Commit Graph
13 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
prosolis c520a89e14 Measure the finer chain tail: 84/120 becomes 18/120, and the derivation was right by cancellation
blit.s gains v7 -- v6's 24-pixel movem chain plus a second chain whose unit is
one `move.l (a0)+,(a2)+`. Measured over 13 span lengths by span.sh, every config
pixel-exact:

    cycles = 66.0 per span + 9.143 per COARSE pixel + 9.978 per FINE pixel

fitting all 13 to within 0.2%. v5 and v6 re-measure to FINDINGS 30 exactly, so
the harness has not drifted underneath the new variant.

Rescored against the same scsi window and the same additive model, v7 takes
84/120 frames over budget to 18/120 -- exactly what FINDINGS 39.4 derived, and
that agreement is two cancelling errors: the derivation's 2-register movem tail
is 29% too dear per pixel, and its "nothing per span" for the second chain entry
is 22.3 clocks too cheap. The plain post-incrementing move.l is the right tail
instruction, and it makes the padding quantum 2 pixels, which a run of 4x4
blocks pads to exactly zero.

The DMAC stays dropped on a measurement now rather than an argument: v7 takes
back 37 of the 43 frames the array chain would, with no reserved channel and no
timing neither emulator here can verify. Break-even against all-V1 moves from
L=4 blocks to L=2.

The fine displacement is carried mid-stream rather than in the span record, so
the decoder holds nothing across the copy and keeps all 12 payload registers --
which is the whole reason the coarse unit is 24 pixels.

span.sh is now -seconds_to_run 200 (30 s wall, 36 configs) and takes its
expected snapshot count from the generated metadata instead of a literal 23.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 19:02:23 -07:00
prosolis c5ca56330e A second emulator agrees, the bus was never counted, and the DMAC loses by one clock
Three things, and the last one reversed itself when the datasheet arrived.

A SECOND EMULATOR. tools/bench/c68k/ links px68k's C68K core into a headless
harness -- no SDL, no ROMs, no emulated machine, because the decoder touches
nothing but RAM, the control block and GVRAM. decode.s is now pixel-exact under
two independent CPU cores, and cycle-table error against MAME is bounded at
3.3%, running against us. MAME 0.277's M68000 turns out to be the MICROCODE
core, not Musashi (m68000.lst + m68000gen.py), so this is two structurally
different timing models agreeing rather than two tables. FINDINGS 28.8's "V4
costs more than RAW" reproduces independently. FINDINGS 37.

THE BUS. Nothing since FINDINGS 24 had counted the 68000's local memory bus --
one 4-clock cycle at a time, carrying instruction prefetch as well as data. The
decoder occupies 86.7% of it and PREFETCH IS 62% OF THAT TRAFFIC, so a data-only
count understates occupancy by 2x. Two sources check each other: c68k_bench
counts every bus callback exactly, and a static walk of decode.lst supplies the
prefetch no emulator here can report. The walk reproduces the measured data half
to 0.04%, which is what licenses its prefetch half, and 15_bus_occupancy.py is a
gate rather than a report because every bus figure depends on that check.
FINDINGS 38.

THE DMAC CHAIN LOSES. FINDINGS 29.6 named it the one uncosted lever. Costed from
bus arithmetic -- a read cycle plus a write cycle, 8 clocks a pixel -- it scored
1/120 frames over budget against the v6 span's 10/120 and looked decisive. Then
the MC68450 manual (Motorola Jul 1989, now at ~/src/mc68450.pdf): Fig 4-25 sheet
4 puts a dual-address word between two 16-bit ports at 9 CLOCKS, because note 2
gives the DMAC 4-clock reads and 5-clock WRITES. The 68000 writes in 4.

    DMAC   9.000 clocks/pixel   datasheet
    v6     9.152 clocks/pixel   measured, FINDINGS 30

1.7%. Scored additively, 86% of what remains of the DMAC's advantage is v6's
24-pixel padding quantum -- a property of its unrolled movem chain, fixable in
software with a finer tail chain, worth 55/120 -> 18/120 against the DMAC's
12/120. Recommendation: fix the quantum, drop the DMAC. Six frames does not buy
a reserved channel, a two-region container layout and a timing dependency
neither emulator here can verify. The container is identical either way -- v6's
record and an HD63450 chaining entry are both 6 bytes, so the chain array IS the
span table -- so nothing is foreclosed. FINDINGS 39.

