Widescreen precision: exact-sign NCLIP, GTE clamp rescue,
backend-invariant entry hooks — plus perf round 1, pacing fixes,
self-profiler, and IRQ-redirect recompiler fixes from the branch.
Conflict resolutions:
- runtime/src/gpu_gl_renderer.c (bezel_tiles_col): combine both bezel
mark-sizing fixes — height-anchored size with PSX_BEZEL_SCALE
(rbengine, fixes ultrawide growth) floored by the caller's
window-proportioned mark_px (PR, fixes thin-margin shrink); an
explicit env override wins in both directions.
- runtime/src/main.cpp: keep both additions — netplay_resolve_link_mode
(rbengine) and the PSX_SELF_PROFILE sampler (PR).
- runtime/tests/test_fps_telemetry_opt_in.py: re-pin the structural
guard's format needles to the PR's dual speed readout strings
(VBlank/Render/Display); the opt-in guards are unchanged.
Verified: psxrecomp-game rebuilds; gpu_gl_renderer.c compiles clean;
ctest failure set identical to pre-merge HEAD (no regressions).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TdzpVVH912V9ktt4n4kntj
- Internal rendered-frame counter: GP1(05h) display-origin CHANGES
(the game finishing a frame and flipping buffers — the standard
emulator "internal FPS"). Shown beside the vblank rate in the title,
OSD, and [FPS] telemetry: "VBlank N/s X.XXx | Render M fps". The two
diverge under load and users could not tell which one they were
seeing (measured: races render exactly one frame per vblank; menus
idle far below their vblank rate).
- The per-scene 4:3 menu present (previous commit) is reverted per user
direction: uniform mod aspect everywhere; the game's own image is
never re-shaped between menu and gameplay.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Adaptive overclock REMOVED (user decision, and correctly so): trading
overclock down preserved vblank cadence but starved the game's render
loop (~30-50 real frames/s under a 110+ vblank counter) and modulated
the guest-time ratio continuously — an audible CDDA warble. The
DuckStation-standard model stands: static user overclock; a too-slow
host slows everything uniformly and audio underruns, never pitch-shifts.
- SDL3 audio: psx_sdl_audio_open reported the DEVICE format instead of
the stream's INPUT spec. SDL3 converts fed data FROM the requested
spec; telling the DRC host_rate=48000 while SDL consumed it as
44100 was a constant ~0.92x pitch-down plus perpetual ring overfill
(overflow_drops clicks) on every SDL3 build. Report the input spec —
the DRC stays the only resampler. (Audio-clocking audit confirmed the
bridge already implements the DuckStation contract: guest-clocked
production at 768 cycles/sample, device-rate pull, +-0.5% trim,
hold+fade on underrun; production stages must not be touched —
netplay/savestate invariants at main.cpp:3009/3071.)
- Present-aspect scene switch: with the widescreen mod engaged, menus/2D
(scene gate inactive, 45-frame hysteresis in gpu.c) present at the
game's own 4:3 so its NATURAL black bars stay, framed by the bezels;
gameplay presents at the mod aspect. New export
psx_ws_scene_wide_active().
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- ADAPTIVE OVERCLOCK: the configured cpu_overclock is now a ceiling.
A proportional controller on an EMA of the wall vblank period trades
the effective overclock down (floor 200%, PSX_ADAPTIVE_OC env) when
the emu thread cannot retire the scaled work, and back up when there
is headroom — so the GUEST TIMELINE never dilates. Measured live
before: guest time at 0.4x wall in races (CD audio at 0.4x pitch, SIO
pad exchange lagging, race clock slow) while per-vblank game logic ran
fast on the vblanks that did arrive. After: 0.94-0.98x sustained
through scenes that previously dropped to 0.3-0.5x, CDDA at wall rate.
Frozen across intentional unpaced windows (turbo loads, HLE boot).
- dirty_ram_text_native_ok memo made page-granular: a diverging guarded
write now bumps only its page's generation; the memo keys on the sum
over a function's own range pages. CD streaming (hundreds of dirty
transitions per frame in races) no longer flushes every verdict
(was 6.8% of the emu thread with the memo never hitting).
