Commit Graph
19 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
CydandClaude Fable 5 07eb74d1f7 BT410 5.3.80: joint articulation is live -- 22 nodes, and the twist reaches the board
RecurseSKLFile now builds a joint renderable for any node whose page name
resolves to a live skeleton Joint: HingeX/Y/Z -> HingeRenderable (watching
Joint::GetHinge), Ball -> BallJointRenderable (watching GetEulerAngles),
otherwise the static path.  Each holds the rest offset in one DCS and the live
rotation in a child DCS, and its Execute diffs the watched value and calls
DPL_FLUSH_DCS -- the engine's own mechanism (L4VIDRND.CPP:1026+).  The value
comes from the mech's JointSubsystem via ResolveJoint, so sim and renderer
read one source.  Gated on BT_JOINTS while it proves out.

  [skl] video\max.skl -> 26 nodes, 1 objects, 1 eye, 22 articulated

The bridge reported anim_abs=1 joints=0 twist=+0.00 before; it now reports
joints=1 twist=-0.86, matching the game's [torso] twist=-0.856.  With the mech
stationary, frames that differed by 0.0% now differ by 62-80%.

A crash it exposed: Mech::ResolveJoint passed segment->GetJointIndex()
straight to GetJoint unchecked, and a segment with no joint reports -1 --
GetNthImplementation then indexes [base + -1*4] and dies (guest 00426A1D).
Torso never hit it because it only asks for its own authored joint name; the
walk asks for every page.  Now bounds-checked against GetJointCount.

Open: the canopy does not stay rigid in the view, though it and the eye hang
off the same articulated node.  Cancelling the bridge's cage compensation
(CAGE_TWIST_SIGN=0) did not close it.  Leading hypothesis: SetupCull builds
worldToEyeMatrix from GetSegmentToWorld(siteeyepoint) -- the SIMULATION's
segment transform -- independent of the render tree, so the canopy follows our
render chain and the eye follows the sim's, and they diverge whenever one
carries the twist and the other does not.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 20:46:18 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 3c289ff10a BT410 5.3.78: the torso twists from the button path; two buffer overruns fixed
BT_FORCE_TORSO sweeps the twist BUTTONS -- the members the streamed direct
mappings write -- so the chain runs without a hand on the RIO.  Live on the
pod: twist sweeps -0.015 to -0.891 rad and back as cmdL/cmdR alternate, at
the resource rate 0.873 rad/s, inside the authored +/-2.443 limits, with
jointtorso resolved.  End to end: attribute id -> direct-mapping destination
-> TorsoSimulation integrator -> skeleton joint -> the canopy eye hanging off
that chain.  5.3.68's table and 5.3.71's integrator both confirmed against
real button semantics.

Two buffer overruns, one of them mine.  Reading TORSO.CPP back caught the
ctor still zeroing dynamicsState[22] after I shrank the array to [16] by
carving the command members out of its front: 24 bytes past the end of every
Torso, on the heap, every mission, since 5.3.68.  A sweep for the same shape
across BT/BT_L4/MUNGA found a pre-existing one -- MECHMPPR.CPP zeroing
reserved[22] against reserved[21].

Both now bound by ELEMENTS().  The rule for this tree: any array carved out
of a reserve block must have its initialiser bound by ELEMENTS, because the
carve is exactly the edit that silently invalidates a literal.

Neither explains the residual host fault (it predates 5.3.68 at 3/3), but
both were real corruption running in every mission -- and the Torso one was
introduced by the very fix that cut the fault rate, which is worth
remembering whenever a rate MOVES instead of going to zero.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 19:52:38 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 e69d761fb8 BT410 5.3.77: the overrun drain loop is not the trigger either
serialnamedpipe's P_RX_BLOCKED path drains its whole backlog when the guest
hasn't read in time -- directserial's `while (doReceive());`.  That looked
like the trigger, since a named pipe's backlog is unbounded where a real
port's is capped by the line rate.  Bounded it to one byte (real UART overrun
semantics) and re-ran the conf that had faulted 3/3: FAULT 283s, FAULT 226s,
FAULT 204s.  Killed.

