Commit Graph
5 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
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 2676f3b835 Put the ring on the 68000, and find the disc stops whenever the player is not asking
ROADMAP P5. The loader moved in session 21 and the frame clock in 22; the ring
producer was the last policy living outside the machine. src/player/ring.i does
`aligned` placement, the descriptor ring, a prefill, 51.2's slack rule and a
seek, and the host keeps only the transport.

It needed a container change. `aligned` asks whether the next record fits
before the end of the ring -- a length asked BEFORE the record is fetched -- and
every reader in this tree answered that by walking the frame stream, which is
exactly what a player streaming off a disc cannot do. DLX4 carries nframes u16
record lengths in the scene header. Frame payloads are byte-identical to the
DLX3 encode, so no fitted constant moves; the scene header goes 5,920 to 6,164 B.

The producer reproduces the host's tiling exactly: 18 wraps, 14.7 KB mean hole,
pixel-exact, a third independent implementation of the same policy.

What it exposed is bigger than the item. A channel only moves bytes while it has
a request and only the CPU can issue one, so the disc stands still between
records by an amount the PLAYER sets, not the medium -- and no host-filled run
could see it. At 488 KB/s in a 256 KB ring a one-deep request queue gives away
6.8% of the pipe and underruns 59 of 120 frames; two-deep gives away 3.4% and
underruns none. The container's whole surplus over the wire is 8.7%, so the
player's own loop was spending most of the slack a branch point saves up.
Prefill is the weaker lever: six records of it still leaves 24 underruns.

Three silent bugs are recorded in FINDINGS 55.7 -- all produced wrong pixels or
a desync rather than a fault -- plus a rig one: MAME renders a screen line by
line, so snapshotting the frame the decoder finished in captures a tear that
reads exactly like a decoder bug.

check.sh gains the machine-owned ring and a seek with the decode after it.
decode.bin is unchanged at 1,296 B and a host-filled run executes none of the
new code, so every FINDINGS 49/51 figure stands. ALL GREEN before and after.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-24 21:45:05 -07:00
prosolis b49bbdc939 Build v7 into the player, and find the cost model 18% wrong on the block it made commonest
src/player/decode.s now paints v7 literal spans, pixel-exact under MAME and
px68k's C68K core over a container where every frame carries 128-216 spans
covering up to 38% of the picture. The span pass is blit.s v7 verbatim: the
66.0/9.143/9.978 fit was measured on that instruction sequence.

The container is DLX3 -- a span section between the mode header and the block
payload, since that is the only place the 68000 can reach without first parsing
something of variable length. 16_span_roundtrip.py gates it in check.sh, and
asserts it emitted enough spans to have tested anything.

Two synthetic all-SPAN anchors price v7 inside decode.s at 151.2 and 225.6
clocks per 4x4 block, against FINDINGS 40's table of 151 and 226 -- 0.2% on
both emulators. The measured mode costs what it was said to cost.

Two things that were not on the list:

TWO BYTE BUDGETS. FINDINGS 40's 18/120 was scored against the 488 KB/s PIPE,
not the 280 KB/s profile, and at the profile rate the lam search has already
spent the allowance -- spans fired on 5 frames of 120 and looked like a
regression. The profile is a chosen quality rate point; the pipe is hardware.
--kbps and --span-kbps are now separate and spans run before mu, because a span
pays in bytes and mu pays in picture. Delivered: 86/120 over budget without
spans, 77/120 at the profile budget, 34/120 on the pipe for +0.36 dB.

C_SKIP_MIXED WAS NEVER MEASURED, and it was 18% low -- 45.0, now 55.0. It is
the one constant in the table that came from a derivation, because the
synthetic frame that would measure it cannot exist: a byte needs a coded block
for its SKIP to be mixed. Four bracketing anchors measure it on both emulators
with the header byte rotated through all four positions, and the partner mode
solves back to its own anchored value to 0.2%. With it corrected the model
predicts a real spanned decode to -0.06% mean / 0.09% worst, against -2.99% /
4.30%. It matters because a span marks its run SKIP, so mixed SKIPs dominate
exactly the frames spans are judged on.

Also: the rig had been writing its synthetic timing frames 26 KB past the top
of a 2 MB machine, and got away with it because the modes it overran are
data-independent. A span's jump displacements come out of the stream, so it is
not. And frames-over-budget is no longer a safe headline -- the controller aims
at the deadline, so 55 of 120 frames sit within 5% of it and a 1% cost shift
moves 22 frames.