- tex_pack_lookup_replacement memo with lazy upload validation: keyed
on (uv limits, clut, texpage); kills/repl growth invalidate hard,
upload ADDS are checked lazily against the prim rect and CLUT row so
continuous race streaming does not self-flush the memo (was 9.3%).
- Bezel: seam hairline removed (user request); the near-black gradient
and wide falloff stay exactly as before.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
First real attribution (in-process 1 kHz IP sampler, 75k samples at
oc900, play build). Top sinks and their fixes:
- tex_pack_on_textured_prim (7.4%): per-prim mutex + CLUT hash + linear
scan over up to 8192 uploads — entirely matched-set/dump census, a
debug/authoring surface with no reader in play builds (substitution
lives in tex_pack_lookup_replacement). Gated out of play builds
unless dumping. Confirmed gone in the follow-up profile.
- text_xlate_on_dispatch (4.2% -> 0.8%): the a0..a3 record scan serves
capture (off in release) and STRING substitution; a fixes-only load
(vram patches / glyph labels) has an empty string table, so the scan
could never act. Early-out on empty table; the throttled patch blocks
still run.
- psx_pgxp_alu/muldiv (3.6%): ALU/MULDIV shadows feed only tier-2
cpu_mode and the correction consumers' chains; the exact-sign NCLIP
arm is LOAD/STORE/COP2 only. Hook bodies now gate on
(cpu_mode || full_hooks) — full_hooks maintained by
gpu_pgxp_rederive_enable — and the remaining per-instruction CALL
cost is removed by an inline g_pgxp_alu_armed check in the
PGXP_ALU/PGXP_MULDIV macros themselves. Correctness: a stale shadow
from the gated period is dropped by pv_validate at every consumer
(the engine's single safety invariant, verified at the MTC2 path).
Measured effect of the round at oc900 (before the macro gate):
sustained 0.73-0.80x -> 0.87-0.91x; streaming-window dip 0.35 -> 0.50;
post-window touching 1.00x. Fresh profile after: xlate and tex_pack
prim hook out of the top-15.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Env-gated self-profiler: samples the main (emu) thread's RIP at 1 kHz
for N seconds, histograms exe-relative 64-byte buckets, dumps the top
120 to psx_self_profile.txt (llvm-addr2line VA = 0x140000000+offset).
Play-build hot-spot attribution without ETL symbolization; zero cost
when unset. Motivation: internal-scale (16x vs 8x), cadence (vsync vs
pacer), and identity-memoization A/Bs all measured within noise, while
halving cpu_overclock nearly closed the fps gap - the cost is in guest
instruction throughput and needs real attribution, not hypotheses.
- Mixed-emitter files (FFE preamble + code_generator bodies) missed the
PSX_ICACHE_FETCH macro; both FFE preambles now define it too.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Closing the save-state menu (Square save / Circle back / toggle key) or
the rewind filmstrip resumes the guest while the closing press is still
held on the pad, so the game samples it as gameplay input - saving a
state in a fighter throws a punch, and since the queued save executes
after the guest resumes, that punch gets baked into the snapshot.
Loads already solve exactly this with savestate_input_guard_arm(),
which feeds neutral pads until the held input is released (min 90 ms,
capped at 700 ms). Arm the same guard whenever either host pause loop
hands control back to the guest, covering every close path: save,
cancel/back, Esc, the toggle hotkey, and rewind accept/cancel.
1. Rewind degraded-mode fix: a capture deferred past its interval
(previous snapshot still compressing at capture time) retried with no
PBO prearm and fell into the synchronous full-pipeline VRAM readback
(8-17 ms on the emu thread). Load-heavy windows delay the compression
pump, making the degraded mode self-selecting exactly where frames
are already long — the 0.4x dip class. Arm the async PBO whenever a
capture is pending and no compression is in flight.