The measurement that explains why it was never plausible: overruns during a
run are 1-3 per report period, because vRIO sends about a byte every 1-3ms --
the backlog is shallow and the loop had nothing to teleport.  The 494/499
counts all land after the game exits.  I read the code and inferred a burst
without measuring the queue depth it operates on.

Default restored to drain-all: it is the validated directserial behaviour the
RIO's rxpollus/rxburst tuning was calibrated against, and changing it on a
dead hypothesis would risk real-cockpit timing for nothing.
VPX_RX_OVERRUN_ONE=1 opts into the bounded form.

The roadmap now carries a fault ledger of every dead hypothesis so none get
re-run.  What survives: a deterministic DPMI-host path walking a
{next,handler} chain into a node whose pointer is an unhooked IVT value,
entered under RIO interrupt load.  Naming the owning routine needs a trace of
entries to host 0x66CF, clean vs faulting -- a DPMI32VM reversing
sub-project, now decoupled from the reconstruction (vRIO down = 100%
reliable, logged conf = ~70%).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 19:33:05 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 edb1670900 BT410 5.3.75: the quiet conf faults 3/3 -- logging SUPPRESSES the fault
Hypothesis: our BT_* logging inflates the load window, the window is the
exposure, so a quiet run should load faster and fault less.  Both halves
wrong.  pod_render_quiet -- which differs from pod_render_rec by exactly the
six BT_* logging vars -- faulted 3/3, same signature, against ~25-40% for the
logged conf.

That is the strongest evidence yet that the residual is a timing-sensitive
HOST bug rather than anything about our data: writing to COM3 changes when
interrupts land relative to the DPMI host's handler-chain walk, and nothing
about our attribute tables or renderables could plausibly be modulated by
whether we print to a serial port.  Interrupt phase can.

Two immediate consequences: pod_render_rec is the LESS fault-prone rig, so
use it; and the 'shipped survives' baseline weakens further, since shipped
also writes plenty to COM3 and so sits on the suppressed side of the same
effect on top of its shorter window.

The wall-clock numbers also correct an earlier assumption: 150-275s
boot+load, not ~60s.  The 60s figure was the load DRAIN in game ticks; DOS
boot, two diagnose passes and card init dominate the rest.

Next is clearly emulator-side: the host keeps no EBP frames (the frame walk
returned one bogus entry), so naming the routine that owns the chain needs a
breakpoint-style trace of entries to 0x66CF with the head node, diffing a
clean run against a faulting one.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 18:51:35 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 e97862507c BT410 5.3.74: the faulting instruction decoded -- a handler-chain walk with a bad node
The SegPhys-corrected dump read real code at last (the earlier zeros were the
probe reading EIP as a bare linear address; CS=00FF has a base):

    66D4  push 0 / push edi / push ebx / push esi
    66D9  call dword near [ebx+4]     <- faults
    66DC  cmp eax,0 / jz done
    66E5  mov ebx,[ebx] / jmp loop

A linked-list walk with a per-node callback -- node = {next@+0, handler@+4},
four args, "handled" on nonzero.  A DPMI exception/interrupt handler chain.

The arithmetic closes exactly: the read is DS_base + ebx + 4, and
7000FA64 - F000CA64 = 80003000, so DS base is 0x80003000 and the famous cr2
is that wrap.  My earlier '[EBX+0x3004]' reading was fabricated from the cr2
alone -- there is no 0x3004 displacement, which is why the constant appeared
in no binary.

So: a chain node's NEXT pointer holds F000CA60, the value parked in unhooked
IVT slots -- the walk expected a terminator and got an interrupt vector, then
read its +4 as a function pointer.  Identical registers on every catch, so
one deterministic path, entered often enough that our 60s load window catches
it 25-40% of the time while shipped's 15s window mostly does not.