TWO CORRECTIONS TO MY OWN WORK IN THE SAME SESSION:

- I argued FINDINGS 35's flat CPU debit for the disk was too pessimistic and
  rescored the window at 53/120 with max(CPU, bus). Wrong. A 68000 has no cache
  and a two-word prefetch queue, so it stalls the moment another master takes
  the bus, and the MC68450 hands the bus over in SLABS under limited-rate
  auto-request rather than interleaving per operand. DMA is additive. 84/120
  stands and 14_dmac_chain.py reproduces it exactly. What 86.7% occupancy really
  says is that there is almost no room to overlap anything. FINDINGS 38.3.
- The first DMAC costing was derived where a primary source existed. Both wrong
  answers were confident and both were caught by reading the manual.

Also landed:
- FINDINGS 5's 8 clocks/word for the SCSI DMA, STATUS's own "most load-bearing
  unmeasured number", is now bracketed by the datasheet: 5 clk/word with the bus
  held, ~12 if the DMAC arbitrates per word. 8 is a supported midpoint, and
  which end applies is a player design decision worth 7 clocks a word on a
  480 KB/s stream. FINDINGS 39.7.
- check.sh gains two gates: the C68K pixel-exact decode (seconds, no MAME) and
  the bus-model self-check. Both skip cleanly without a px68k checkout.
- spanned blocks are now charged their mode-map dispatch, which FINDINGS 30.7
  flagged as uncounted in 12_span_tradeoff.py.
- MAME timed runs must be budgeted by WALL CLOCK, not -seconds_to_run: this box
  runs x68000 at ~0.033x realtime and two runs were killed by their own timeout.
  That is why the all-RAW cell in 37.3 is empty. The C68K harness does the same
  work in seconds because it emulates a CPU and not a machine.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 18:30:23 -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 06b98d4b47 Price cycles in the mode decision: 37 misses become 1, for 0.26 dB
The decoder has been CPU-bound since FINDINGS 28 while the mode decision
minimised D + lam*R -- distortion against BYTES. decide() now minimises
D + lam*bytes + mu*cycles, and ratectl bisects mu per frame against the
833,333-cycle budget with the lam bisection nested inside it. On the worst
sustained window:

  sasi  27.22 -> 26.95 dB, 109.5 -> 109.4 KB/s, 37/120 misses -> 1
  scsi  29.90 -> 29.27 dB, 280.0 -> 278.6 KB/s, 51/120 misses -> 1

Bitrate does not move: the byte controller still binds, and mu changes WHICH
modes are bought. V4 is what it stops buying -- 25.2 -> 20.3% of blocks at sasi
and 15.0 -> 5.3% at scsi, where RAW takes it. That is 28.8's inversion in
practice: RAW is dearer in bytes and cheaper in cycles, so only the byte-rich
profile can buy its way out of V4.

Three things worth knowing beyond the headline:

  - The one frame that still misses, at both profiles, is FRAME 0 -- no previous
    reconstruction, so 100% changed by definition, which is also what a scene
    cut is. It comes out at the all-V1 floor of 110.6% and is emitted late on
    purpose. Freezing a cut to make a deadline is the worse failure.
  - 28.7's "11 frames are impossible" was too pessimistic. That floor held the
    SKIP set fixed and asked how cheaply the drawn blocks could be drawn; the
    real decision can also MOVE a block to SKIP, which above ~90% non-SKIP is
    the only lever left.
  - SKIP's price depends on its neighbours (13.25 cycles clustered, 45 mixed),
    which a per-block lagrangian cannot see. The way out is that the two uses
    need not share a cost function: a ranking constant inside decide(), the
    exact clustered rule for the frame-level bisection. vq_hybrid.cycles() is
    now the one definition of that rule and 11_cpu_budget.py imports it.

Gated: 09_ratectl_drift.py runs both controllers, both 0/120 drifting frames.
The cost-aware container decodes pixel-exact on the 68000 (120 frames). ON by
default in encode.py; --no-cpu-fit restores session 7. check.sh ALL GREEN.

Still a model, not a measurement, for THIS container: FINDINGS 31's cycle
figures come from vq_hybrid.cycles (within 1 point of the 68000 on four frames
of the session-7 container). Timing this one on the machine is step 1 of the
next session -- it was started and killed for time, and it is slow.