2. Native-vblank-rate mods no longer force vsync off for fps > 60. The
present-cadence policy is already an XOR (swap interval resolves to
the configured vsync only when the panel matches the CRTC rate within
2%, else 0 with the wall pacer engaged), so the force was pure
over-defense that locked the 120 Hz mod onto the wall pacer even on a
matching 120.0 Hz panel — where driver vsync absorbs the sub-frame
jitter the pacer converts into debt/catch-up oscillation (measured
99.7-122.5 fps seesaw at 0.83-1.02x). Non-matching panels behave
exactly as before.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A region-truncated final block that runs off the end of its function fell
off the C function body when no in-image fallthrough function existed:
the entry-switch prologue had consumed cpu->pc to 0, so the dispatcher
returned "handled" with pc==0 and the top-level trampoline read it as
"program ended". Witnessed live in the WipEout 3 ntsc120full8 static
bake: the 0xD5000 region variant's block_800D7FC0 ends at the region
edge (continuation 0x800D8004 lies outside the image); the moment CD
streaming loaded content matching that variant's identity ranges the
dispatcher routed 0x800D7FC0 into the truncated block and the run died —
the deterministic "execution completed, PC=0" at ~10 s into boot, ~frame
1221, byte-for-byte reproducible.
Both code_generator tail sites (plain functions and alias hosts) now
emit `cpu->pc = <end+4>; return;` when the last live block runs off the
image edge — the CPS tail-transfer the full_function_emitter already
emits for in-image fallthroughs. The dispatcher routes the published
continuation to whoever owns it (a neighboring region variant, AOT
text, or the interpreter). Faithful and class-level: no per-game
anything.
Diagnosis chain that cornered it (all landed as permanent tooling):
- pc0 escape journal site 14 (trampoline top-level exit) named the last
dispatched target: 0x800D7FC0.
- site 15 (dirty-dispatch handled-with-pc0 tripwire, now journaled with
a route tag) proved the producer was route 3 = the static overlay
dispatcher, first occurrence, not in exception context.
- Return-shape census of every candidate variant body showed no
return-with-pc==0 path — forcing the discovery that the dispatch case
for 0x800D7FC0 routes FIRST to the 0xD5000 variant, whose truncated
tail block falls off the end.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fixes the deterministic top-level "execution completed, PC=0" ~10 s
into WipEout 3 boot with the static bake linked (the 120 Hz core bug).
Root cause (CPS-contract audit, H1): every emitted block-leader IRQ
check was `psx_check_interrupts_at(cpu, X); cpu->pc = X;` — whatever
resume PC the exception epilogue published (guest RFE to a non-EPC
target: longjmp-style card-ISR handlers, SetCustomExitFromException,
thread switch) was unconditionally overwritten by the static transfer.
The dirty interpreter honors these redirects ("Handler resumed
elsewhere — surface to dispatch"); the static bake moved the IRQ
take-points from interp pumps onto compiled leaders, where the redirect
was dropped — the guest's continuation vanished, downstream state was
never established, and a later jr through a null pointer surfaced as a
silent top-level PC=0 exit.
- code_generator/full_function_emitter: both check emitters (and the
install-slot hook) now emit the compiled analogue of the interp
contract: `if (cpu->pc != 0 && ((cpu->pc ^ X) & 0x1FFFFFFF)) return;`
after the check, surfacing the redirect to the trampoline. Applies to
branch/jr/jalr/jal/split sites in the AOT text, the recompiled BIOS,
and every overlay shard/static bake on regeneration.
- interrupts.c: the async-RFE resume latch (g_async_rfe_resume_pc,
"Tomba 2 frame-1997 fix") was documented but NEVER ASSIGNED — the
whole rescue in the traps/dirty sentinel gates was inert (audit H3).
Latch it at every exception entry that installs a real EPC.
- pc0 escape journal (always-on, play builds): every runtime site that
publishes/rescues a null PC records {site, frame, dispatch depth, ra,
epc, extras} in a 64-entry ring, dumped at the abnormal-exit print.