Open: which routine owns the chain, and where the bogus next came from.  The
probe now walks the EBP frame chain to name the caller.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 18:34:22 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 2ce3528f1c BT410 5.3.73: the bad pointer is the emulator's default-handler stub
The IVT scan on the second probe catch settles EBX: F000:CA60 is the
emulator's default unhandled-interrupt callback -- the value filling every
vector nobody hooked (it matched ~56 of them), while the hardware-IRQ block
IVT[08-0F] holds the DPMI host's own 0D1F reflector stubs.  The serial IRQs
are properly hooked; the host read one of the UNHOOKED vectors' default value
and probed [value + 0x3004] as a flat pointer, wrapping to the famous cr2.

Also corrected: the first dump read ESP/EIP as bare linear addresses -- the
'stack' bytes were DOS conventional memory (they decode as 16-bit real-mode
code), since SS=0107 has a nonzero base.  SegPhys-corrected dumps are built
and armed for the next catch.  The zeros at the faulting EIP are consistent
with DPMI32VM being a virtual-memory host that pages its own regions --
'Reference to a page you don't own' is its pager's abort message for an
address outside every region it owns.

Nailed: deterministic host-side path; the serial stream correlates as
exposure, not as trigger bytes; the bad read is [unhooked-vector-default +
0x3004].  Open: which vector, which host routine -- the corrected dumps
should name the return chain on the next catch.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 18:24:27 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 f2687a3146 BT410 5.3.72: the fault caught in the act; the inside view gets its cockpit
VPX_PF_WATCH (fork, cpu/paging.cpp): on a guest page fault at the watched
linear address, dump guest registers, the last 64 serial RX deliveries with
guest cs:eip at each, the code bytes at the faulting EIP and the stack top.
serialnamedpipe's doReceive feeds the ring.  Armed in podrun.sh and
launch_pod.ps1.

The first catch decoded the residual fault completely: CS:EIP 00FF:000066D4
in the DPMI host, EBX = F000CA60 -- an IVT entry read as a dword, segment
F000 offset CA60, a BIOS default interrupt handler -- and the faulting access
is [EBX+0x3004], whose 0x80000000 segment-base wrap gives exactly cr2
7000FA64.  The host probes a word 0x3004 bytes past a real-mode vector value
treated as a flat pointer: harmless for its own low-memory handlers, a fault
for BIOS F000:xxxx defaults.  The serial ring shows a steady 1-byte/1-3ms
vRIO stream with nothing special at the fault -- the stream determines which
vectors get walked, not the crash itself.  The 0x3004 appears nowhere in
DPMI32VM.OVL or 32RTM.EXE as an immediate, so the probe now also dumps code
bytes at EIP; faulthunt.sh loops runs until the next catch.

Shipped baseline streak: 4/4 clean -- consistent with exposure, not yet
discriminating.

The inside view now loads the COCKPIT skeleton: the fleet-wide X-variant
naming convention (MAD->MAX etc., all 64 skeletons present) selects the same
25-joint chain with a single object -- max_cop.bgf, the MAX_COP canopy shell
with the PUNCH-texel windows from the capture forensics.  The donor names the
same mechanism from the decomp side (inside = SkeletonType_A with '_cop'
selection).  Fallback to the body skeleton when no X file exists.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 18:09:22 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 bd1070110b BT410 5.3.71: torso button commands wired into the sim; residual fault rate measured
TorsoSimulation now carries the donor's digital command handling (binary
@004b5cf0): elevate up/down, twist left/right with limit clamps, the
centre-button recenter latch slewing home across frames, and the ramp
machinery kept verbatim including the binary's punchline -- the shipped build
unconditionally overwrites the ramp with 1.0f, authored dead weight preserved
as the binary's shape.  recenterActive carved from the dynamicsState reserve.
With 5.3.68's table fix the RIO/TM twist buttons land in these members and
move the torso, and the canopy eye rides the twist chain.

Also corrected in the roadmap: the 5.3.70 TriggerState 'wart' was not a wart
-- CheckFireEdge already compares fireImpulse's bit pattern as a signed int,
sign-correct for button ints and floats alike, and the donor binds and types
the member identically.

