Dragon-s-Lair-X68k

19 Commits 1 Branch 0 Tags

3 Commits

Include renames

Author	SHA1	Message	Date
prosolis	497f88b945	Rate control: rebuilt per-frame, wired in, and gated at zero drift FINDINGS 26 stopped the session-5 rate controller before it shipped: it built a lam-ladder of independent whole-sequence encodes and picked frames off it, so SKIP blocks referenced reconstructions the decoder never saw -- 111 of 120 frames drifted. The fix is the structural one 26.1 said it had to be. vq_hybrid is now frame-drivable -- frame_ctx / decide / paint -- and encode() is a thin loop over it. Rate control drives the same three calls, bisects lam per frame under the leaky bucket, and feeds back the frame it actually emitted. The desync has no way to occur, and 09_ratectl_drift.py goes 111/120 -> 0/120. That test is now part of check.sh, which is ~2 min rather than ~40 s. Both overshoots on the worst sustained window are closed for under 1 dB, totals including audio: sasi 137.4 -> 109.5 KB/s (-0.60 dB), scsi 381.6 -> 280.0 KB/s (-0.91 dB). Zero frames hit the lam=800 cliff, so nothing was destroyed to get there. Rate control also makes the display path cheaper -- scsi's median drops 53.6% -> 47.1% -- because raising lam moves blocks to SKIP and V1. Two knobs measured rather than guessed. --rc-floor is worth 0.00 dB on that window and defaults to the profile lam, so rate control cannot regress content that already fits. --prefill defaults to 0 and is documented as a trap: it buys a permission to overshoot of exactly bucket/nframes, and on a 14-frame clip it disables the controller outright. FINDINGS 26.5 was wrong in both halves and 27.6 records it. _paint was not the bottleneck (14% of a frame, though vectorising it was still right at 17.1x) and the ladder was never "minutes" -- those were k-means in build(). What makes per-frame rate control affordable is that VQ.assign depends on neither lam nor prev, so it is cached one frame deep: a 12-step search over 120 frames costs 0.31 s against 49.1 s. Also caught: fixed-lam sasi was already 5% over target on 00020, the clip everyone called easy. Nothing noticed because the profile table quotes PSNR and not bitrate. check.sh: ALL GREEN. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6	2026-08-23 14:36:45 -07:00
prosolis	e00264a058	Find the sustained action sequence: it breaks both profiles The open risk since session 2 was "a sustained action sequence could still break the bitrate", with every clip measured so far being 1.2-1.7 s. Closed by measurement rather than by sampling clips by hand. 07_motion_survey.py scans a whole stream at 96x72 for the hottest sliding window of inter-frame difference. On 00223 the spread between the quietest and hottest sustained 10 s windows is 10.6x, which is the argument for not eyeballing it. Hottest is t=539.4s, the Singe endgame. There, with the fixed lam the CLI uses, sasi overshoots 110 -> 129.6 KB/s (+18%) and scsi 280 -> 373.8 KB/s (+34%). Rate control moves from "insurance, not a fix" to required, and is promoted above the full-disc survey. The bus is not broken -- 381.6 KB/s still fits the 488 KB/s figure -- so FINDINGS 21 survives, at 78% of the pipe instead of a comfortable margin. Three further corrections fall out: - The two largest streams on the disc are bonus material. 00216 is the feature with a burned-in commentary PiP; 00215 is the commentary. 00223 is the clean 9.4 min. A size-ranked survey would have encoded live action. - On hard content the 256-colour scene palette (31.33 dB) binds well before the X68000 display (40.81 dB); scsi is already within 0.51 dB of it. - FINDINGS 24.5's architecture question resolves to "both paths, chosen per frame": 30-53% of frames sit above the 70% crossover. Picking per frame costs a median 37.0% of the frame budget and caps at 53.6%. Reporting for this is wired into encode.py, which previously only printed a mean over all frames -- the one statistic that cannot answer a per-frame question. extract.py takes optional start/dur; 08_mode_map.py renders source \| decoded \| block-mode map to .webm. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6	2026-08-23 14:00:12 -07:00
prosolis	e4062ed294	Session 2: hybrid VQ codec, two quality profiles, three corrections Answers session 1's critical-path question. Flat 4x4 VQ at k=256 was prototyped and REJECTED by eye: Dirk's face disintegrates and ink outlines break into 4-pixel stair-steps. The 256-colour palettised frame is excellent, so the palette was never the problem -- block VQ was. Replaced it with a Cinepak-style hybrid: each 4x4 block is SKIP, one 4x4 codeword, four 2x2 codewords, or RAW literal pixels, chosen per block by rate-distortion. The RAW escape makes lam=0 pixel-exact (measured 0.00 dB loss), so the quality knob spans lossless to heavily-compressed in one bitstream. Per the user's decision, ships TWO quality profiles from that one codec, one decoder and one bitstream -- only the rate knob differs: sasi 45 KB/s lam=300 34.8 dB stock 10MHz ACE/EXPERT scsi 75 KB/s lam=100 35.9 dB Super/XVI or CZ-6BS1 Three corrections to earlier numbers: 1. Session 1's "183 KB/s at 12fps" was a bad extrapolation. Halving the framerate does not halve the bitrate -- decimation roughly doubles the per-frame delta. Re-measured directly: 340 KB/s for session 1's own RLE, 247 KB/s for changed-spans+deflate. The lossless floor is 319 MB. 2. A FOURTH false-good result, same family as the three in FINDINGS 4: k=1024 codebooks appeared to buy +2.4 dB free, because the rate model charged 1 byte for a 10-bit index. Charging the true cost reverses the verdict -- k=256 wins at every matched bitrate, and by 5 dB at the low end where the SASI profile lives. k=256 ships. 3. Stream inventory: the ~3-5MB clips are 1.2-1.7s, not ~60s, and some 60s streams are menus, not content. Any survey must classify before averaging. Also cleared both candidate sources for the game-logic layer: the SNES project is MIT and DirkSimple is zlib, so the arcade scene graph can be imported and the two transcriptions diffed against each other. Encoder is working end-to-end: extract.py -> vq/vq_hybrid/ratectl -> encode.py, emitting a big-endian DLX1 container the 68000 can parse with plain moves. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6	2026-08-23 11:56:08 -07:00

