3 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
prosolis 6f698ca226 Put the player on a real volume, and find the write window is the frame
ROADMAP K3. src/player/packed.s (2,898 B) brings up its own display, builds
its own 193-entry DMA chain, keeps its own frame clock off V-DISP and fetches
every record itself with READ(10) off a CZ-6BS1. The rig writes no picture
byte, no palette entry and no CRTC register.

120 of 120 frames pixel-exact, every one compared, in both palette orders --
the gate had to grow to do it, because a packed frame is a LITERAL and the
codec's recursion was what made one comparison audit 120.

And the write window turns out to be the frame. A packed write requires R20
bit 11, buffer mode blanks the layer, and a DMAC-direct player holds the
window open for the whole data phase, so

    dark fraction of a slot = record bytes / (DATA-PHASE rate x slot)

which is 1.0 at the container's own 582.0 KB/s: every frame delivered, on
time, pixel-exact, and none of them displayed. The rate in that expression is
the BURST rate, a third hardware number B1 has no test for. It reverses 61.5's
ranking -- a packed player that DMAs to RAM and paints with the measured 27.3%
blit is on screen 72.7% of every slot at any rate, and the two are equal only
at 2,131 KB/s = 3.7x the wire.

And a held channel costs the frame clock half its ticks without the clock
being able to tell: 487 of 1,038 V-DISP edges lost, zero late frames reported,
the player believing 12 fps while the screen ran at 6.37.

FINDINGS 64. ROADMAP K4 opened and fenced behind B2.
check.sh ALL GREEN before and after.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-25 09:10:48 -07:00
prosolis 1be428c270 Align the container to the disc, and find the decoder-free packed player fits
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
2026-08-25 06:54:27 -07:00
prosolis 5921fab118 Put the transport on the 68000, and find PIO costs 87 clocks a byte
ROADMAP P4b. src/player/xfer.i answers src/player/ring.i's XF_* mailbox with a
real READ(10) to a real MB89352 in place of tools/bench/stream.lua's modelled
transport: 120 records, 4,488,588 B, pixel-exact out of a 256 KB ring, with a
real mid-stream seek in a second pass. The tiling is the SAME 18 wraps and
14.7 KB mean hole that 49.4's host producer and 55.4's modelled transport
produced -- a third transport, same placement, which is the assertion that
ring.i could not tell which side of the seam answered it.

What it costs is the finding. tools/bench/xfer_cost.sh subtracts the same 120
frames run twice and gets 87.28 clocks per delivered byte, against the 68000's
own cycle table for the loop, which says 87.15 -- 0.2% apart, so the cost is the
instruction stream and not MAME's device model, and it is the first number this
rig has produced that survives leaving the emulator. That is 391.8% of a 12 fps
frame; the machine's own V-DISP clock agrees from the other end at 2.57 fps.
Against the ladder, W=5 held is 22.4% of a frame and W=19 is 85.3%, so P4a is
worth 4.6x the worst DMA configuration in this tree and 17.5x the best -- where
before this session it was worth 9 against 19. W itself did not move by a clock.

"UNDERRUNS: 0/120" is vacuous with a synchronous transport, and stream.lua now
prints that argument next to the zero: a frame cannot start before its record
has landed because the decoder IS the transport. The counter that means
something is NO IDLE, 119/120 with a worst overrun of 441 whole ticks. Same
class of error as 49.7.2's free-running ring passing at 48 KB.

58.3: a record is not a sector -- 117 of 120 start part way into one, and
reading whole sectors into the ring corrupts the neighbours rather than wasting
bytes (49.2, no bounds check). scsi.i reads the covering sectors and stores only
the window, which is free in PIO and stops being free the moment P4a succeeds.
tools/analysis/26_sector_align.py prices the three ways out and sector-aligned
records win on both axes: +0.43% wire and zero clocks, against +1.34% and a
bounce copy at +5 clk/B. ROADMAP now carries a four-item re-encode bundle and
P4a should be attempted against a sector-aligned container.

check.sh gains two stages and was ALL GREEN before and after. decode.bin is
unchanged at 1,296 B and the same MD5.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-24 23:15:53 -07:00