Fault rate, measured: riostreak.sh ran four consecutive vRIO-live runs --
CLEAN/CLEAN/FAULT/CLEAN, faults only ever in the load window (ticks 42-53k),
clean runs always past launch.  Post-fix tally 8 runs / 2 faults (~25%; was
3/3 before the Torso fix).  Our load window is ~60s where shipped's is ~15s:
if the residual is a constant-rate hazard during load, shipped's expected
per-run rate is only ~7% -- 'shipped survives' may be exposure luck, and the
residual is most likely an emulator-fork serial/DPMI interaction rather than
a game defect.  Next probe: hook the fork's page-fault path on the fixed cr2
and dump recent serial-IRQ deliveries + guest cs:ip history, plus a
shipped-exe streak for the baseline.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 15:44:12 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 8b9c2e6b11 BT410 5.3.70: the full direct-mapping contract audited; the fault is not fully dead
The canopy-eye confirming run (5th post-Torso-fix run with vRIO live) faulted
with the old signature during the load drain -- four clean runs then one
fault.  The two-runs rule keeps earning its keep.

The BT_MAP_LOG audit now prints the whole resolved contract, not just NULLs.
The L4 list carries 13 direct mappings: mapper stick/throttle/reverse/looks
(ids 3/4/6/10-12), Torso torsoCenter (id 14, matching the donor), and
TriggerState (id 19 = the known 0x13 binding) on six weapons.  Every
destination resolves and every size is right -- the 8-byte joystick write
lands in an 8-byte ControlsJoystick, buttons are ints into ints.

One type wart noted, not fixed: MechWeapon binds TriggerState onto
fireImpulse, a Scalar -- a ButtonGroup direct writes an int bit-pattern, so a
real trigger press stores 1.4e-45f.  Size-safe, but the fire FSM will never
read a real button press as a pull; fire worked in tests only via the
BT_FORCE_FIRE hook, which writes a proper float.  The RIO trigger needs an
int home for TriggerState.

Surviving fault theories, in current order: an emulator/DPMI-host serial-IRQ
interaction whose probability guest timing merely modulates (the fault's
constants -- fixed host EIP, fixed cr2, always during the load drain -- fit
this better than the corruption story ever did, since the smash point never
moved across builds where our BSS moved); a second corruption source outside
the direct mappings; sampling noise.  riostreak.sh is measuring the post-fix
rate over four consecutive runs.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 15:34:31 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 d4f105f42d BT410 5.3.69: the cockpit eye sits in the canopy -- site handling in the walk
RecurseSKLFile now walks "site=" children.  Sites get no draw component --
which is why the walk's 26 nodes matched the real capture all along: sites
were never DCS nodes -- and siteeyepoint spawns the cockpit camera with the
donor's exact construction (bt411 btl4vid.cpp:462, decomp FUN_004579a8):
offset = the site's own local rest transform, parent = the site's PARENT
joint's DCS, not the hull root.  World orientation, torso twist and gait all
arrive through chain composition.  The root-DCS eye remains only as the
zero-construction fallback for skeletons with no siteeyepoint.

Measured on the live pod with the RIO streaming: [eye] cockpit eye on
'jointeye', 26 nodes / 19 objects / 1 eye, and the bridge camera sits at
Y = hull + 7.7 -- the exact chain sum jointlocal 5.29 + hip 0.37 + torso 0.31
+ jointeye 1.69.  canopy_eye1.png is the pilot's view, the mech's own nose
wedge visible below the sightline.  Own-mech cage handling is the next layer.

Also: eye_count threading through ReadSKLFile/RecurseSKLFile, and the [skl]
summary now reports it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 15:18:27 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 8231bee58c BT410 5.3.68: THE LIVE-RIO FAULT IS FIXED -- it and the TM crash were one defect
The [map] audit named it in one run: subsystem 17 = Torso, attribute ids 12/13
unresolved.  The donor's decompiled torso.hpp carries the authentic enum with
binary offsets -- ids 3..15, including StickPosition(9), TorsoUp/Down/
Left/Right(10-13), TorsoCenter(14), MotionState(15).  Our table stopped at
seven entries with MotionState at id 9, on the strength of a comment claiming
the rest were messages.