Author

SHA1

Message

Date

prosolis

497f88b945

Rate control: rebuilt per-frame, wired in, and gated at zero drift

FINDINGS 26 stopped the session-5 rate controller before it shipped: it built a
lam-ladder of independent whole-sequence encodes and picked frames off it, so
SKIP blocks referenced reconstructions the decoder never saw -- 111 of 120
frames drifted. The fix is the structural one 26.1 said it had to be.

vq_hybrid is now frame-drivable -- frame_ctx / decide / paint -- and encode() is
a thin loop over it. Rate control drives the same three calls, bisects lam per
frame under the leaky bucket, and feeds back the frame it actually emitted. The
desync has no way to occur, and 09_ratectl_drift.py goes 111/120 -> 0/120. That
test is now part of check.sh, which is ~2 min rather than ~40 s.

Both overshoots on the worst sustained window are closed for under 1 dB, totals
including audio: sasi 137.4 -> 109.5 KB/s (-0.60 dB), scsi 381.6 -> 280.0 KB/s
(-0.91 dB). Zero frames hit the lam=800 cliff, so nothing was destroyed to get
there. Rate control also makes the display path cheaper -- scsi's median drops
53.6% -> 47.1% -- because raising lam moves blocks to SKIP and V1.

Two knobs measured rather than guessed. --rc-floor is worth 0.00 dB on that
window and defaults to the profile lam, so rate control cannot regress content
that already fits. --prefill defaults to 0 and is documented as a trap: it buys
a permission to overshoot of exactly bucket/nframes, and on a 14-frame clip it
disables the controller outright.

FINDINGS 26.5 was wrong in both halves and 27.6 records it. _paint was not the
bottleneck (14% of a frame, though vectorising it was still right at 17.1x) and
the ladder was never "minutes" -- those were k-means in build(). What makes
per-frame rate control affordable is that VQ.assign depends on neither lam nor
prev, so it is cached one frame deep: a 12-step search over 120 frames costs
0.31 s against 49.1 s.

