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

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.

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.
  • docs/HARDWARE.md — X68000 GVRAM/CRTC reference.

Layout

docs/            findings, status, hardware reference
tools/analysis/  frame-analysis scripts (01/02 marked BROKEN as regression refs)
tools/bench/     MAME Lua injection harness + 68000 benchmark sources
tools/vasm/      vasm m68k assembler (built from source)
tools/encoder/   VQ encoder (not yet written)
src/player/      68000 player (not yet written)
assets/          extracted frames/audio (gitignored)

Source media (DRAGONS_LAIR.iso) and ROMs are gitignored — supply your own.

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