The play build's exit trace was blind (fntrace is debug-only:
fntrace_seq=0 in the death artifact); publishes are rare so the
always-on cost is a few stores.
- compile_overlays.py: PSX_STATIC_NO_ISOLATED=1 A/B guard to skip the
isolated-fragment pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Root-causes the transient 1-frame sign-corner flicker at wide aspects
(sign faces blink when the exact-sign NCLIP path silently loses its
shadows for one frame):
- gte_nclip was the only shadow consumer skipping the engine's single
safety invariant (packed-word validation). A stale FIFO shadow (e.g.
after an SXYP MTC2 shifts the real FIFO but not shadows 12/13) could
invent a silently WRONG winding sign. New pgxp_get_gte_sxy_checked
validates the shadow's word against the live SXY register; staleness
now demotes to the honest integer fallback.
- Overlay shadow-diff REPLAY passes ran the pgxp memory hooks live
(record pass's stale FIFO shadows re-validated against different
vertices -> flags dropped, live slots overwritten -> arena-wide
provenance kill = one-frame integer-sign blink, plus false
SHDIFF_GTE_DATA divergences permanently demoting shards to interp).
gte_replay_side_effects_begin/end now bracket pgxp_suppress so replay
is shadow-silent, like the speculative validation passes. The nclip
precise path is additionally gated off inside the sandbox and
speculative passes.
- pgxp_set_enabled is now idempotent: a redundant re-derive (config
apply, correction toggle, debug A/B) no longer costs a generation
bump, which killed every live shadow and blinked one frame of
exact-sign coverage.
- Observability: free-running NCLIP precise/fallback/corrected counters
and a PGXPStats.invalidations counter (bumped at the generation-bump
site), both exposed in the geom_correction debug reply.
All changes are inert at 4:3 (ws_precise_nclip gate) and touch
host-only state exclusively.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The pack directory's exclude.txt is game content (gitignored), so it
silently disappears whenever the pack is regenerated - which re-enabled
HD substitution of WipEout 3's four font atlases and produced the
doubled-glyph defect (sub-texel HD strokes under the game's two-pass
shadow draw; coverage.json proved atlas 4cb2ec4e substituting). The
config now carries the exclusions durably; they merge with any
pack-local exclude.txt, and semantics are unchanged (texel-source
exclusion only, applied at tex_pack_lookup_replacement).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
pc=0 from the same-thread-restore epilogue means "the interrupted native
frame is still on the host stack below - return and it continues". At
dispatch depth <= 0 no such frame can exist and the 0 reaches the main
loop as a bogus GUEST_EXIT, so prefer the compiled interrupt resume PC
there (the same remedy the scheduler top-level-resume case already uses).
Honest scope note: this closes a real hole by construction, but does NOT
fix the observed WipEout 3 static-bake boot exit (deterministic
"execution completed, PC=0", ra=0x800D7FC0, epc=0x8015FAEC) - that death
reproduces unchanged, so its escape route is elsewhere; investigation
continues. Also: the top-level exit path now prints the exit registers
(ra/sp/epc/sr/func/last_store_pc/v0/a0/t9), which is how the crash was
attributed on play builds without debug tools.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A sweep of vblank-period-derived windows under the NTSC x2 CRTC (audit
2026-08-19) confirmed the high-stakes paths - SPU/XA/CDDA pitch and
cadence, guest timers, rumble, pacing - are guest-cycle-anchored and
correct at x2. Two windows that cover CYCLE-fixed guest work were
period-relative and silently halved:
- sio.c card ChangeThread-defer tail ("~2 VBlank periods" over the
libcard A6C10/B4E38 handshake): now stock-period relative.
- cdrom.c savestate CD boost window ("~3s at 60Hz", counted per sim
vblank): now scaled by the multiplier.
