The RIO cockpit board now runs sustained sessions with button mashing;
dropouts self-heal in ~1-3s. Documented in RIO-NOTES.md:
- directserial RIO_TAP=<path> (host env): logs every TX/RX byte with
host-us + emu-ms timestamps, plus config/RTS/DTR/break lines. This
instrument found every root cause below.
- Confs: rxburst:16 restored (no-burst reply pacing made the game ACK
~14ms late -> board dropped on the first long analog stream; the old
'rxburst corrupts boot' belief was the then-unpatched PCSPAK crash).
priority=highest,highest (unfocused DOSBox was demoted and blew the
ACK deadline).
- BTL4OPT.EXE patch lineage (in ALPHA_1/, zip left pristine):
v2 full DISABLE_AND_DIE NOPs (v1 left the IRQ/RTS-retract prologue
live -> first protocol error deafened the driver), v3 TXMAXIDLE 4->32
(kills the button-press ACK-window livelock), v4 analog retry limit
15s->0.5s (dev value was 0.2s; recovery now near-instant).
- Board firmware patch plan recorded for the EPROM-dump route.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Texturing (validated live -- game-live-textured.png, the ravine's brown dirt
terrain): the wire model is Division's intensity+ramp scheme. action 26
uploads 8-bit intensity texels ([node][nbytes][w][h] + rows; type 13 =
texture); texmap (12) references the texture; material (11) references its
texmap and a ramp (14: lo/hi RGB); texel color = lerp(lo, hi, i/255). The
backend bakes RGBA per material, uploads to GL, maps with wire UVs
(stride-5: floats 3-4; stride-8/9: floats 6-7).
Serial (directserial fork options, tracked in vpx-device/serialport/):
- rxpollus:<us> -- receive poll tick (stock 1ms); 100us discovers inbound
bytes ~10x sooner. Validated: sim advanced, camera moved with real RIO.
- rxburst:<n> -- stock DOSBox re-serializes received bytes at emulated wire
speed (~1ms/byte at 9600) though they already paid wire time on the real
cable; a 15-byte analog reply gained ~14ms, blowing the RIO's few-ms ACK
window and dropping the game into its 15-second retry fallback
(L4CTRL.CPP limit=15.0 //0.2). rxburst:16 delivers buffered bytes 16x
faster. game_rio.conf: realport:COM1 rxpollus:100 rxburst:16.
Crash-on-advance fixed: *_TSHD.BGF terrain shadows live only in arena
subdirs the search path misses; null shadow renderable was dereferenced once
the sim moved. All 11 copied into VIDEO/GEO in the working image; game now
runs sustained (560+ frames, textured, no crash). Details in RIO-NOTES.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The RIO drops comms if the analog-reply ACK is late by more than a few ms.
Empirically a slower CPU failed sooner, so the latency was dominated by how
fast the game processes the RIO packet and ACKs -- core=dynamic (recompiler)
+ cycles=max keeps the board in sync (user-confirmed). game_rio.conf passes
the real RIO through serial1=directserial realport:COM1.
With real control input the sim advances and then faults (null-ptr deref at
BTL4OPT.EXE CODE+0x123B) -- downstream of the minimal test.egg not setting the
arena objectpath, so VIDEO/GEO/ARENA/thr_tshd.bgf isn't found. That is content
config, separate from the now-working VPX protocol / renderer / RIO. Details
in RIO-NOTES.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Fable 5