The streamed control mappings bind BY ID as direct WRITE destinations, so the
truncation produced two different crashes from one cause: in TM mode the
button ids 12/13 resolved NULL (the boot write-fault the moment the joystick
polled), and in RIO mode the analog id 9 resolved to our motionState
StateIndicator -- every analog packet from a live vRIO wrote raw floats over a
watcher-socketed object, and the corrupted chains walked into unmapped memory
~30-40s later.  That was the 'intermittent' pod fault at the fixed DPMI-host
address.  vRIO down = no analog = no corruption, which is why the norio conf
launched: every observation from the whole hunt drops out of this mechanism.

Fix: the full 13-entry donor table; five int command members carved from the
dynamicsState reserve (class size unchanged); ctor zeros them.

Verified, two agreeing runs each way: TM mode launches with a clean audit and
the Thrustmaster joystick driving the torso (stickY=0.907 -> torsoElev 0.349);
RIO mode with vRIO STREAMING launches, zero faults, weapons cycling.
pod_render_rec is no longer poisoned and the norio workaround is obsolete.

The audit-before-the-archive-call pattern (BT_MAP_LOG walks the same streamed
table CreateStreamedMappings consumes, naming what will not resolve) turned a
two-day intermittent-corruption hunt into a one-run lookup.  The streamed RES
tables are binding contracts on our attribute enums.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 14:41:52 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 1233a1d5f6 BT410 5.3.66: RIO-fault eliminations, and TM mode's own NULL-deref surfaced
Three clean eliminations on the live-RIO fault, all on the ack-fixed emulator:
not the ack heuristic (reproduces after the fix), not the debug logging
(pod_render_quiet faults identically with no BT_* env), and not the failed
test-mode handshake (the quiet run's init PASSED and it faulted anyway).

The Thrustmaster isolator -- L4CONTROLS=THRUSTMASTER so the game never opens
the RIO while vRIO keeps streaming into serial1 -- was blocked by its own
discovery: TM mode dies at boot in ControlsInstanceDirectOf<int>::Update+0x6,
mov eax,[eax+0x1c] with EAX=0, at guest 00485E1A.  That address resolves
cleanly in our map and the loader names BTL4REC.EXE CODE 0x75E1A directly: a
real defect in our controls wiring for the non-RIO path, and its own
reconstruction brick.

Standing facts for the hunt: our exe + live vRIO = fault in ~30-40s; shipped
exe + the same stream on the same emulator = fine (two baselines).  The ISR
and LBE4ControlsManager are archive code; ours in the per-event path are the
mapper (MECHMPPR) and the event/receiver plumbing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 10:24:22 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 d143f833ab BT410 5.3.64: THE COCKPIT EYE IS LIVE -- root+eye composition, and the emulator
deadlock it exposed

The camera gap root-caused and fixed through three layers:

LAYER 1 (ours): "chain the engine after the skeleton" was a non-fix.  The
engine's MakeEntityRenderables only accepts Object/Rubble resources, so
chaining it with a Skeleton printed "wrong video resource type" and built
NOTHING -- the fifodump proved it: zero vr_flush_dcs_artic records.  The real
fix mirrors the engine's Mover composition (L4VIDEO.CPP:4795-4860) inside our
mech case: a Dynamic RootRenderable (whose ctor seeds its DCS from
localToWorld and whose Execute re-flushes on change -- the ONLY source of
per-frame wire articulation), the skeleton hung UNDER its DCS via ReadSKLFile's
new parent_dcs parameter, and for the inside view a DPLEyeRenderable on that
root with the published EyepointRotation.  Also explains the mystery monolith
in the first frame: the skeleton was parked at the world origin with the
camera inside its shins.

LAYER 2 (1995 library, read from our own linked symbols): dpl_DrawSceneComplete
= velocirender_frameack(0), and frameack's unsolicited-reply path prints
"dpl error - unsolicited input during frame ack", adds the 1995 authors' own
puzzled "flush artic??" when the stray action is 0x1f, and calls exit(9).
Documented before it ever fires.

