Two Stuck rollbacks fired on rung 10 inside half an hour, both on a fly that was walking, and
both were the ratchet working to contract: the stall window is reset by exploration -- one tile
the run has never stood on -- and a fly crossing a town it has already covered to reach the
rung's own door earns none of it. Entering a map for the first time already counts, because a
new map is ground nobody has stood on; re-entering one does not, which is what the museum was.
So the window gains a second signal, passed in by the caller and meaningless to the ratchet
itself, exactly as coverage is: the Pokemon loop answers with "nearer the objective, in map
hops, than this run has ever been", over the same map graph GO OBJECTIVE walks. It can fire at
most once per step of the road, it spends no budget, it captures nothing and it skips no
trigger. Nothing in the macro layer reads it back and no button is bound on it.
The checkpointed ratchet state is untouched: the signal is a level on one sample, not a counter.
GO FRONTIER was 1,235 of the rung-10 run's macro starts in 47 minutes, over two museum floors
and a town whose ground the fly had already covered. The tiles it aimed at were real and
unreachable: 98 walkable tiles on the museum's ground floor, 62 of them reachable from the door,
39 never stood on and almost all of those behind the admission desk. A walk that can reach none
of its goals refuses no route and writes every goal to the blocked ledger -- which is a ten
brain minute window, so all of it came back and the refusal happened again, once per hold.
A window is right for a target somebody is standing in front of and wrong for ground the map has
fenced off. So the refusal is remembered per map instead, with no window, and it is cleared by
the one event that can change the answer: the fly standing somewhere on that map it had not
stood on before -- a door opened, a script carried it through, somebody moved out of a doorway.
Re-entering the map clears nothing, which is the loop the window made.
BACK was 678 macro starts in 47 minutes on rung 10, 189 of them on Pewter City with no text box
on screen at all. BACK is on no overworld and no dialog pad, so every one of them was dealt by
Scene::Unknown -- which holds two states under one name. One is a screen this crate cannot name,
the Pokedex or the trainer card or OPTION, where A and B are what leave it. The other is a frame
of the overworld where the cartridge is driving -- a warp in flight, a scripted push-back, the
museum guide walking the fly through the door -- which the detector calls Unknown because the
buttons are not reaching the player.
On the second, NEXT and BACK are an A and a B pressed into somebody else's script: they change
nothing and they complete where the fly stands, which is section 12.2's trap with no box to
advance. So Unknown's pad is dealt on whether a box is drawn, and a scripted overworld frame is
an empty pad the fly waits out -- the cartridge gives the buttons back by itself.
Rung 10 spent five and a half hours in Pewter City with the objective two doors away, and the
fly kept ending up inside the museum, where GO OBJECTIVE, GO SHOP and GO HEAL were all off the
pad: a map with no row in the graph has no neighbours, so next_hop answers nothing and area_of
answers nothing. Named as a residual by the previous review and worked here.
Both ids come from the cartridge's own warp table, surveyed from the rung-10 checkpoint rather
than counted: Pewter City names 0x34 at (14, 7) and at (19, 5), which are the museum's two
doors, and 0x34 names 0x35 at (7, 7), which is the staircase. The upper floor has no area, for
the same reason a bedroom has none -- no front door of its own -- and the road out of it is the
staircase, which is what the fly needs there.
The rung-10 review needed to tell "the whole-map grid is wrong on this map" from "this frame
was mid-step", and the refusal label cannot: both read "screen disagrees". So the decode is
split from its own cross-check, the disagreement is readable tile by tile, and the map survey
stands still for a while and counts how many of those frames decode.
On Pewter City, measured from the rung-10 checkpoint: standing still it decodes on 118 of 120
frames, and the frame the survey caught disagrees on three tiles by exactly one tile row in the
direction the fly was walking. The map is fine; the reading is refused while the fly is moving.
The first run of the new ROM test failed on YES 134, and every one past
the sixth was in Pewter City or the gym the fly had walked to -- which is
the fly playing the game, not the ring. Row 41 is about the presses spent
in the room, so the harness records starts by name while the fly is still
on the map it resumed on: 6 macros there, YES 2.
Where the fly was standing, the conversation press by press, why TALK
retired nothing, the four rows this branch closes and the one it leaves,
the ROM-gated run, and the hunt: 1 distinct tile to 437, 73/73 flagged
windows to 54/73, YES in a text box on map 0x3a 1424 to 4, dialog frames
69,469 to 5,492.