Remaining audited-but-unchanged exposures are opt-in QoL paths (FMV
auto-skip hold, turbo-load hysteresis, audio mute hangover, rewind
interval, pacer catch-up window) documented in the audit; and one latent
trap: the non-block-cycles fire_vblank_edge path steps timers/cdrom per
vblank edge and would run devices at 2x under the multiplier (shipping
builds compile it out). mdec.c's "cycles_per_frame = 338688" comment is
mislabeled (that is 10 ms, not a frame) - pre-existing, cycle-anchored,
unaffected by the multiplier.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Some titles stream level code over pages inside their own static text
range (Driver 2 streams mission code over its boot text), leaving those
pages permanently diverged: below the overlay floor they are excluded
from overlay capture and fall into single-instruction dispatch thrash
(hundreds of thousands of one-instruction dispatches per window).
PSX_OVERLAY_REGION_FLOOR lowers the floor per title so diverged text
pages become overlay-cache candidates and chain through local flow.
Value is clamped above the kernel window; default behavior is unchanged
when the variable is unset. On Driver 2 this took text-blocked
interpreter work from 278M to 37M instructions per window.
Passing --disc suppressed the remembered settings/disc.cfg disc for the
launcher's initial state (the has_disc_path gate) without seeding the
launcher itself, so the window opened with "No disc selected" and the
player had to re-pick the disc on every launch even though a valid disc
was named on the command line.
Seed resolved_disc from the validated CLI path before the launcher
window opens. resolve_disc_for_runtime still applies the override
authoritatively for the runtime after the launcher returns, so
precedence is unchanged.
The always-on Shift-JIS string-inventory scan walks every guest store
argument even when no translation table is loaded. Measured cost:
26-35% of whole-lane throughput on streaming-heavy titles (three GT2
race lanes; reproduced on Driver 2, where disabling it took one lane
from 19 to 43 vblank/s).
Capture now defaults off; PSX_XLATE_CAPTURE=1 turns the scan back on
for translation authoring. Substitution (armed table + language) is
unaffected either way.
The runtime pins the cache dir and captures path into the spawned
compile's environment so the cache can never drift from where the loader
reads - but not the FLAVOR. compile_overlays.py's --flavor defaults to 0
(play), so an instrumented (flavor 2) runtime spawned compiles whose
shards its own loader then rejected: the overlay_loader_status message
said it plainly - "this build reads ..._f2 but shards exist under ..._f0
-> ALL overlays run INTERPRETED". On mod-heavy titles (WipEout 3's
framerate packages patch most of the game text) that is the difference
between full speed and ~0.2x, misread as general slowness for weeks.
The runtime now exports PSX_OVERLAY_FLAVOR alongside the other pins, and
the tool honors it over --flavor, so each build population self-heals.
Measured after the fix (instrumented, WipEout 3 ntsc120full8): shard
loads 0 -> 8 (45 funcs), interpreted insns 6.6M/s -> 1.0M/s.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The unstick pump - a nest repair for Ape Escape LOAD that force-re-edges
I_MASK.7/IRQ7 after a LOAD-style probe abort - ran enabled by default for
every game. On WipEout 3 SE under the NTSC x2 CRTC its arming detector
misfires during the boot memcard check, and the forced IRQ storm keeps the
kernel card ISR acking idle bytes forever (traced: 40k+ card_ack 0x00 at
~1.3k-cycle spacing, all Sw/HwCARD completion events stuck ACTIVE, zero
delivered), so the game waits on the memcard screen indefinitely. A/B with
PSX_APE_CARD_UNSTICK=0 boots straight through.
Per-game hacks are config-owned: default OFF, enable with [runtime]
ape_card_unstick = true (Ape Escape's config should set it), and the
PSX_APE_CARD_UNSTICK env var still overrides in either direction.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The swap-paces gate from the previous commit was a flag cached from
apply_present_cadence(), which can run before the GL renderer is live -
the gate never engaged and the unpaced-skip hole survived. Replace it
with psx_present_swap_paces(), evaluated by the renderer at every skip
decision, so no cached copy can go stale across init order or cadence
changes. The setter is gone.
Bezel: floor the tiled mark size at 20% of the window's short dimension.