LAYER 3 (emulator, the actual deadlock): with per-frame articulation flowing
for the first time, the game stopped drawing at frame 232 -- one 0x1f burst
per frame forever, no receives, no error.  The VPX device feeds the frame ack
only after 6 CONSECUTIVE empty polls and reset that counter on EVERY
outputData write; per-frame articulation writes made the count unreachable, so
dpl_DrawSceneComplete never went true.  Fix: the reset is gated on
!frame_outstanding -- once a draw is outstanding the only receive the game
will do next is the frame ack.  The iserver-drain concern the reset guarded is
boot-time only, when no frame is outstanding.

Verified: two agreeing runs of ours on the fixed emulator (611 draws / 222
artic batches in run 2 -- the 232 wall is gone), camera travelling with the
mech (cam -329.7,0,60.5 -> -362.3,0,54.5 across 8s), anim_abs 0 -> 1 on the
bridge, view now INSIDE the cockpit cage.  Shipped binary re-run on the fixed
emulator: launches and runs, no regression.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 09:46:23 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 af010c18c2 BT410 5.3.63: the mech gets both skeleton and engine renderables
MakeEntityRenderables no longer stops after the skeleton.  It builds ours AND
chains DPLRenderer, which is what creates the RootRenderable and the
DPLEyeRenderable the camera follows.  Verified over three runs:

  [mer] 208 class=3001 view=1 res=1
     [vid] type=1 file='mad.skl'
  [skl] video\mad.skl -> 26 nodes, 19 objects
     [chain] into DPLRenderer, skeleton=yes, stack at 0x12dde7

No fault, mission launches, sim runs.  Worth noting separately: the engine's
eyepoint construction -- prime suspect for the page fault through most of a
session -- runs perfectly here, with the stack at 0x12dde7, right beside the
main loop's frame.  Both are consistent with the corrected finding that the
fault is a live-RIO artifact at a fixed DPMI host address.

The camera still does not move: two frames six seconds apart differ by zero
pixels while [sim] shows the mech travelling from (487,20,288) to (493,20,301),
and the bridge reads cam (0.0, 10.0, 0.0) -- world origin plus eye height.  So
the eye renderable was necessary but not sufficient.

Eliminated by reading our own code rather than guessing: the viewpoint entity
IS the mech (BTL4APP.CPP:354), the video renderer IS linked to it
(APP.CPP:1337), and SetupCull would Fail() loudly if the mech lacked
"siteeyepoint" or EyepointRotation -- neither Fail appears.  That leaves the
path from SetupCull's worldToEyeMatrix to what the bridge reads off the wire,
which is bridge territory rather than reconstruction territory.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 08:36:51 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 3c42766f48 BT410 5.3.62: correction -- the fault address was never in our code
Every conclusion that named EulerAngles::operator=(const LinearMatrix&) as the
fault site was wrong, including the disassembly built on top of it.  Three
independent proofs:

1. ROTATION.CPP is ours, so the function was instrumented directly -- print
   this, &matrix and a local's address on the first twelve calls plus any wild
   pointer.  The run faulted with ZERO [euler] lines: never called.

2. After the probe was added, 0x66D9 disassembles to a two-byte conditional
   jump (jnl) that touches no memory.  The dump reports ErrCode 0004, a data
   READ.

3. EIP 0x66D9 and cr2 0x7000FA64 are identical to the byte across every build
   this session, including builds where the code at that offset changed
   completely.  A fault in our CODE segment moves when the code moves.  This
   one does not -- it lives in the DPMI host, which loads low and never gets
   relinked.

The map lookup was a coincidence: our _TEXT is section-relative from 0, so its
offsets overlap the host's low addresses, and the map will name a function for
any small number.  Before resolving a fault address against the map, confirm it
belongs to our segment -- cheapest check is whether it moves on relink.

