Minigames & Sol Tower

The judge scores the raw chart cell, not the held-sequence symbol the display substitutes on every fourth beat — and each chart symbol is literally a pad-button mask (1 = Square, 2 = Circle, 3 = Triangle).

Triangle matches no chart cell: it spends a stock of three, scores small anywhere but big (plus a full groove-gauge step) on the 4-beat combo slot, and the spin it triggers suspends judging entirely. Full trace, addresses and scoring constants: docs/subsystems/minigame-dance.md.

The names, ladder and prizes are read off your image. Each roster record opens with a 32-byte ASCII name, and the cabinet serves records 5–16 in order — across which the prize gold is strictly increasing and sums to — coins. Records 3 and 4 are the post-clear second-lap opponents, which is why the raw roster's gold column looks jumbled.

The duel is drawn with the cabinet's own assets, decoded from your disc as it runs: your fighter from the battle-form party pack (PROT 1204), the opponent from its per-rung pack (PROT 1206…1219), both posed from their real animation banks, plus the arena, the retail HUD/tally-menu widgets, the overlay's own sound cues and its boss-overture music. Full trace: docs/subsystems/minigame-baka-fighter.md.

Fitted rather than traced: the 3D camera, fighter spacing and menu layout (the duel's GTE matrices aren't in a save state), the tiled floor (the stage set carries no floor mesh), the HP-bar frame, and the animation slot order. Two rules are stated readings rather than overlay-pinned constants: the mid-run pot forfeit and the final rung's automatic payout. When the presentation assets don't decode, the duel falls back to the stat panel above and says so — no stand-in art is drawn.

The rules are the retail loop, read off your image: the ten-species table (score value, pull factor, strike gate), the per-pond spawn tables the hook resolves through (lure row × band column), the four reel-cadence gesture templates the “Good!” recogniser matches, the band-roll odds, the strike credit, the gate behind each pond's band-4 rarity, the tension divisors of all three rods, the catch-score formula with its 999,999 cap, and the prize counter — all decoded from the fishing overlay on your disc at load. Reference: minigame-fishing.md.

The pond is the real place: the venue's own field-scene bundle assembled in WebGL — and the angler on the shore is the lead's actual field model, standing in his own idle animation.

Fitted rather than traced: the camera framing and the shore anchor (the retail camera lives in runtime globals), the line / bobber / ripple overlay, the exact strike-denominator ladder, the fight's reel-in rates, and the fish-behaviour branch order (its pull / dart / sink formulas are per-species disc data). The HUD glyph atlas is the one undecoded fishing asset, so its icons draw as labelled text. The venue bundle carries two pond areas — the fenced fishing deck and the rocky-shore pool — and which pond each venue plays at is a fitted assignment; the line-snap loss is an engine-side reading. No stand-in mechanics beyond what is listed here.

The fight is your disc's. The four-direction deal, the AP gate and the action queue are the arena's own rules; each command resolves through the ported battle engine — its power from the battle overlay's move-power table, the damage roll and finisher from the shared battle formulas, the elemental nudge from the 8×8 affinity matrix. Your fighter's body is the assembled battle form — the player battle file's equipment-id sections spliced and posed from its own action streams, with each direction playing that command's own swing record (the direction ids 0xC..0xF are the swing slots, so the pairing is the disc's, not a guess) — and your stats are the new-game template leveled through the game's own growth curves (pick the level above). The command costs are your character's own swing records, the opponent fights with its monster record's boosted battle stats, and a committed sequence is resolved against the SCUS arts-name table's own combo strings to raise the retail arts banner — every number decoded from the image you loaded, in your browser.

The arena is the game's own too. The fenced dirt ring behind the fighters is the Sol Muscle Dome's real battle backdrop — PROT 1225, the tail slot of the dome's own other6.lzs file — drawn world-fixed with its own texture pages and with its lamp-glow prims blended additively the PSX way (the stream's separate dust-decal object is omitted — the retail match shows a mist-free arena), and the ground underfoot is the retail battle ground grid (the flat tiled plane the battle overlay emits, sampling the backdrop's own dirt tile at its traced VRAM address). The sound is the dome's own cue set: the match SM's UI blips (PROT 0868) and the shared battle impact cue (PROT 0869), decoded from your image, with the battle theme the arena inherits as BGM.

The chrome is the game's art now, too. Every chip, plate, badge, numeral and banner strip on the HUD is decoded from your disc: the blue/gold plate slices, the D-pad glyph, the AP-plate pieces and the HP/MP badges from the boot-time widget page in PROT.DAT's unindexed system-TIM gap; the chip labels in the game's own small battle font; the digits from the menu-glyph atlas; the red cross-out X, the SUPER / HYPER / MIRACLE ARTS!! strips, the DAMAGE / HIT / TOTAL words and the big orange damage numerals from the battle-effect bank (PROT 0870); and the “Welcome to the Muscle Dome!” cursive, the INTERVAL heading and the ROUND word from the dome's own data file (extraction 1220), placed by the PROT 0977 overlay's sprite table. Screen positions come from the SCUS-static battle HUD element table plus a live PCSX-Redux packet capture of a real dome match (command cluster, enemy art, player HYPER ARTS!!). The arts command input is packet-pinned piece by piece from a GP0 capture of a live retail input screen: the High/Left/Right/Low hexagon chips with their baked label strips and gold diamond ends, the maroon input bar and its committed-command pennants, the input-phase AP plate's gouraud sheen, the green Triangle-button circle (its own tiny system TIM), and the Hyper Arts list window — system-UI interior tiles under the retail per-window gradient, with each art's name, arrow string and AP cost in the orange sub-palette, straight from the SCUS arts-name table.

Fitted rather than traced: the base camera seat, fighter spacing and facing (the slow spin between rounds is the traced idle-phase camera tick); the banner's white speed-line rays (polygonal in retail, procedural here) and the SUPER/MIRACLE banner word composition (atlas layout — only the HYPER strip's draw is packet-pinned); the chips' glide-in motion (the page parks them at the element table's arrived endpoints); the between-fights INTERVAL screen's hold time (its heading and six count-up rows are the retail emitters' own; retail's fade/hold counters are unported); the time-meter placement (its ramp is the traced FUN_801d3444 shape); which of the three traced UI blips fires on which page event; the KO clip pick (slot 4 of the pinned party hit-reaction family — the flinch, slot 2, is traced); the opponent's greedy command AI (retail has no dome-specific AI table); the jitter-free level growth (retail adds a zero-mean random spread); the awarded Seru; the pennant spawn anchor and non-30-cost pennant widths (the capture holds the 30-cost pitch); the Auto picker (greedy here — retail's picker is unpinned); the review / Begin-Reselect screens' geometry (screenshot-read); and the arts list showing every table art — the page does not model arts learning, which retail gates the list on. Two honest gaps: the rules engine resolves each command as a basic strike — retail expands a recognized art through its art records for more damage, so the arts banner here is presentation over the real recognition, not an arts damage model — and the Ra-Seru (magic) chip renders crossed out because the port has no cast path, though retail crosses it only on its magic-forbidden courses. Without a disc image the chrome falls back to the old canvas approximation; when the 3D bodies don't decode, the fight falls back to the text HUD and says so; when the backdrop entry doesn't decode, the floor falls back to plain tiles.