A thin letterbox band no longer shrinks the marks into busy little rows -
they stay window-proportioned and the band crops them symmetrically, so
bands read like the side columns do.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Pacing: when driver vsync owns the frame cadence the blocking Swap IS the
game's clock, but the unchanged-frame present skip bypassed it - every
skipped swap silently unpaced that frame. WipEout 3 at 30 Hz sim renders
every other vblank, so half the frames ran unpaced: the game sped to a
fluctuating ~2x with pitched-up CD audio and visible frameskip, EXCEPT while
the FPS readout was on, whose persistent OSD line forced a swap per frame
and masked the hole ("the moment I do fps readout off it goes stupid fast").
gl_renderer_set_swap_paces(), derived in apply_present_cadence(), disables
the skip whenever the swap paces. Real hardware scans out every vblank
regardless of change.
Bezel: replace the flat tiling with a mounted-screen treatment - deep-tinted
ground, the tiled marks at watermark subtlety (0.22), a distance-field shade
(rounded-rect SDF against the live viewport rect) running near-black beside
the game to a faint pattern at the outer edges, and a resolution-scaled
hairline seam terminating the viewport. The 200 ms fade-in from black on
viewport-rect changes folds into the shade endpoints. Game framebuffer
untouched; all of it derives procedurally from the viewport rect.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Manual fast-forward engage/release and turbo-loads engage/release now print
one [pace] line each with the host timestamp. Any unpaced or present-skip
mode flipping mid-play is exactly the class users report as "the speed is
busted", and the existing transition ring is only reachable through the
debug server - absent from play builds, which is where players actually
live. One line per transition self-documents the next repro.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two refinements that keep the game image the focal point and make the
padding read as environmental texture instead of a second UI layer:
- Padding shade: a per-rect gradient quad (new tiny fragment program) drawn
over the bezel backdrop+tiles, derived from the live viewport rectangle.
The padding is near-black (alpha 0.94) immediately beside the game and
eases out to a faint pattern (alpha 0.72) at the outer screen edges,
smoothstepped across the full padding span - wide and subtle, never a
narrow shadow. Columns shade along X, bands along Y, so it holds for any
viewport aspect. The game rect itself is never touched.
- Transition fade: when the viewport rect moves (menu aspect contraction,
window resize) the padding restarts from solid black and reveals the
resting gradient over ~200 ms (smoothstepped), so the eye follows the
contracting game image instead of a full-intensity pattern popping in on
frame one. The fade folds into the gradient endpoints (affine), so it is
one draw either way.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
present_bezel only drew the left/right margins and explicitly ignored the
vertical geometry, so a window taller than the content aspect (32:9 content
on a 16:9 display) framed the game with bezel art on the sides and raw black
bars above and below. Add bezel_draw_band -- the transpose of
bezel_draw_rect: one logo spans the band height with the same air factor,
repeating across at authored aspect -- and clear/draw the top and bottom
bands between the side columns so no pixel is painted twice.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two bugs that together kept every mod-patched text page interpreted forever
(the WipEout 3 framerate mod's 74 divergent pages -> ~0.5M interpreted block
dispatches/sec in play):
- The [[widescreen.cull.widen]] emitter writes psx_ws_cull_slt_widen /
psx_ws_cull_slti_lower at configured sites, including in overlay-resident
code, but the overlay dispatch preamble never defined them: every shard
containing a widen site failed to link (undefined reference) and the
autocompile pipeline reported compile-error for the whole region. Mirror
both helpers into the preamble following the documented self-contained,
byte-identical convention.
- append_pgxp_hooks joins the hook onto the translated statement with a
space; the block-cycles MULT/DIV/MFLO/MFHI translations end in `#endif`,
and the preprocessor discards tokens after #endif (the "extra tokens"
warning class) - so those hooks silently never ran. Give the hook its own
line when the translation ends in a directive.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three changes that ride the existing PGXP dataflow engine:
- Arm the PGXP engine whenever a precision consumer needs it, not only when
a correction feature is on. gpu_pgxp_rederive_enable() derives the arm from
texture correction OR geometry correction OR the widescreen precise-NCLIP
opt-in, and every setter re-derives. Previously disabling both corrections
silently disabled the shadows precise_nclip depends on.