What is actually true, by same-binary A/B:

    vRIO DOWN, serial1 still a namedpipe -> mission LAUNCHES
    vRIO UP,   same conf, same binary    -> FAULT

The trigger is a LIVE RIO stream, not an unplugged cable.  The emulator reports
continuous serial1 RX overruns, the fault lands wherever the app happened to be
(terrain one run, the mech's inside view another), and the shipped binary
survives the identical conditions.  A fault at a fixed host address, at
arbitrary points in the app, requiring an interrupt-driven stream, is an
interrupt re-entrancy signature rather than a wild pointer.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 08:22:15 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 9c959e6891 BT410 5.3.60: first rendered frame from a running reconstructed mission
emulator/render-bridge/first_mission_frame.png -- arena city, textured
buildings, horizon, 28fps, captured from the GL bridge while our build ran a
live mission with the mech walking.  The skeleton went in with it:
[skl] video\mad.skl -> 26 nodes, 19 objects.

Corrects yesterday's RIO framing.  I called serial1 an unplugged cable.  Wrong
twice: VRio.App is running on this rig (the dev-rig default since 7/17), and
the emulator log recorded real byte counts on that port -- RX overruns of 471,
503, 528 -- which an unconnected pipe cannot produce.  The port was LIVE and
streaming during every crashing run.

So the defect is not that we mishandle a disconnected port, it is that we
mishandle a live RIO stream, which is worse: every production pod has a real
RIO.  The shipped binary on the same rig logs 'lost RIO analog request', keeps
sending characters, and runs the mission; ours logs 'RIO never came back from
test mode!' and dies partway through the load.  The overrun counts say the
guest is not draining the port fast enough.  L4RIO.CPP's handshake is authentic
archive code, but MechRIOMapper (BT/MECHMPPR.CPP) is ours -- that is the thread.

pod_render_norio.conf stays the way to get a running mission today, but it is a
workaround: it disables the cockpit's primary input device.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-28 23:33:08 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 475ae3106e BT410 5.3.59: A MISSION RUNS -- the RIO serial port was blocking every load
pod_render_norio.conf is pod_render_rec.conf with one line changed,
serial1=disabled instead of the vrio named pipe.  Same binary, same egg.  With
it, our build launches and the mech walks:

  [launch] state=2 minPriorityEmpty=1 ticks=85316
  [queues] p0=- p1=- p2=BUSY p3=- p4=-
  BTL4Application::RunMissionMessageHandler
  Turning Plasma Score Display On
  [sim] pos=(180.466,10,-358.703) yaw=-0.275605 spd=14.4
  [sim] pos=(251.959,10,-250.498) yaw=-0.89103  spd=14.4

No fault, 290 log lines and counting.  This is the first time the
reconstruction has reached a running mission on the pod.

The hang was never starvation, a deadlock, or a refill loop -- it was VOLUME,
the first candidate I listed and then talked myself out of.  530 renderer
events queue at priority 0 during load; BackgroundTasks::Execute runs exactly
one task per call round-robin over seven tasks, and the 1ms frame budget is
always blown here so no extra background passes happen.  That is ~9 events per
real second, so a load legitimately takes ~60s.  The fault arrived at ~40s,
before the backlog could clear.  Every 'the queue never drains' reading was
really 'the process dies before it can'.

The disproof was already in hand: the post tally climbed to 530 and went FLAT,
which means nothing was refilling.  p0=BUSY with nextReady=1 is equally
consistent with a large finite backlog still draining, and I read it as refill.

Why the RIO port: the pipe has no server attached, which should behave as an
unplugged cable.  The emulator log shows steady serial1 RX overruns, our build
prints 'RIO never came back from test mode!', and the SHIPPED binary prints
'lost RIO analog request' and launches anyway on this identical rig.  So an
unplugged RIO is survivable and our handling of it is not -- a real defect, not
a rig artifact, since a pod with an unplugged RIO cable should still boot.

