ROADMAP K1, the packed player's one open structural item. A frame is a picture
AND a palette, and no run in this tree had pointed a DMA channel at the palette
registers. dmagate.s runs 7-9, gated by dma_run.sh and check.sh:
7. 512 B off the disc into $E82000, bus held -- byte-exact in 256 register
words, read back OUT OF the registers by the 68000;
8. the SAME transfer aimed at RAM -- byte-exact at $2C000, and 256 of 256
palette words still read the poison the CPU wrote, which is what attributes
run 7 to the channel's MAR rather than to the readback path;
9. ONE array-chained start across two kinds of destination -- the palette and
six picture rows at the 1,024 B line stride, 2,048 B byte-exact.
So a packed frame is one channel start: a 193-entry array, palette first, CPU
halted from the first byte to the last. The array is scene-constant, because
the packed layout spends both 256-colour pages and there is no page to flip.
What is left on the CPU per frame in the video path is the channel start and the
READ(10) -- no per-frame PAINT, which is not the same claim as no per-frame CPU.
The destination is POISONED first (62.1). Runs 4-6 wrote into RAM that was zero
and GVRAM that was stale against a record that is mostly pad; "it matches the
disc" was weaker than it read as. The host counts whether the poison actually
discriminates instead of assuming it: 511 of 512, and the gate refuses under 500.
And it opened a hardware item (62.4, ROADMAP B4). MAME maps the palette to
palette_device over memory_array, whose write16 is a plain COMBINE_DATA -- RAM
that honours mem_mask, with no handler that could refuse a byte write. Unlike
GVRAM's 256-colour arm there is nothing here to be wrong about, so the run
bounds the model and not the board. What a real palette register does with a
byte write is unmeasured. A negative costs 0.28% of a frame and nothing else.
29_packed_player.py now also prints the two rows with the per-frame palette
charged -- 55.7% of a frame on the chain, 582 KB/s -- alongside the picture-only
figures the codec comparison is quoted against.
check.sh ALL GREEN before (tmp/check_s30_start.log) and after
(tmp/check_s30_end.log).
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
Two sessions, unrecorded until now, committed together because their edits
share files and cannot be split cleanly after the fact.
Session 28 (FINDINGS 60): the container is DLX5 -- every record sector-aligned,
120/120 starting on a boundary where 3/120 did, +0.48% on the wire and zero
clocks -- and the ring's release rounds to RECALN so no pad is stranded. Two
encoder levers measured and refused: `--spans all` buys +0.19 dB for +67% of
the wire, and joint span/lam selection emits byte-identical containers because
`lam` never leaves its floor on any of 120 frames.
Session 29 (FINDINGS 61): the packed full-frame blit is 27.3% of a 12 fps
frame, a channel fills GVRAM in buffer mode off the disc with the CPU halted,
and it walks the 1,024 B line stride itself through array chaining. At the
9 clk/B dual-address floor the codec is 110.4% of a frame and a decoder-free
packed literal player is 55.2%, at +4.89 dB -- 2.75 dB past a ceiling the
codec's scene-wide palette cannot cross. Encoder work is parked; the codec is
kept and not built on.
check.sh is ALL GREEN before and after, plus one new stage that gates the ORDER
of the measured paint costs rather than their values.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
prosolis