- gte_nclip: when the sub-pixel shadow of all three SXY FIFO entries is live,
take the winding SIGN from the exact double cross product and keep the
hardware integer magnitude. The X-squash scales areas by a positive factor,
so only integer rounding ever flips a sign; this removes both the vanished
trackside signs and the per-frame tile flicker at wide aspects without any
epsilon tolerance. The producer clamps shadow coords to +/-4096 px so a
projection blowup cannot wrap the 16.16 int32.
- Clamp rescue (prepare_precise_triangle): a vertex parked exactly on a GTE
saturation rail (+/-1024) is hardware-mangled; when the validated dataflow
shadow knows its true position, rasterize with that instead. Kills the
"polygon spike" streak class that 4:3 framing plus CRT overscan hid. Every
in-range vertex stays native, so normal geometry is bit-identical.
- dirty_ram_interp: fire psx_mod_function_entry on interp dispatch so
function-entry mod hooks do not depend on which backend executes a
mod-patched page.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- A claimed side whose owner's heartbeat is stale is a corpse: reclaim it
and bump pair_gen so a surviving peer re-latches its epoch against the
new process instead of the dead one's timeline. Fixes both launches being
refused after earlier killed runs left present[] set (user-observed).
- atexit release marks our side free on clean quit; crashes fall back to
the heartbeat reclaim.
- A fresh claim with no live peer resets rings/lines/pairing so every
session starts on a clean wire.
- The nap loop's 3 s wall-clock give-up is gone: a live-but-stalled peer
(loads, pause) is exactly when lockstep must wait; the escape let one
side run 4M+ cycles past the bound. Peer death remains the only exit.
Headless secondary: PSX_HEADLESS=1 on the B instance (existing CI mode --
no window/audio, full guest) pairs and runs; validated with corpse-reclaim
scenario end to end.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Each console is a complete single-console runtime in its own process (own
core, own window, own pad); the SIO1 cable is a pair of SPSC rings in a
shared-memory segment, paced by the bounded-skew barrier the fiber dual
mode validated. In-process dual halves the frame rate by construction; the
threads-in-one-process alternative needs ~590 device statics and 66 config
setters made per-machine. Two processes get each console a core for free
and upgrade to two PCs later by swapping the transport.
Design points (psx_link_shm.h):
- LINK-TIME: processes boot at different wall times, so due-cycles run on
local-cycles-minus-epoch, epoch latched when the pair forms.
- Ops stay pure (psx_link.h determinism contract); wall clock only in the
barrier poll (peer-death detection -> unplugged-cable semantics).
- Lookahead defaults to ~one PAL frame: below that, each side's ordinary
pacer idle (clock frozen up to 8 ms/frame) stalls the peer -- measured
0.57x at a quarter frame, 0.30x at the fiber-tuned 8192. Pair speed is
min(A,B) by design; menus/races pair at 1.0x, phase-shifted intro FMV
dips compound and that is correct lockstep behaviour.
- PSX_SIO1_BACKEND=shm PSX_LINK_SHM_ROLE=a|b selects; PSX_LINK_SHM_NAME,
_LOOKAHEAD, _LATENCY tune. [runtime.link] backend="shm" also accepted.
- Savestate during link play serializes an empty wire (in-flight chars
lost; handshakes retransmit). Cross-process co-checkpointing is future
work.