FINDINGS 41. check.sh ALL GREEN, now gating on a span-heavy DLX3 container.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 20:02:03 -07:00
prosolis 7d365b3ff5 Drop SASI on capacity, then find the budget never had the disk in it
USER DECISION: drop the `sasi` profile. Not on bandwidth -- on capacity. A SASI
volume is 40 MB, and the 22.8 min of unique scene footage on the source Blu-ray
(streams 00000-00201, measured, not recalled) is 146 MiB at the LOWEST rate this
codec makes -- more than the machine's whole 4-unit SASI space. `scsi` is the
only profile now. FINDINGS 32.

Then the user asked whether we were drawing the wrong conclusions about PIO vs
DMA, and we were, more broadly than the question implied. Every CPU figure in
FINDINGS 24-34 is scored against the full 833,333 cycles/frame with nothing
subtracted for moving the bitstream off disk. Debiting the HD63450 cycle-steal
at the long-standing 8 clk/word ESTIMATE, "1 frame of 120 misses" becomes 84 of
120, median 112.4%. PIO at the span rate is 99.8% of the machine. Spans buy
cycles by spending bandwidth and the bandwidth returns as steal, so 31.6's "fits
completely" becomes a worst frame of 114.3%. 10 fps absorbs it: median 93.7%,
1/120. FINDINGS 35. `11_cpu_budget.py` takes --io dma|pio|none, defaults to dma,
and warns if asked for none.

Also landed:
- item 1 done: the cost model checked against the 68000 on a cost-aware
  container, -3.07% to +0.01%, whole-window mean -1.22%. FINDINGS 34.
- item 4 done: the container carries its own 4-byte record alignment (DLX2).
  94/120 record starts were on odd addresses -- an address error, not a slow
  read -- now 0/120 for 16 B/s. Re-encoding reproduces 31.1 exactly. FINDINGS 33.
- a `scsi` window does not fit the 2 MB machine the rig emulates (2.84 MB of
  stream past a 0x200000 ceiling). The gate now verifies 80 of 120 frames and
  SAYS so, and fails loudly when the pass does not complete, instead of
  reporting a phantom 49,005-pixel diff. FINDINGS 36.

Three near-misses this session had one shape: an unobservable run nearly
produced a false finding. stdbuf -oL on any MAME job that prints progress -- a
file is block-buffered too, and a run that is merely finishing looks exactly
like one that is wedged.

check.sh ALL GREEN.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 17:09:47 -07:00
prosolis e1aa26bb57 The 68000 decoder draws pixel-exact frames, and does not fit
src/player/decode.s parses DLX1 and decodes straight into GVRAM. Verified
pixel-exact over a 120-frame sequential run of the worst sustained window on
the disc -- all four block modes, full temporal recursion, so the last frame
is only right if all 120 were. In check.sh.

It costs a mean of 81.7% of a 12fps frame budget, and 31% of frames exceed
100% (42% at scsi). CPU is now the binding constraint. FINDINGS 28.

Three things that were believed and are not true:

- The dual-display-path plan of FINDINGS 24.5/25.6 is incoherent. The compose
  path needs a RAM copy of the previous reconstruction; the direct path's
  selling point is that it keeps none. Mixing them shows stale pixels on 70 of
  120 frames, worst frame 18.8% of the screen. Every coherent repair is dearer
  than not mixing, and 24.5's two figures were both copies with no decode in
  either, so there was never a crossover to find. One path ships, and the 96KB
  reference frame is gone. tools/analysis/10_pathmix_drift.py keeps the
  counterexample runnable; check.sh asserts it still reproduces.

- The four block modes do not cost the same. V1 300, V4 448, RAW 400 cycles
  against the old model's flat 207.8. V4 is 25% of blocks and 50% of the
  cycles, and the mode decision charges it bytes it does not charge cycles for.
  tools/analysis/11_cpu_budget.py reproduces all four frames timed on the
  68000 to within 1 point. Hand-derived timings agree to 0.5% on V1.

- The container is big-endian but not aligned. Variable-length records laid end
  to end put frame 1's length field at an odd address, and move.l (a0)+ there
  is an address error: frame 0 decoded perfectly and then vectored into the
  IPL for 59 emulated seconds looking like a hang. Found by dumping PC, not by
  reading the source.

Also: an all-V1 frame, the cheapest possible full redraw, is 110.5% of budget.
No mode assignment fits a scene cut at 12fps. That one needs a decision, not a
measurement.

Next: charge cycles in the mode decision and bisect against 833,333 per frame,
the way session 6 bisects lam against bytes -- but with no bucket, because a
late frame cannot be banked.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 15:04:38 -07:00