The 54 that still flag are a different trap on ground the before arm
never reached -- GO FRONTIER runs and a GO OBJECTIVE/BACK/GO FRONTIER
cycle in Pewter City -- and that is the next brief.
What was live, what the survey read, and what the three candidate
readings in the brief turned out to be: not the prompt, not HEAL, but the
dialog pad dealt unconditionally with TALK to get back into it. The
scene-by-scene table splits the dialog row in two and the pad-empty sweep
gains the reopen ledger's own residual. macros-wram.md narrows its "no
observable for a choice" claim rather than withdrawing it.
Unit: HEAL is off a full party's pad, including the rung-10 party's own
numbers, which is the assertion that the loop was never the heal's; TALK
is off a rested nurse's pad and on a hurt one's, and an ordinary
villager is unaffected; her prompt deals one answer and a plain box still
deals three; a readable prompt that is not hers deals both answers and no
NEXT; an answer whose prompt reopens is excluded and one that settled the
box is not; a completed heal and a declined prompt both retire her.
ROM-gated from the live checkpoint (FLY_CENTER_CHECKPOINT): the fly
leaves map 0x3a on a bounded number of macros, YES starts stay under
five, NEXT is on no pad while a prompt is readable, and TALK is on no pad
at a rested nurse. The run also counts dialog and prompt frames, which is
what makes the forty-six-to-one ratio visible.
TALK's precondition reaches over a counter because the cartridge does;
its talked-ledger entry was read one tile ahead. So TALK was bound at the
counter and recorded nothing, 107 times, and the nurse was never retired.
The entry now comes from the same reading the precondition makes.
A completed HEAL writes her into the talked ledger: the macro has had the
conversation with its own presses, and the reached window would otherwise
expire in ten brain minutes and offer the ring again. A declined prompt
writes it too -- 12.4 inverted for one person, because the pad only ever
offers NO at her prompt when the party is already full.
And the general rule: a YES or NO whose prompt is up again on the same
map and tile within one hold did nothing, so that answer joins the
blocked ledger for its window.
On a box that is a readable YES/NO prompt, NEXT is YES under another
name -- an A press at a two-option menu confirms the option the cursor is
on -- so it is off that pad and the pad is the box's two answers. That is
12.10's pair rule in a dialog.
At the nurse's own prompt only the answer that changes something is
bound: YES with a hurt or statused party, NO with a full one, read from
the same byte HEAL's precondition has read since section 13.
And TALK is off the pad at a nurse the party has no use for. Her
conversation is a service whose need the cartridge publishes, and a ring
of text that ends where it began is section 12.2's trap. Nobody else is
narrowed.
An answer the reopened-prompt ledger excludes leaves the pad, and the
exclusion never empties one: a box nothing can answer cannot be left.
Row 41 is the Pokemon Center nurse: 2,142 YES starts on one tile of map
0x3a with a party at 70/70. The survey that names it is a new probe mode
(FLY_PROBE_CATCH=nurse) that leaves the box with B and then pulses A,
printing every state the conversation passes through with the two-option
menu's own geometry beside it. It is a ring of forty-six presses and the
box is a choice on exactly one of them.
So the reading: wFontLoaded plus the border DisplayTwoOptionMenu draws,
plus the cursor it parks inside it. Both halves are needed -- the cursor
bytes survive the box closing, so all forty-six frames carry the
geometry. It claims that box and not "a choice is open" in general.
TargetKey gains Answer { at, yes } for the reopened-prompt exclusion.
The doc comment on Cursor::want credited THROW BALL's 63 blocked starts to the
bag drawing slowly, which is true of the frames and not the cause. What the rule
did was make the step report which list it had been left looking at, and the
answer was never the bag - it was the party list, because battle_entry's ITEM and
PKMN were the other way round. The rule stands on its own: a step that reads the
list it has already answered takes its length and its direction from entries it
is not walking.
The rung-10 loop whole: which building the fly was in, why every candidate list
on that map emptied, the byte dump that named the battle menu's swapped entries,
the ROM-gated before and after, and the two arms of the trap hunt being identical
because a restore clears the ledgers the loop was built out of.
Section 13.1's tables follow: MENU off both overworld rows and off the narrow
counter row, the move list's conditional BACK, the start menu reachable only by
the raw START button, and two new rows in the pad-empty audit - the room whose
one door the ledger rests, and the map with no way out at all, which is the one
empty pad left and is asserted rather than covered.
