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 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 09a5a50065 Measure the blit on the 68000: the 38% estimate was 53.6%
First 68000 instructions in this project to draw a pixel. Everything before
this was GVRAM filled from Lua, which costs zero 68000 cycles, so the blit
figure the whole CPU budget rests on had never been validated.

Four variants of a full-frame 256x192 paint, timed in MAME and each also
hand-derived from the MC68000 timing tables beforehand; the two agree to
0.006-0.43%, which is what makes the result trustworthy after this project's
history of false-good measurements.

  V1 movem.l blit from a word-expanded RAM frame   446,286 cyc   53.6%
  V2 naive move.b/move.w per pixel               1,284,174 cyc  154.1%
  V3 write-only floor, no source read              225,789 cyc   27.1%
  V4 same writes in 4x4 block order                637,971 cyc   76.6%

Scope: MAME's gvram_w/gvram_r carry no timing at all, so these are instruction
cycles against zero-wait-state memory -- a floor, not a hardware prediction.

V1's output snapshots pixel-exact through verify_frame256.py, closing
FINDINGS 23.5. The V1/V3 gap shows reading the source frame is exactly half
the cost, which makes the architecture question live: decode-direct-to-GVRAM
needs no RAM reference frame and scales with the non-SKIP block fraction,
crossing compose-then-blit at 70% of blocks changed. That fraction is now the
top priority and is already a by-product of vq_hybrid.py's mode decision.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 13:43:56 -07:00
prosolis 7ba979a236 Handoff: green-light script, reconciled figures, a smaller first step for the decoder
Prepares session 4 for handoff. No new measurements; this reconciles the docs
with what session 4 changed and makes the next session's entry point cheaper.

- tools/bench/check.sh re-runs both display regression tests from the Blu-ray in
  ~40 s and prints ALL GREEN. Verified green cold, after wiping tmp/ and
  re-extracting. STATUS and README both open with it, because everything
  downstream assumes the display path is pixel-exact and nothing previously
  checked that in one command.

- Reconciled the figures session 4 invalidated. Session 3's 38.88 dB ceiling is
  struck through in STATUS with a pointer to 40.81; the "three facts the player
  must honour" table no longer quotes R20 = 0x0116, which was the 768-wide IPL
  timing and would have been copied into the player as if it were the shipping
  value. crtc_mode.lua is now named as the single source of truth for CRTC
  registers, in both STATUS and README.

  The 38.88 dB in the session-3 reproduce section is left alone and annotated
  instead: it is correct for that test, which still packs I = 1. The two numbers
  disagree for a reason and a reader should be able to see which is which.

- Next-step 2 now leads with something smaller than "write the decoder": a dumb
  full-frame RAM->GVRAM blit in 68000 code, timed. That number alone confirms or
  kills the 38% estimate, and needs no bitstream, codebooks, or DLX1 parsing.
  The reference image and its checker already exist.

- Parked the user's Cliff Hanger / Lupin III follow-on in STATUS so it is not
  lost and not mistaken for scheduled work. Cheaper than this project on every
  axis except media prep, which is where it would actually stall.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 13:31:11 -07:00
prosolis 34f9ee341d A real 256x256 CRTC mode, derived not recalled; palette ceiling was 2 dB low
Session 3 left the harness on the IPL's 768x512 text timing because no CRTC
values had been derived and guessing them was the failure mode to avoid. This
derives them from MAME 0.277's divisor ladder instead, and the derivation is
self-checking: the 256-wide mode runs at div 6 against the 768 mode's div 2, so
htotal is exactly 1104/3 = 368 dots and every horizontal register divides by
three with no remainder. Only the blanking split rounds. Verified by snapshot:
native 256x512, active area pixel-exact, x=512 wrap gone.

Two things fell out that change numbers elsewhere:

- The palette's shared LSB I must be chosen per entry, not hardcoded to 1.
  Doing so lifts the display ceiling from 38.85 to 40.81 dB and is the only way
  to reach true black at all, since pal6bit(1) = 4. 102 of 256 entries want
  I = 0, so this is not a corner case. Supersedes FINDINGS 22.4; scsi has ~2 dB
  more headroom than that section claimed. The encoder does not do this yet.

- Letterboxing costs a palette entry: GVRAM cleared to zero shows entry 0, and
  a free mediancut palette puts a real image colour there. 255 colours plus a
  reserved black, via prep_frame.py --reserve-black.

MAME's graphics double-scan is phase-shifted one raster line (it halves the
absolute scanline and vbegin is odd), which produced a false failure before it
was understood; the regression test now asserts the shifted pairing explicitly.

Still Lua-side. No 68000 instruction has drawn a pixel; the 38% blit estimate
remains unvalidated. What this buys is a defined geometry for the decoder to
write into: 256 words per row, 1024-byte stride, rows 32..223.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 13:27:17 -07:00
prosolis 3265bf2740 Handoff: reconcile docs with the verified display path
Session 3 summary in STATUS.md, plus the things a cold start needs.

- Reproduce section for the display result, verified cold from the Blu-ray at
  end of session: extract -> prep -> MAME -> verify, exact match, 38.88 dB.
  The frames are not in the repo and the old ones lived in /tmp, so the chain
  starts from extract.py rather than assuming a scratch directory survives.
- tools/bench/verify_frame.py turns FINDINGS 22 into a regression check. It is
  deliberately an exact test rather than a PSNR threshold, since the whole
  point of that section is that the render is bit-for-bit predictable. It
  prints the three registers to check when it fails.
- Recorded where the MAME source now lives, and why to read it first: six
  register-poking attempts failed against a gate that one grep found.
- Split the CRTC mode table out as its own next step. It is the prerequisite
  for the decoder skeleton and the smallest well-defined task available, with
  an explicit warning not to write the timing values from memory.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 13:16:04 -07:00
prosolis b322e84cd4 Get a real Dragon's Lair frame onto the emulated X68000
First pixels on an actual X68000 screen. Everything up to now was Python-side
or a headless -video none run, which cannot snapshot at all.

The blocker was not the video controller. The IPL leaves CRTC R20 = 0x0B16,
and bit 11 is "G-VRAM set to buffer", which makes MAME's draw_gfx() return
early. GVRAM writes still land and read back correctly while the layer is
invisible, so six attempts at $E82400/$E82500/$E82600 all rendered black with
every register holding the value I intended.

Two more facts, both confirmed against MAME 0.277 source rather than assumed:

- $E8E001 monitor contrast is left at 14 by the IPL, scaling all output to
  93.3%. The player must set it to 15. Contrast 0 blanks the screen, which is
  a free fade-to-black for scene transitions.
- The palette word is GGGGGRRRRRBBBBBI with a shared LSB, expanded as
  pal6bit((field<<1)|I). With contrast at 15 the render is pixel-exact, not
  merely close, which also confirms the 1024-byte GVRAM line stride.

That exactness gives a new quality ceiling: the 15-bit+I palette alone costs
38.88 dB against the 24-bit palettised source, the same order as the scsi
profile's own codec error. scsi is close to display-transparent on hardware,
which bounds how much further it is worth raising.

Unblocks next step 2, the 68000 decoder skeleton, which now has a known-good
reference image to diff against.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01194oWYW8DQXK1SZ2DnChW6
2026-08-23 13:12:27 -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