FINDINGS 31. tools/analysis/13_cpu_ratectl.py.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 16:24:22 -07:00
prosolis 29eb78a599 Measure the span: the mode survives, and it is an encoder format
FINDINGS 29 priced a literal-span mode at 4*(50 + 4L*9.08) cycles and labelled
the whole section DERIVED. Session 8 step 0 was to measure it before optimising
over the mode set it implies. Two variants in blit.s, one stream per span length
from prep_spans.py, timed by span.lua, driven by span.sh in ~25 s:

  v5, handed (x, npix) and left to work the copy out:  97.9/span + 10.459/px
  v6, handed an address and a jump displacement:       43.7/span +  9.152/px
  29 assumed                                           50.0/span +  9.080/px

So 29's arithmetic was right about a format nobody had written. The difference
is not tuning: v5 spends ~122 cycles a span computing a destination, dividing
npix into bursts and handling a 0..15 remainder, all of which the encoder knows
at build time. v6's record is {u32 absolute GVRAM address, u16 jump
displacement} into an unrolled chain of 24-pixel copy units -- no loop, no
remainder, no arithmetic -- and it fits 11 span lengths to 0.3%.

Three things that measurement showed and derivation could not:

  - The per-pixel cost is a function of REGISTER PRESSURE. FINDINGS 24's 9.08
    was a fixed blit with 12 registers free; v5 can spare 8 and pays 10.46; v6
    gets 12 back only because the encoder holds the state.
  - Short spans die in the remainder path -- a 12-pixel span costs MORE than a
    16-pixel one -- and the fix is padding, not avoidance.
  - Odd-x alignment is free (259.0 vs 261.8 cycles/span), as a 16-bit bus
    implies but nobody had checked.

Re-priced against the unchanged mode maps, sasi: median 74.4% -> 52.0% (29 said
43.0), misses 37 -> 10/120 (29 said 8), 448.0 KB/s. Break-even moved from runs
of 2 blocks to runs of 4. 29.4 survives: a scene cut needs x >= 0.196 of the
frame as spans and the bus allows x <= 0.373, so it fits at 12fps.

All 23 timing configs are also checked pixel-exact, so none of this was timed
against a decoder that quietly skipped work.

FINDINGS 30. Next: lever B, the cost-aware mode decision.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 15:45:51 -07:00
prosolis 3641f37e28 The bus is 4x idle while the CPU is pinned: price the trade
The codec was designed when bytes were scarce, so every decision in it trades
cycles to save bytes. That is now backwards: sasi spends 110 KB/s of a 488 KB/s
pipe while missing 31% of frames on CPU.

The cheapest thing a 68000 can be handed is the most expensive thing to store.
Measured, per pixel: row-linear copy from word-expanded memory 9.08 cycles,
block-order 12.98, V1 codebook 18.74, RAW byte literals 25.03. So the 1024-byte
stride costs 43% and unpacking bytes to words costs more than the write itself.

Pricing one new mode -- a per-row span of word-expanded literals movem.l'd
straight from the stream buffer -- against the UNCHANGED mode maps:

  sasi   median 74.4% -> 43.0%, worst 136.2% -> 106.2%, misses 37 -> 8/120,
         101.7 -> 453.2 KB/s
  scsi   median 94.9% -> 69.4%, misses 51 -> 18/120, 272 -> 479.7 KB/s

scsi gains less precisely because it has less idle bandwidth left to trade.

Two consequences worth flagging. A word-expanded literal block derives to ~240
cycles, cheaper than V1's measured 299.9 and pixel-exact -- so every codebook
mode is CPU-dominated by a literal, and the codebook is a byte optimisation
that now costs cycles. And 28.5's "a scene cut cannot fit at 12fps" reopens:
CPU needs >=19% of the frame as spans, the bus allows <=39%, and that interval
is not empty.

DERIVED, NOT MEASURED, and labelled as such everywhere. The 9.08 cycles/pixel
is real but was measured at full row width with 12-register bursts, so short
spans are flattered. Measuring one span on the 68000 is now step 0 of the next
session, ahead of the cost-aware mode decision, because it changes the mode set
that decision optimises over.

FINDINGS 29. tools/analysis/12_span_tradeoff.py.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 15:28:29 -07:00
prosolis ed353d24a9 Budget both profiles against both clocks: the CPU limit is the clock, not the profile
11_cpu_budget.py takes --machine. Clocks confirmed from MAME 0.277
x68k.cpp:1133/1194/1200, not recalled: x68000 AND x68ksupr are both
40_MHz_XTAL/4 = 10 MHz; only the XVI is faster at 33.33_MHz_XTAL/2.

                sasi            scsi
  stock 10MHz   31% miss        42% miss
  XVI 16.7MHz   0% miss         0% miss

sasi is the cheaper profile but it does not fit either at 10 MHz. The XVI
column is headroom, not a target: the profiles are an I/O-bandwidth axis and
say nothing about CPU, and the locked target CPU is a stock 10 MHz 68000 for
both of them. So both profiles have to fit the same 833,333-cycle budget, and
the cycle ceiling has to be enforced in the encoder regardless of which one
ships.