A new test from the rung-10 Pewter checkpoint: the fly is on map 0x35, the
museum's upper floor, the objective is the gym where the badge is, and over
thirty-three brain minutes MENU is on no overworld pad, no overworld pad is
empty, MENU and BACK never alternate, and the fly leaves the building on frame
182. On v0.4.3 the same test fails at the first of those: MENU is on the pad of
maps 2, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57 and 58 with 147 starts.
The harness records where a macro reported blocked, which is what identified the
battle menu's swapped entries, and the forest test now asserts THROW BALL never
blocks: 15 starts and 0 blocked from the rung-9 checkpoint, against 6 of 6.
Its bound on a battle's macros goes from 400 to 700 against a re-measured worst
of 450, because a fly whose SWITCH and ITEM reach their own lists fights longer
than one that can only attack. Every battle still ends: 3 of 3.
THROW BALL was 63 starts and 63 blocked on v0.4.3 and SWITCH 15 of them, and the
reason is neither macro's own script. The screen reads FIGHT PKMN over ITEM RUN
and the game's index does not: wCurrentMenuItem is the row inside the column the
cursor is in, and selection adds two for the right column, so the order is
FIGHT, ITEM, PKMN, RUN. battle_entry had PKMN 1 and ITEM 2 -- the row-major
reading of the picture -- so every macro that meant to open the bag opened the
party list and every macro that meant to open the party list opened the bag.
Surveyed on the cartridge from the rung-9 checkpoint: a THROW BALL aiming at 2
walked the cursor to wTopMenuItemX 15 / wCurrentMenuItem 0, pressed A, and the
party list opened -- wTopMenuItemY 1, wTopMenuItemX 0, wListMenuID $02 -- with
the game writing wCurrentMenuItem 2 on the frame after the press.
The fake had the same mistake in its own geometry, so it could not have caught
it: its two-by-two moved row-major. It is column-major now, like the cartridge.
THROW BALL on the cartridge was 63 starts and 63 `blocked`, mean sixty-nine
frames: the cursor to ITEM, the A that confirms it, the twenty settle frames,
and then a refusal on the very next frame. Red keeps one cursor for every menu
in the game, the bag takes longer than twenty frames to draw, and `listing` was
still answering for the battle *menu* -- four entries, max 3. A ball whose bag
index was above that read as off the end of the list and the step gave up at
once; one inside it was walked for by pressing UP and LEFT at the battle menu,
which is the blind pressing section 4 forbids.
So a Listing now says which list it is (ListKind) and a cursor step says which
list its target indexes into. A step whose list is not up waits exactly as it
waits for a list that reports no cursor at all, and takes its press order and
its budget from that list on the first frame it accepts input rather than from
whatever was up when the script was built. A confirming press that has already
begun still finishes: the press is what answers the list, so the cartridge is
already drawing the next one while it is issued.
The crossings are named: FIGHT and ITEM and PKMN and RUN over the battle menu,
a move slot over the move list, a bag index over the bag, a party slot over the
party list. A shop's own screens are one list and stay as they were.
The fake gained the one thing it could not express -- a list that takes frames
to draw -- and two of its fixtures had FIGHT and a potion opening nothing at
all, which is how they passed while the cartridge could not.
The v0.4.3 residual: BACK was 263 of 797 macro starts and every one of them was
over an open move list. A move list whose battler the seam cannot place binds no
MOVE n at all -- move_slot_bound needs wBattleMon* -- so its pad was BACK alone,
and the only thing that button does is close the list MOVE 1 on the menu
underneath had just opened. That is section 12.10's pair with MOVE 1 standing
where NEXT used to.
So BACK is dealt on the move list only while battle.own reads, and MOVE 1 keeps
the backstop it has over the top-level menu: with nothing readable the pad is
MOVE 1 alone and its script confirms wherever the cursor stands, which is the
press that ends a turn. With the moves readable the pad is unchanged.
Rung 10, thirty brain minutes inside the Pewter museum's upper floor (map 0x35):
macro starts MENU 82, BACK 82, GO FRONTIER 8, the event log alternating
`MENU start/done, BACK start/done`. MENU pressed START, the start menu opened,
and that scene's pad is CLOSE / CONFIRM / BACK -- so BACK pressed B and closed it
again. Two buttons that undo each other with nothing else changing, which is
section 12.10's rule one scene wider than a battle, and section 12.2's trap by
definition: a precondition satisfied wherever the fly stands and a macro that
completes without moving.
