epilectrik: "the issue seems to be related to a tick rate that advances the
heat accumulation... i need to trace out what the clock origin was." Traced.
THE CLOCK ORIGIN [T1]: the DOS binary keeps its engine frame rate in the
global DAT_0052140c, set once at startup:
0x401ace: mov [0x52140c], 0x41E00000 = 28.0f (nominal)
0x401ada: mov [0x52140c], 0x4191A6E0 = 18.2065f (BIOS-tick fallback)
The DOS main pushes it straight into the ApplicationManager ctor (0x401189:
push [0x52140c]), and ~90 sites across the image fmul/fdiv by it -- it is THE
per-frame<->per-second conversion scalar of the whole 1995 engine. The engine
executes every interesting master every frame and every executable subsystem
every entity tick (UPDATE.cpp / ENTITY.cpp, T0 -- no throttle at any layer),
so subsystem Performance cadence == this rate: the pod's myomer tick was
NOMINALLY 28 Hz. My previous 30 Hz reference (the i860 BOARD frame) was
wrong by 7%, not the 2x the veterans hear.
THE RESIDUAL IS EFFECTIVE RATE, NOT NOMINAL: Oracle, on the halved build,
still asks "If you could please halve the myomer heat rate again. We will
bracket to something reasonable." A 486 host missing beats halves the real
Performance cadence without changing any constant -- and the 18.2 fallback
existing at all says slow paths were expected. Statics cannot settle the
in-pod effective rate, so his bracket is the right instrument:
effective default = 28 [T1 nominal] x 0.5 [T3 testimony calib] = 14 Hz
BT_MYO_HZ=<hz> still overrides absolutely for bracketing
the resolved rate now logs under BT_MYO_LOG, tier tags inline
Measured (Owens, seek 4, flat out): peak T 1007 -> ~640, degradation never
reached -- the halving Oracle requested, delivered as one auditable knob
instead of a silent constant edit.
KB: decomp-reference.md gains the DAT_0052140c section (~90 consumer sites --
whenever the decomp shows an unexplained mul/div by _DAT_0052140c it is
per-second<->per-frame at 28); btl4main.cpp's "30 = pod authentic" pacer note
corrected (30 kept deliberately for display smoothness, the divergence now
documented). Candidate follow-up recorded: the frame-rate-dependent particle
trail density (rendering.md) should normalize against the same 28, which may
bear on Ronin's smoke-density report (#114).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
