest throws, Xenia shows "Disc Read Error"
So last commit's heap failure was caused by the poke, and by a careless one:
0xFFFFFFFF claims stages that do not exist (0, 17, 24-31 in word A). Poking only
real story ids (0x0001FFFE = stages 1-16) does not blow the heap. That the list
screen changes behaviour with the mask is itself evidence word A feeds it.
Getting a trustworthy control took three tries, and every failure produced a
plausible wrong answer rather than an error:
1. the title-glyph oracle fired during the ATTRACT MOVIE, so A was pressed at
nothing and the run "reported 0 failures" for a screen it never reached;
2. Xvfb keeps the previous instance's framebuffer until the new one draws, so
a screenshot seconds after launch showed the OLD run -- "MAIN MENU reached
after 1s", against a process that no longer existed;
3. a single-pixel "is NEW GAME white?" test matched a white LOADING FLASH.
Fixes, all in challenge_probe.sh: blank the root and refuse screen oracles for
the first 40 s; identify a screen by a PATTERN of sampled points (white text AND
the dark panel behind it), not one pixel; require two consecutive samples. The
new oracle was validated offline against all six saved screenshots and accepts
exactly the one real main menu.
General lesson worth the words: a navigation oracle that can only fail by
returning the wrong screen will happily produce a whole run of confident,
meaningless results.
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.