prosolis
145753c0bf
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
3.7 KiB
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 (~40 s, needs the Blu-ray
mounted) re-runs both display regression tests and 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 a regression
test for the rate-control desync (FINDINGS 26) and exits
non-zero until it is fixed.
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.
`crtc_mode.lua` is the single source of truth for CRTC R00-R08
and R20 — do not write CRTC values anywhere else.
tools/vasm/ vasm m68k assembler (built from source)
tools/encoder/ hybrid VQ encoder + DLX1 container writer (working)
src/player/ 68000 player (not yet written)
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. 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.