prosolis
06b98d4b47
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
Dragon's Lair — Sharp X68000 port
Porting Dragon's Lair to a stock X68000 (68000 @ 10MHz, 2MB, SASI/SCSI).
This is fundamentally a video codec problem, not a game-logic problem: the game logic is a scene table with branching input windows; the difficulty is pushing ~22 minutes of Don Bluth animation through a 10MHz 68000.
Green-light check: ./tools/bench/check.sh (~3 min, needs the Blu-ray
mounted) re-runs both display regression tests, the rate-control drift test, the
display-path coherency counterexample and a 120-frame 68000 decode, then prints
ALL GREEN.
Read first
docs/FINDINGS.md— measured hardware facts, content statistics, codec decision, and a section on measurement traps that produced three separate false results. Read §4 before trusting any pipeline number.docs/STATUS.md— current state, working setup, blockers, next steps. Start here. It also lists what has been explicitly abandoned, so old ideas do not get re-proposed.docs/BENCHMARK.md— how to measure the storage subsystem, and why a bandwidth figure out of MAME would be meaningless.docs/HARDWARE.md— X68000 GVRAM/CRTC reference.
Layout
docs/ findings, status, hardware reference
tools/analysis/ measurement scripts, numbered in the order they were written
(01/02 marked BROKEN deliberately, kept as regression refs).
Run from the repo root — they import from tools/encoder/.
07 finds the hottest sustained window in a stream; 08 renders
source | decoded | block-mode map as .webm; 09 is the
rate-control drift gate (FINDINGS 26/27) and is part of
check.sh -- it exits non-zero if the encoder ever again
reports a reconstruction no decoder would produce.
10 is a COUNTEREXAMPLE, and exits non-zero by design: it
demonstrates that the two-display-path plan of FINDINGS
24.5/25.6 corrupts 70 of 120 frames (FINDINGS 28.1).
11 scores a container against the MEASURED per-mode block
costs without needing MAME; 12 prices the literal-span mode of
FINDINGS 30 against those same mode maps, and prints whether a
scene cut still fits at 12fps; 13 measures what fitting the
CPU budget costs in dB (FINDINGS 31) and caches H.build so the
search loop is seconds, not minutes.
tools/bench/ MAME Lua injection harness + 68000 benchmark sources.
`check.sh` re-runs both display regression tests (~40 s).
`blit.s`/`blit.lua` time the full-frame GVRAM blit on the
68000 itself (FINDINGS 24) — not part of check.sh, because
wall timings would make the green-light check host-sensitive.
`span.sh` (prep_spans.py + span.lua + blit.s v5/v6) measures
the literal-span mode the same way (FINDINGS 30, ~25 s); it
also asserts all 23 timing configs drew a pixel-exact frame.
`crtc_mode.lua` is the single source of truth for CRTC R00-R08
and R20 — do not write CRTC values anywhere else.
`prep_dlx.py`/`decode.lua`/`verify_decode.py` load, time and
verify `src/player/decode.s`; the verify pass is in check.sh.
tools/vasm/ vasm m68k assembler (built from source)
tools/encoder/ hybrid VQ encoder + DLX1 container writer (working).
dlx.py is the reference DECODER -- ground truth for the 68000.
src/player/ decode.s: the 68000 DLX1 decoder. Pixel-exact, and 31% of
frames over the 12fps CPU budget. See FINDINGS 28.
assets/ extracted frames/audio (gitignored)
Encoder
python3 tools/encoder/extract.py 00020 /tmp/fr 12 crop
python3 tools/encoder/encode.py /tmp/fr out.dlx --profile sasi --preview p.png
Two quality profiles ship from one codec and one decoder — sasi (110 KB/s) and
scsi (280 KB/s) are two points on the same rate-distortion curve. Both are
ceilings: lam is bisected per frame under a leaky bucket, so the profile's
lam is a quality floor rather than a setting (--fixed-lam opts out).
There are two ceilings, on two different axes. The second is the 68000's
decode budget: mu is bisected per frame against 833,333 cycles so the frame
also decodes in time, which takes the worst sustained window from 37 frames
over budget to 1 for 0.26 dB (FINDINGS 31). It is on by default; --no-cpu-fit
restores session 7 behaviour. Unlike bytes, cycles have no bucket — there is no
double buffer to decode ahead into, so it is a hard per-frame ceiling. The codec is
a Cinepak-style hybrid: each 4x4 block is coded as SKIP, one 4x4 codeword, four
2x2 codewords, or RAW literal pixels, chosen per block by rate-distortion.
The RAW escape means lam=0 is pixel-exact against the palettised frame, so the
quality knob spans lossless to heavily-compressed without changing the bitstream.
Profiles are derived from a bandwidth figure, not chosen by eye:
python3 tools/encoder/profile_gen.py --bw-mbps 4 --name scsi
On reading
docs/FINDINGS.md: it is append-only and several later sections overturn earlier ones. Superseded sections carry a blockquote at the top pointing to the correction — heed those, especially 18 (reversed by 21).
Source media (DRAGONS_LAIR.iso) and ROMs are gitignored — supply your own.
Not every large stream is game footage. 00216 is the feature with a
burned-in commentary picture-in-picture and 00215 is the commentary itself —
the two largest files on the disc. The clean 9.4-minute animation is 00223.
See FINDINGS 25.1 before running any size-ranked survey.