Going-Commando/docs/plan/pcsx2-verification.md

PCSX2 verification (gc-trace)

Status as of 2026-10-11. The tfrag lighting magnitudes are verified; this is the file that records how, so the next comparison starts from the harness instead of from scratch.

Tool: tools/trace (gc-trace). It never ships, no shipped crate depends on it, and it reads the game's own memory out of a running emulator, a savestate, or a raw dump.

What exists now

gc-trace pine-info                       # protocol handshake
gc-trace dump-ee   <src> [--out FILE]     # 32 MiB EE RAM image
gc-trace find      <src> --bytes HEX      # content search (the locators use it too)
gc-trace read      <src> --addr HEX --len N
gc-trace info      <src>                  # savestate metadata
gc-trace compare-tfrag-light <unpacked-dir> [--level N] <src>

<src> is --pine [slot], --state FILE / --state latest, or --ee FILE. It may sit anywhere on the command line.

The comparison:

1. Locates the tfrags block in RAM by content -- the key is tfrag 0's bounding sphere, sixteen bytes unique in 32 MiB. A candidate is accepted only when the block header matches, every header matches the disc on the invariant bytes (everything but the relocated data pointer and the runtime occlusion index), and every data pointer is the relocated form table + disc offset. Anything less is a plausible wrong read.
2. Locates the light bank the same way, by its exact section bytes.
3. Runs the pass over the same disc data with gc_engine::tfrag_light::light_tfrag.
4. Diffs per channel, per vertex, bucketed by vertex class, with the first few mismatching vertices' terms (gc_engine::tfrag_light:: light_vertex_terms) printed so a mismatch can be attributed.

Result: levels 0 and 1, verified 2026-10-11

Level 0 (Veldin), three inputs -- the live emulator over PINE and two PCSX2 savestates from that level, all agreeing byte for byte:

level0: tfrags block at 0x848000, table at 0x848040, 833 tfrags
  headers matching the disc on invariant bytes: 833/833
  data pointers relocated as table + disc offset: 833/833
  light bank in RAM at 0x50ab20, byte-identical to the disc's

vertices compared: 40600 (162400 colour bytes)
  equal:              162400 (100.00%)
  runtime-set: 3130 vertices, 3130 fully equal
  single-set: 37470 vertices, 37470 fully equal

Level 1, from savestate slot 2 and cross-checked against the live emulator:

level1: tfrags block at 0x84c000, table at 0x84c040, 401 tfrags
  headers matching the disc on invariant bytes: 401/401
  data pointers relocated as table + disc offset: 401/401
  light bank in RAM at 0x50f4a0, byte-identical to the disc's

vertices compared: 26470 (105880 colour bytes)
  equal:              105880 (100.00%)
  runtime-set: 129 vertices, 129 fully equal
  single-set: 26341 vertices, 26341 fully equal

Level 1 matters more than one more tally: it is a different planet with a different geometry extent, a different light bank and a different runtime-set population, and it agrees on every byte. The two fixes below are therefore not level-0 coincidences.

What this establishes:

• The tfrag locator and the pointer model are right. 833 of 833 headers match on invariant bytes and 833 of 833 data pointers are relocated exactly table + disc offset, so the block found in RAM is the level's and the geometry read out of it is the geometry the game drew.
• The light bank framing is right. The section found in RAM is byte-identical to the disc's: offset at +0x04, an i32 set count, twelve bytes of pad, then 0x40-byte sets. The previous reading -- offset at +0x00, count at +0x04 -- was wrong, and this is what settled it.
• The lighting magnitudes match exactly: every one of the 162,400 colour bytes the game wrote equals ours. This was the open item in docs/roadmap.md and docs/plan/level-assets.md ("Lighting magnitudes are unverified: they need comparison against reference frames").

Two bugs the comparison found

Both produced plausible output and neither was visible in a screenshot.

1. The normal's z was not negated. vertex_normal_bits negated x and y and left z positive, while the renderer's NormalTable::normal negates all three. The result: dA = -0.707 where the game had +0.707, so max(dA, dA·wA) picked the wrong branch and every vertex lit near its base colour -- dark, but not wrong dark. Level 0 agreed on 95.88% of colour bytes with the bug and 100.00% without it.

2. A record with no light set drew transparent black. select 0x000f names set 15; the level's directional bank has 5 sets, so the pass had no set to light with and yielded [0,0,0,0]. The game writes the record's base colour: 3,130 of level 0's 40,600 vertices do this. The vertex is unlit, not invisible.

Finding the next thing

• Compare another level. All three inputs available are level 0; another level needs a savestate taken in it (F1 in-game, or gc-trace pine-savestate SLOT). The harness takes --level N already.
• Point lights. The runtime-set cluster is set 15 and above; those slots are filled by gameplay, so they cannot be verified from a level-load image. Comparing them needs a frame with point lights in it.
• Blended sets. Both levels' vertices are all single-set (select & 0xff00 == 0), so the blend path -- the only path rsqrt touches -- is untested against the game.
• Distil, then test. A comparison is not a regression. When a fact from here becomes load-bearing, distil it into a numbers-only fixture under tools/trace/tests/ and test against that; no test may read a savestate, a dump or a live emulator.

The test setup

PCSX2 is installed and working on this machine, so every comparison above can be re-run rather than being a one-off observation.

What	Where
Emulator	~/Desktop/pcsx2/pcsx2-v2.8.2-linux-appimage-x64-Qt.AppImage — the directory name is lowercase on disk
Game disc	~/Desktop/pcsx2/games/Ratchet & Clank - Going Commando.iso; verified target SCUS_972.68 v1.01 NTSC (docs/disc-identification.md)
Emulator config	~/.config/PCSX2/ (sstates, bios, memcards, inis, logs)
BIOS	extracted into ~/.config/PCSX2/bios/
Savestates	~/.config/PCSX2/sstates/SCUS-97268 (38996035).NN.p2s, NN = slot
Unpacked disc	~/Documents/gc-extracted/, all 27 levels
PINE socket	$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/pcsx2.sock (/run/user/1000/pcsx2.sock), slot 28011

The emulator boots the disc with -fastboot; a level takes about a minute from a cold start to reach. To capture a state manually, press F1 in-game (it lands in the slot's .p2s); to capture from a script, gc-trace pine-savestate SLOT asks the emulator to write one.

The disc integration tests need the image, not the emulator:

GC_DISC="$HOME/Desktop/pcsx2/games/Ratchet & Clank - Going Commando.iso" \
    cargo test --workspace

Running it

cargo run -q -p gc-trace -- pine-info
cargo run -q -p gc-trace -- compare-tfrag-light ~/Documents/gc-extracted --level 0 --pine
cargo run -q -p gc-trace -- compare-tfrag-light ~/Documents/gc-extracted --level 0 \
    --state ~/.config/PCSX2/sstates/<name>.p2s

Exit status is 0 when every byte matches, 2 on mismatches, 1 on error, so it can be run as a check. PINE must be enabled in the emulator (Settings → Advanced); the socket is $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/pcsx2.sock on Linux.

Nothing here redistributes game data. The disc, the BIOS and the savestates are the user's own; the repository holds the tool and the numbers.