Two things, both read off the shipped framebuffer.
SLOT 0 IS THE OWN ROW. Its layout entry is the odd one out -- {180,225} at
layout mode 0, KILLS/DEATHS at +0x95/+0xe8 instead of the strip boxes'
+0x48 -- and the shipped Comm page fills it with the LOCAL pilot while the
seven surrounding boxes stay empty in a solo mission. So slot 0 takes the
mission player directly and only slots 1..7 come from the pod roster. That
also explains the artifact this session opened with: the ungated walk was
feeding the mission player into the STRIP slots, which is why gating the
roster removed wrong pixels but left the centre row missing.
THE OWN ROW TAKES THE LARGE NAME RASTER. Mission carries both; we asked for
the small one, so 'Aeolus' drew visibly undersized and low in the box. The
strip slots keep the small raster -- their boxes are half the height.
Comm missing 2099 -> 733 -> 0 extra 0 -> 152 -> 0
The Comm head is now EXACT: 15656 pixels against the shipped binary's 15656.
Four heads exact (Eng1/2/3, Comm), the three MFDs within ~150px, and the
whole cockpit at 98.9% identical / 99% coverage -- from 89.7% / 92% when the
session started.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The gauge framebuffer is PLANE-PACKED: L4GAUGE.CFG gives each port a bit
mask, not a rectangle, so all six heads share the same x/y and are separated
only by bit -- the packing the VDB splits into the pod's physical screens.
Comparing RGB was therefore measuring nothing useful; the "magenta artifact"
just meant the wrong heads were lit at that pixel.
New instruments (emulator/render-bridge/gauge-ab/, with a README):
planes.py per-head scoreboard -- shipped vs ours, missing vs extra, per
port mask, recovering the 16-bit word from DOSBox's RGB565
BT_VIS_LOG a complete cockpit widget map from the single dispatch every
gauge widget is built through (MethodDescription::Execute),
printing name + port + authored position
ab.sh stages the fresh build over BTL4REC.EXE and kills any running
DOSBox before launching -- see below
The fix: the Comm page's pilot roster is the POD roster (the viewpoint mech's
ControlsMapper pilot array, mapper attributes 15/16), not the mission's
player list. It is zero in a solo mission, so the shipped page draws empty;
ours resolved the local player and painted its icon in colour 0xff. The gate
belongs in the row source, not PilotList::Execute -- Execute's empty branch
still has to run, because erasing is what the shipped page draws.
head shipped ours missing extra (was)
Eng1 17981 17981 0 0 (0 / 1030)
Eng2 17981 17981 0 0
Eng3 17981 17981 0 0
Comm 15656 13557 2099 0 (2099 / 1253)
Heat 21374 20913 566 105 (566 / 990)
Title-band magenta 404 -> 0. The 2099 Comm pixels we are missing were
missing before the gate, so it is a strict improvement.
Method note, which cost more than the bug: the rig's confs run BTL4REC.EXE
out of the mount while the build writes build410/btl4opt.exe, and nothing
connected the two. Three measurements ran an hour-old binary, so a change
that "did nothing" three times had never been tested -- and the correct first
hypothesis was discarded on that evidence. ab.sh now re-stages every launch.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The name art was never missing. The egg carries it as notation pages of hex
rows ([BitMap::Small::Aeolus]); the engine BitMap has a ctor that reads
exactly that format; and the AUTHENTIC Mission ctor already loads them into
smallNameBitmapChain (MISSION.CPP:525 -- implemented, called, working). The
break was ours: btl4gau3's LookupPlayerNameBitmap was a bring-up stub
returning NULL. It now uses the authentic API (GetCurrentMission()->
GetSmallNameBitmap(playerBitmapIndex)) and resolves live -- traced index=1
to a real BitMap, with the fallback-box branch provably never firing.
Coverage 91% -> 92%.
DIAGNOSIS CORRECTED for the stray magenta blocks over the top-left title:
they are NOT a missing-name placeholder. They are the REAL name bitmap
drawn at the wrong slot coordinates -- PilotList lays its 8 roster slots
out from the PE-recovered DAT_0051af88 (x,y,mode) table, and ours puts them
top-left instead of the shipped exe's centre row. Recovering that table is
the next cockpit thread; the egg-hex -> live-BitMap pipeline is verified end
to end, so what remains there is layout, not art or lookup.
(A duplicate loader written before finding the authentic one was removed --
CODE/RP/MUNGA/MISSION.CPP already does this job.)
Gauge fight 11/11, smoke and novice clean, zero faults.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Six TUs born in one wave (4-agent re-hosting workflow from the BT411 donors
+ inline integration): BTL4GAUG (16 widget primitives + 5 connections, the
TU anchor @004c3f6c), BTL4GAU2 (13 composite panel clusters), BTL4GAU3
(PilotList/PlayerStatus/SectorDisplay/MessageBoard/mapping group), BTL4RDR
(the MapDisplay radar vs the authentic surviving header), BTL4GRND (the
real renderer: L4LampManager + L4Warehouse + BuildConfigurationFile with
the 19-entry BT registry chained onto the engine table). btl4.lib grows
7 -> 11 members; all 50 game TUs compile; link clean.
VERIFIED LIVE: with L4GAUGE=640x480x16 the interpreter parses the full
authentic L4GAUGE.CFG, Bhk1Init runs, ColorMapperArmor binds the live
mech's damage zones by name (cross-chassis names take the authentic inert
path), and the complete mutual missile fight runs with the cockpit stack
updating from real combat -- 16/16 rounds, 138 zone hits, zero faults.
Gauges-off regressions untouched.
Engine bring-up deviation (documented): ParseAttribute normalizes
unpublished attribute names to a shared writable zero cell -- the 1995
GaugeConnectionDirectOf ctor hard-derefs its source (first boot crashed
there); widgets on unpublished names draw static zeros and light up
automatically as the attribute waves publish the 1995 CFG spellings the
bindings already carry.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Fable 5