Verified: two instances pair, exchange lines state, hold skew within the
bound, and run at min-of-pair speed with ~3s total barrier wait per 45s of
phase-shifted intro FMV; two UNLINKED instances hold 1.00x simultaneously
(16-core host), isolating all coupling cost to lockstep semantics.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
One logo used to span 78% of the margin's width, so the mark grew with
every extra pixel of pillarbox -- enormous on ultrawide, a sliver on a
barely-wider-than-4:3 window. Anchor the tile to the window height
(default 18%, PSX_BEZEL_SCALE overrides), clamped to 78% of the margin so
narrow margins keep the old air-either-side look. A wider window now shows
more breathing room around the same-size column of marks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
hd_textures=true with no pack installed still paid per upload: mutex,
overlap invalidation, CRC32 of the rect, and a stored pixel copy. FMV is a
stream of MDEC macroblock uploads, so the empty-pack tracker showed up in
the stock FMV profile (tex_pack_on_upload -> invalidate_locked -> free).
tex_pack_active() now requires entries (or dump mode).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
g_apply_armed covers every apply mechanism, but the dispatch hook's only
apply work is string swapping + throttled in-place RAM patches; vram_patch
blocks apply through the VRAM upload hook. WipEout 3 ships a fixes-only set
(track palette gap), which left the hook armed with an empty string table --
the a0..a3 record scan hashed four registers per dispatch against a table
that could never hit, measured at 20% of a stock FMV run (top profile entry).
New g_table_n atomic + early-out when no dispatch-relevant work exists.
Stock intro: mean speed 0.83x -> 0.96x, half-speed samples 44 -> 23.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The pre-movie publisher screens are 24-bit STILLS in the same depth24
session as the movie, so the depth-transition clear never separates them and
their rows leaked into the movie's letterbox bars (SCEA text strip
alternating with black under the Psygnosis FMV). A still does not stream
MDEC; a movie does — on the idle->streaming edge (10-vblank hysteresis so
low-fps movies do not flap) the written-row bitmap resets, turning
everything a still left behind into black bars while the movie re-marks its
own rows with every decoded frame.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
ensure_cpu at depth24 entry made the letterbox bars TRUTHFUL, but the truth
is leftover 15-bit screen bytes (the pre-movie SCEA splash), and a
double-buffered movie holds that leftover at different rows in its two bands
— so the bars alternate content every couple of frames. Track which rows
have received a CPU->VRAM rect since the current depth24 session began
(s_d24_row_written, cleared at every depth transition) and present unwritten
rows as black in gpu_depth24_present_row. Savestate restore marks all rows
(restored VRAM is authoritative); reset clears.
First frame caveat: a title that uploads frame 1 before flipping GP1 depth24
shows one black movie-frame interval instead of the splash remnant.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
skip_fmv_offered flips to true: [video] auto_skip_fmv in settings.toml now
actually drives g_auto_skip_fmv (the clamp that zeroed it is retained only
for a future offered=false profile). recomp-ui's Skip FMVs row and
retcomm-launcher's checkbox already read/write the key end to end — the
runtime was the only link refusing the value.
The builtin psx.skip_fmv activation-plugin mod (and its
psx.enhancement.skip-fmv package) is removed: one feature, one control. A
state.toml still naming the package resolves it as unknown and is skipped.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- gpu_vblank_period_cycles() is consulted per basic-block edge and profiled at
~3% exclusive recomputing a constant; now cached, refreshed at its four cold
writers (GP1 display mode, CRTC multiplier, period override, snapshot parse).
- PAL content through 60 Hz driver vsync duplicates ten frames a second; when
the user has not set frame_interpolation, default it ON for PAL discs on a
~60 Hz panel. PSX_FRAME_INTERP=0|1 overrides for A/B.
- PSX_FMV_INTERP=1 keeps interpolation running through FMV/MDEC phases (the
unconditional suspension is what makes 25 fps PAL video judder).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Conflict resolutions:
- boot_state.h: section-tag collision at 0x11 — master shipped BS_SEC_SIO1
there (all v5 states + dual-console switch blobs), so the branch's
BS_SEC_TEXPACK/BS_SEC_MODSET renumber to 0x12/0x13. PR-branch dev states
are the only casualty.
- boot_state.c: adopt the branch's backpatched true section count (placeholder
+ write_section_raw counter), which subsumes master's constant-minus-
exclusions arithmetic; keep master's section-exclude guards on CPU/RAM
writes and the branch's MODSET-first mod-plan guard.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Alex Vanderveen