Model comparisons are now gated to the clock and framerate they were stated
at: quoting 24.5's 76.6% or the stock-machine 68000 timings against an XVI
budget compares a model to a measurement of a different machine.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 15:13:34 -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
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 145753c0bf Handoff: rate control is next, and it is unsound as written
Session 5 handoff. The user has chosen rate control as the next session's work,
so this reads ratectl.py properly before that session starts rather than
discovering the problem mid-implementation.

FINDINGS 26: encode_rate_controlled() is not sound. H.encode() is temporally
recursive -- SKIP blocks copy the previous RECONSTRUCTION -- but rate control
builds a ladder of independent whole-sequence encodes and picks each frame from
whichever rung fits the budget. Frames then reference reconstructions the
decoder never saw. Measured on the Singe window: 67 rung switches, 111 of 120
frames drift, worst frame 43.4% of pixels, reported PSNR overstated by 0.36 dB.
It would have wired up cleanly and reported a plausible wrong answer.

Two further defects in the same function: the lam ladder runs to 2e5, 250x past
the FINDINGS 15 cliff, so a frame that only fits up there is destroyed rather
than rate-controlled; and with 5 rungs only two are ever chosen, straddling the
operating point by 7.5x. The docstring describes a per-frame binary search,
which is the right design -- the implementation is a fixed ladder. The leaky
bucket does work and should be kept: 109.1 KB/s against a 110 target.

tools/analysis/09_ratectl_drift.py is the regression test and the acceptance
criterion: it exits non-zero until zero frames drift.

Also corrected the stale 38% blit figure in ratectl.py's profile commentary,
which session 5 measured at 53.6% (FINDINGS 24), and recorded the pgrep -f
self-kill trap again -- four times across three sessions now.

check.sh ALL GREEN.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 14:10:07 -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 64cd1ffd72 Handoff: reconcile docs and tooling with the corrections made this session
Session 2 reversed several of its own conclusions. The docs are append-only, so
a reader could land on a superseded section and act on it. This pass makes the
repo internally consistent.

Defects found and fixed in STATUS.md:
- claimed "Hybrid VQ with k=1024: no" as the answer to the linework question,
  directly contradicting FINDINGS 14, which rejected k=1024. Both profiles are
  k=256.
- malformed profile table (six column separators, five columns).
- next-steps list had two items numbered 3 and listed the full-disc survey
  twice.
- the disk-benchmark section still read CRITICAL-PATH with "if SCSI sustains
  >=800 KB/s, ship pixel-exact". That was written while the bandwidth figure
  was misread as 4 MB/s. At 4 Mbps pixel-exact needs 92-97% of the pipe and is
  not available, and the ring-buffer result means the design no longer hangs on
  the benchmark at all. Rewritten with what it IS still worth doing: confirming
  the 4 Mbps provenance, and confirming DMA is used rather than PIO.

FINDINGS now carries supersession blockquotes on 5, 8, 11, 17 and 18 pointing
at the sections that correct them. 18 is the dangerous one -- its peak-vs-
sustained test is reversed by 21 -- so it is marked DO NOT ACT ON THIS SECTION
while noting the per-frame data itself remains valid.

profile_gen.py had the same problem in code: it defaulted to the superseded
peak sizing and returned lam=25 where the docs say lam=10. The buffered test is
now the default and peak sizing is behind --size-for-peak as a bound only. A
tool that contradicts the findings is worse than no tool.

Also preserves the five measurement scripts that produced this session's
numbers as tools/analysis/05-09, following the session 1 precedent, and adds an
"explicitly abandoned -- do not re-propose" list to STATUS covering entropy
coding, k=1024 codebooks and flat 4x4 VQ.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 12:28:41 -07:00
reala-misaki 65112b9305 Session 1: hardware research, content measurement, codec decision, MAME harness
Verified GVRAM is one word-access per pixel in ALL color modes; chose 256-color
256x192 with movem.l bursts (page 1 sacrificed as double-buffer).

Measured 8 scenes from the Blu-ray source: blit costs under 8% of the 12fps
cycle budget, so I/O is the bottleneck, not CPU. Naive delta+RLE reaches only
3.2:1 (365 KB/s, 470MB) -> decision to use 4x4 vector quantization (~30 KB/s).

"Shot on twos" assumption failed: the transfer has zero duplicate frames, so
12fps requires explicit decimation.

Documents three false measurement results and their root causes (per-frame
Floyd-Steinberg dithering, temporal denoise, exact-match dedupe on noisy source).

MAME Lua injection harness works and is reusable for cycle-cost measurement;
the IOCS _B_READ disk benchmark is blocked returning -1.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 11:23:49 -07:00