The first recording ever made with this came back 1,766 frames of nothing.
It recorded pad NOUGHT and the controller was somewhere else - which pad
one lands on is an accident of the host, the same accident that made Lunar
Porter read all four in the first place - and a flight flown for the
purpose was lost to it.
So every pad is or-ed into the byte. A demo is a record of what somebody
DID, and on a machine one person is playing the number it arrived on is
not part of that. It plays back on pad nought, where --pad puts the first
file given, and any program that reads more than one pad reads them or-ed
anyway for exactly the same reason.
--record-pad takes one file now rather than filling pads in turn, because
there is nothing left for the second one to mean.
The check for it plays a recording on pad ONE with nought holding nothing
and requires the bytes back. That is the case that was missing: the round
trip was tested and passed, on pad nought, which is the only pad it could
not have gone wrong on.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
One byte a frame, in exactly the format the player takes, so a recording
needs no conversion and there is no second format to keep in step. That
symmetry is the feature, and it makes the strongest form of the claim
testable: a recording is made OF a playback, and the bytes coming out have
to be the bytes that went in.
It exists because some inputs cannot sensibly be written by hand. Flying a
lander from one base to another is a few hundred frames of steering that
has to arrive somewhere eight cells wide, and several attempts at
authoring one got within two columns and no closer. That is a piloting
exercise rather than a test. Playing it once and keeping what happened is
the answer.
A BYTE FOR EVERY FRAME, written inside the loop that advances the
recordings rather than after it, so a machine that jumped several frames
at once still writes one for each. A recording is a timeline: one that
skipped the frames nobody looked at would play back faster than it was
flown.
What is recorded is what the DEVICE WOULD REPORT, not the live state - a
recording of a playback that wrote the live state would be a file of
noughts. And it is flushed as it goes, because a recording is usually
stopped by whoever is playing rather than by the program ending, and a
demo lost to a buffer is a demo flown twice.
Tests/replay.sh is where this and whatever follows it are checked. Twelve
scripts now.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5