The wild reference at EulerAngles::operator=(const LinearMatrix&)+0x19 is still
unexplained, but it is now reproducible on demand by enabling serial1 rather
than being a coin flip.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-28 23:23:29 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 d3b332a62a BT410 5.3.58: the load gate is blocked by a REFILL loop on priority 0, not starvation
Per-priority occupancy, measured every second until the fault:

  [queues] p0=BUSY p1=- p2=BUSY p3=- p4=- nextReady=1

That single line kills the two leading theories.  p3/p4 empty means nothing
above priority 0 is competing, so the pump is free to serve it -- no
starvation.  nextReady=1 means PeekAtNextEvent always has a READY event, so
priority 0 is not holding a timed event whose alarm never comes due -- no
deadlock.  What remains is refill: priority 0 is replenished as fast as the
pump drains it, ~143 events per simulated second.

It is also fully deterministic.  Two runs of the same binary reported
pump=352/1499 at frame 1001 and 495/2643 at frame 2002, identical to the byte.
So 'crashes about half the time' was never a race -- it was comparing runs that
differed in binary or conf.

Only InterestManager::PostRendererEvent posts at priority 0 (it maps every
renderer event there while the app is not RunningMission), so naming the
message names the flooder.  Application::Post now tallies priority-0 posts by
message ID and reports the busiest three.  Notably, all three producers of
NotifyOfNewInterestingEntity are entity-CREATION paths, so if that ID dominates
then something is creating entities in a loop -- which would explain the
unbounded growth behind the fault as well as the hang.

pod_render_noskl.conf now carries the same probes, so one instrumented binary
can be run with the skeleton walk on and off.  Walk-off runs are the only
configuration of ours known to reach 'Turning Plasma Score Display On'.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-28 22:20:11 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 4cf09917ce BT410 5.3.57: the crash is deterministic, and the real blocker is the load gate
The previous commit's attribution was wrong and is corrected in the roadmap.

WRONG: 'the crash is the skeleton walk's' rested on 0 crashes in 2 runs with
the walk disabled -- a 25% coin flip presented as evidence.  The oldest
preserved dump has no [skl] line and ends on the old 'couldn't figure out how
to MakeEntityRenderables' fallback, so it predates the walk and faults
identically.

WRONG: 'it lands at different points each time'.  Every dump carries the same
numbers to the byte (cr2 7000FA64, EIP 66D9).  What varies is how far the log
gets, not where the fault is.

Resolving the address through btl4opt.map names it exactly:
EulerAngles::operator=(const LinearMatrix&)+0x19, a read through the matrix
reference.  A binary scan finds all three call sites of that operator pass a
stack local, so the 1.79GB pointer still has no static explanation -- that is
now its own open item rather than a guess.

Two theories killed cleanly by the new BT_STACK_LOG probe and a binary scan:
ESP drift (drift=0 over 2002 frames; exactly one callee-cleans function exists
in the whole binary) and an undersized stack (our PE and the shipped one have
identical 1MB/8K geometry).

What the probe found matters more: the application is parked in state=2, which
is LoadingMission, not WaitingForLaunch.  Priority 0 is where the interest
manager queues renderer events during load, the gate needs that priority empty,
and it never empties -- so the mission never launches and the renderer holds a
blank screen by design.  The fault arrives ~30s into that wait.  Runs that DO
launch never print a single [launch] line.  So 'crashes half the time' and
'hangs during load' are one event seen twice.

A 15x disagreement between two clocks looked like a reconstruction slip --
BTL4.CPP passes GetTicksPerSecond() where ApplicationManager wants a frame
rate.  Checked against the shipped binary before touching it: same instruction
sequence, same kind of static float pushed.  Authentic.  Documented so nobody
'fixes' it.

Also swept every subsystem DefaultData against its real C++ base.  Fifteen
chain past their immediate parent, but fourteen skip only classes that add no
handlers and no attributes, and no class's attribute-ID base disagrees with its
index chain -- so there are no gap slots there.  The one real defect: Generator
is a HeatSink but chained to Subsystem::MessageHandlers, so it ignored every
ToggleCooling message.  Fixed (compiles next build).

Tooling: podrun.sh stages the build over BTL4REC.EXE, exports the host-side VPX
board env -- without which the run dies at the iserver handshake rather than
merely rendering nothing -- and archives every run's log, marking it -CRASH
when it faulted.  Before this the only preserved dump was an accident, on a rig
where each run costs four minutes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-28 21:41:38 -05:00