Also caught: fixed-lam sasi was already 5% over target on 00020, the clip
everyone called easy. Nothing noticed because the profile table quotes PSNR and
not bitrate.

check.sh: ALL GREEN.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6

2026-08-23 14:36:45 -07:00

prosolis

e00264a058

Find the sustained action sequence: it breaks both profiles

The open risk since session 2 was "a sustained action sequence could still
break the bitrate", with every clip measured so far being 1.2-1.7 s. Closed by
measurement rather than by sampling clips by hand.

07_motion_survey.py scans a whole stream at 96x72 for the hottest sliding
window of inter-frame difference. On 00223 the spread between the quietest and
hottest sustained 10 s windows is 10.6x, which is the argument for not eyeballing
it. Hottest is t=539.4s, the Singe endgame.

There, with the fixed lam the CLI uses, sasi overshoots 110 -> 129.6 KB/s (+18%)
and scsi 280 -> 373.8 KB/s (+34%). Rate control moves from "insurance, not a
fix" to required, and is promoted above the full-disc survey. The bus is not
broken -- 381.6 KB/s still fits the 488 KB/s figure -- so FINDINGS 21 survives,
at 78% of the pipe instead of a comfortable margin.

Three further corrections fall out:

- The two largest streams on the disc are bonus material. 00216 is the feature
  with a burned-in commentary PiP; 00215 is the commentary. 00223 is the clean
  9.4 min. A size-ranked survey would have encoded live action.
- On hard content the 256-colour scene palette (31.33 dB) binds well before the
  X68000 display (40.81 dB); scsi is already within 0.51 dB of it.
- FINDINGS 24.5's architecture question resolves to "both paths, chosen per
  frame": 30-53% of frames sit above the 70% crossover. Picking per frame costs
  a median 37.0% of the frame budget and caps at 53.6%. Reporting for this is
  wired into encode.py, which previously only printed a mean over all frames --
  the one statistic that cannot answer a per-frame question.

extract.py takes optional start/dur; 08_mode_map.py renders source | decoded |
block-mode map to .webm.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6

2026-08-23 14:00:12 -07:00

prosolis

e4062ed294

Session 2: hybrid VQ codec, two quality profiles, three corrections

Answers session 1's critical-path question. Flat 4x4 VQ at k=256 was prototyped
and REJECTED by eye: Dirk's face disintegrates and ink outlines break into
4-pixel stair-steps. The 256-colour palettised frame is excellent, so the
palette was never the problem -- block VQ was.

Replaced it with a Cinepak-style hybrid: each 4x4 block is SKIP, one 4x4
codeword, four 2x2 codewords, or RAW literal pixels, chosen per block by
rate-distortion. The RAW escape makes lam=0 pixel-exact (measured 0.00 dB loss),
so the quality knob spans lossless to heavily-compressed in one bitstream.

Per the user's decision, ships TWO quality profiles from that one codec, one
decoder and one bitstream -- only the rate knob differs:
  sasi  45 KB/s  lam=300  34.8 dB   stock 10MHz ACE/EXPERT
  scsi  75 KB/s  lam=100  35.9 dB   Super/XVI or CZ-6BS1

Three corrections to earlier numbers:

1. Session 1's "183 KB/s at 12fps" was a bad extrapolation. Halving the
   framerate does not halve the bitrate -- decimation roughly doubles the
   per-frame delta. Re-measured directly: 340 KB/s for session 1's own RLE,
   247 KB/s for changed-spans+deflate. The lossless floor is 319 MB.

2. A FOURTH false-good result, same family as the three in FINDINGS 4:
   k=1024 codebooks appeared to buy +2.4 dB free, because the rate model
   charged 1 byte for a 10-bit index. Charging the true cost reverses the
   verdict -- k=256 wins at every matched bitrate, and by 5 dB at the low end
   where the SASI profile lives. k=256 ships.

3. Stream inventory: the ~3-5MB clips are 1.2-1.7s, not ~60s, and some 60s
   streams are menus, not content. Any survey must classify before averaging.

Also cleared both candidate sources for the game-logic layer: the SNES project
is MIT and DirkSimple is zlib, so the arcade scene graph can be imported and
the two transcriptions diffed against each other.

Encoder is working end-to-end: extract.py -> vq/vq_hybrid/ratectl -> encode.py,
emitting a big-endian DLX1 container the 68000 can parse with plain moves.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6

2026-08-23 11:56:08 -07:00