Nothing in the macro vocabulary uses the start menu for anything, so MENU comes
off scene_set's overworld row entirely rather than being narrowed. It stays a
type, a population, a tag and a script, so the roles, the channel order and
--print-compatibility are untouched, and the fly's raw START still opens the
start menu in macros mode.
MENU was also what made an empty overworld pad impossible. That guarantee moves
to the way out: `ways` gains one last resort for a *room*, the one GO ROUTE has
had outdoors since 13.1, so a map that offers nothing else at all still offers
its door or its staircase -- ignoring the blocked window, because a target the
ledger is resting is still the only place to go. The museum's staircase is a
passage and not an exit, which is why the old tier 3 could not answer for it.
A map with no way out at all is now a genuinely empty pad. No map in Red is
that, it is asserted as the named residual, and game.padEmptyMs reports it.
The contract: no pair of buttons on any battle pad may undo each other with
nothing else changing, which is section 12.2's rule stated at the pad instead
of at one macro. Section 13.1's table takes NEXT off the own-turn main menu,
gives the bag a row of its own on the own turn, and records MOVE 1 as the
backstop that row keeps.
The audit carries the reproduction -- 71,673 frames in one battle, 73 of 73
windows flagged, BACK 739 starts on the move list against NEXT 739 on the main
menu -- the ROM-gated run before and after, the trap hunt before and after
(1 distinct tile to 260, 73 of 73 flagged windows to 68 of 73, 0 overworld
frames to 20,394), and the residuals: NEXT on a move list whose cursor the seam
cannot place is now the largest source of it, which is row 30b and wants a WRAM
reading rather than a pad change.
Unit: no battle pad holds both NEXT and BACK, over every sub-state with and
without a potion and a ball, and NEXT is on none with a cursor accepting input
(the assertion the top-level menu failed before this branch). A battle frame
with a cursor accepting input is the fly's turn, against real WRAM, for all
four menus plus the two frames that correctly are not one. The bag deals
ITEM / THROW BALL / BACK, and BACK alone when the bag is empty.
ROM-gated, from the live rung-9 forest checkpoint: no pad with both buttons, no
NEXT while a menu accepts input, the longest NEXT/BACK alternation under four,
and every battle entered also left, each on a bounded number of macros. The
battle rules ask the scene the pad was dealt for rather than wIsInBattle, so
the $ff frame a lost battle passes through -- which reads Unknown, whose pad is
NEXT and BACK by contract -- is not accused of a battle rule.
The test fails on v0.4.2 from the same checkpoint with "NEXT was on the pad
while a battle menu was accepting input", NEXT dealt on battle/main, and a run
that never leaves map 51.
Live on rung 9 thirty-five minutes after v0.4.2: NEXT 1264 macro starts, BACK
1241, the log alternating NEXT start/done, BACK start/done every hold, on map
51. NEXT on the top-level battle menu is an A press on the cursor, and the
cursor sits on FIGHT, so it opened the move list; BACK on the move list closed
it again. Each button was legitimate where it stood, and the pair undid itself
with nothing else changing, so the turn never resolved.
NEXT is now on no pad with a cursor accepting input. It keeps the between-turns
row alone and the forced switch, which has no BACK beside it to undo it. MOVE 1
is the top-level menu's backstop instead: the question over that menu is 12.8's
"is there a move list to open", FIGHT always opens, and the script there is
confirm FIGHT and stop, which reads no move at all.
The bag is the fly's own turn, because a cursor accepting input is one, and its
pad is the bag's own three answers: ITEM, THROW BALL, BACK. Section 12.10.
286 distinct tiles become 489 over twenty brain minutes from the rung-9
checkpoint, the median flagged window holds 55 tiles instead of 16, GO FRONTIER
runs 64 walks worth up to twelve net tiles instead of four worth one, and one
walk spends its cap where six did.
The cost is named rather than buried: flagged windows go 61 to 70 and windows
under four tiles 5 to 14, and every one of those is a window spent inside a
battle -- a fly that covers more ground walks into more grass, 48,756 battle
frames becoming 50,413 with the longest battle 9,549 frames becoming 13,411.
This is the first measurement in that file where more ground and fewer flags do
not both hold, and it is stated as such.
Section 15 is the contract for map-aware walks: what is decoded, the one ROM
read and why it is a read of the cartridge image, what the window fallback is
for and how it says so, and the proof. macros-wram.md section 9 is the bytes --
four addresses with their encodings, the bank-aware read on the seam, the corner
the cartridge settled, the two gates against a plausible-but-wrong decode, and
the survey of Pallet Town and Viridian Forest.
The buffer is ds 1300 and every real map plus its three-block border fits in it.
A header that says otherwise is one read mid-load, and decoding it would read
past the buffer into somebody else s WRAM, so it is a refusal rather than a
clamp.
ROM-gated and checkpoint-gated, skipped cleanly without either. The decode
against the window predicate on every tile the window can answer for; the decode
against a survey of real presses, where every refused press has to be a wall, a
directed wall or a sprite in the way, and every step the cartridge made has to be
one the grid would have planned; GO FRONTIER aiming at ground outside the window
and walking there; and every way out of the map reachable in one plan with no
guessed tile in it.
Pallet Town: 221 walkable, 207 reachable, 90 window tiles, 120 surveyed, 58
refused presses. Viridian Forest: 719 walkable, all reachable, 90 window tiles,
120 surveyed, 74 refused presses, a 215-frame frontier walk out of the window and
ways out 27 to 149 steps away.
scene_probe prints the grid s size, its walkable count, the count reachable from
where the fly stands and the count never stood on, draws the ground with the
reading it actually used, and names the refusal when there is no grid. trap_hunt
carries the same line into every trace line and into the summary, so a stalled
walk can be read at a glance: a fly with 719 walkable tiles and 4 reachable ones
is fenced in and no re-plan will help it.
A warp writes wCurMap before the map header and the block data: on Oak s lab
doormat wCurMap already reads PALLET_TOWN while the header still reads the lab s
ten-by-twelve. The decode agrees with the screen on such a frame -- both are the
old map -- so only the id is wrong, and a grid filed under it would stay wrong
for as long as it was cached. One byte answers it: does the cached grid still
agree with the screen about the tile the fly is standing on.
Measured on the cartridge, not derived: a map tile is 2x2 screen tiles and
CheckTilePassable matches one id, and the screen agrees with the lower-left tile
of the quadrant. Viridian Forest s (4, 32) reads 3, the second row of its
block, where the first row holds bash4. On open ground most quadrants hold one id
four times over, so the upper-left guess reads correctly on a town and falls
apart in a forest -- which is why the decode is cross-checked against the screen
before it is trusted.
The rung-9 forest review: what was live, the mechanism of all three
observations, the audit rows, and the trap hunt before and after from the
release container's own checkpoint.
The hunt is brain-driven rather than stubbed, which is legitimate here and
was not for sections 13 and 14: this branch adds no macro type, so no
population is re-dealt and the two arms differ in the macro code alone.
Distinct tiles 216 to 286, windows flagged 70 of 73 to 61, windows under
four tiles 21 to 5, BACK starts with no list open 175 to 0, MOVE n starts
36 to 68.
Four residuals are named rather than buried: BACK is still 359 starts of
830 over open lists, which is row 34's contract; a NEXT/BACK two-cycle
closes the run inside one battle, from a move list whose cursor the seam
cannot place on its opening frames; a window spent in a battle is flagged
by the tile rule whatever happens in it; and the THROW BALL precondition
is inert in this run because the save carries a party of one.
Row 41 is the loop behind this one: in the before arm the fly answered the
nurse's box YES 474 times on one tile of a Pokemon Center for the last
eight brain minutes of the run. The after arm never enters it, so it is
neither reproduced nor fixed here. It is the next thing to measure.
route and frontier ask for the grid once per plan and fall back to the window
when there is none. With it: one plan crosses a whole map, GO WARP / GO OUT /
GO ROUTE route to their warp or connection tile rather than to the nearest tile
of an edge that reads Unknown, a tile-pair wall is planned around instead of
being learned by walking into it, and the frontier is the nearest unstood
walkable tile anywhere on the map instead of the nearest one on screen.
The walkable predicate answered for the ten-by-nine screen window and Unknown
everywhere else. MapGrid is the same rule over every tile of the loaded map:
block ids out of wOverworldMap, a blocks-to-tiles read of the tileset header s
blockset through the new bank-aware ROM read, the tileset s collision list as
before, and the TilePairCollisionsLand values as directed walls both ways.
The reader checks itself before it answers: the decode is compared against the
window predicate over the player s own neighbourhood, and a frame where the
window can answer for none of it -- a battle, a text box, a frame mid-warp -- is
refused, because wOverworldMap shares its bytes with the picture buffer. Every
refusal is named (GridRefusal) and leaves the window predicate in charge.
Cached per map id and size, so a map is decoded once on arrival rather than once
per question, and owned beside the session ledgers: never checkpointed.
