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Below MSL 3.1, SPIRV-Cross emulates an image atomic with a raw device pointer beside the texture, laid out like a linear image. A block-linear image's Metal texture is a deswizzled copy, so its atomics went to a scratch buffer nothing read (Pokemon Legends: Z-A's atomic max into texture 302), and a 3D image's pointer was indexed with the int3 coordinate itself, which does not compile (16 shaders of Octopath Traveler 0, 5 of Ghost Trick, 8 of FINAL FANTASY RESONANCE). - dmsh_atomic.py: shaders with image atomics (OpImageTexelPointer) are written at MSL 3.1, so the atomics run on the image's own texture; every other shader keeps its MSL 2.3 source byte for byte. MSL that still holds the pointer form fails the build. - Translator (TranslationFlags.MetalImageAtomics, renamed from Msl23ImageAtomics): admits 3D images and SUATOM.CAS (Metal's texture compare-exchange); the IGN coordinate guard is unchanged. - Host: the IMGA pointer binding, the scratch buffer and the layout admission are gone. NVN images of R32Uint / R32Sint take MTLTextureUsageShaderAtomic (img_usage, kept by tex_upgrade: Metal leaves that bit out of the usage property); any other texture in an atomic slot is replaced by an atomic-capable write sink with a red line. - Chain a4e2088c2e69 (with main's vertex-output padding). Tested on chain 0ce4b5e8aefb, this change before that rebase: Octopath Traveler 0 builds all 10,324 shaders, Z-A all 28,603, Ghost Trick's five 3D-atomic shaders build. Mac runs of both games under the Metal API validation layer showed no validation error (Octopath Traveler 0 to frame 14,400, its particle atomics on buffer texture 2049; Z-A to frame 12,000 through the atomic max on texture 302). Synthetic atomics and CAS run on buffer, 2D, 2D-array and 3D textures of a Mac GPU (test_image_atomic_bounds.py, t_atomic_return.m). GitHub issue #290: at40b643bOctopath Traveler 0 already built 10,308 of 10,324 shaders (2e655b7fixed the returning atomics); the 16 left were the 3D ones, which build now. Not checked: an iPhone, FINAL FANTASY RESONANCE's library, the picture of Z-A's atomic scene.
Subsystem references
How the host meets each part of a Switch game, and every failure met so far, one entry per mechanism: symptom, cause, fix (file and function), the games it was found on (linked to their notes in dm/games/<id>/README.md). Start from the symptom index when you have a log line or a visible result; the workflows that lead here are in docs/agents.
| File | Covers |
|---|---|
| packing.md | NSP script, compressed inputs and build artifacts |
| rewriter.md | The NSO rewriter patch_nso.py: jump tables, exclusive windows, patch area reach, cuts and observation gates, functions without unwind entries, stack and system registers, relocations |
| memory.md | Guest layout, heap and application pool, virtual address memory and the alias region (the SDK's node area), engine allocators, mapping SVCs, running out of memory |
| threads.md | Thread creation and cores, address arbitration, yields and spin waits, events |
| services.md | SDK calls and system services: sm connections, names that changed between SDKs, file system and saves, add-on content, input, keyboard and applets, display and operation mode, accounts and network, settings and fonts, C library and time, modules |
| movies.md | The SDK's movie library: decoder lifecycle, output slots, native-texture output, demuxers and codecs, game movie players |
| audio.md | The audio renderer and its command lists by SDK, AudioOut and devices, codecs, timing |
| frame-rate.md | The host's frame step, engine frame limiters, present intervals and display rates, CPU cost |
| nvn-objects.md | NVN object sizes, memory pools, command memory, queues and syncs, CPU-written textures, NVN entry points |
| rendering.md | The replay on Metal: textures, passes and clears, blend / depth / stencil, vertex input, uniforms and ordering, conditional rendering; the Vulkan and OpenGL layers |
| shaders.md | Shader containers by engine, control sections and code, translation, bindings and handles, shaders compiled at run time, pipelines and caches |
| game-state.md | Saves, scripted state, and game behaviour that looks like a host bug but is not |
A new general finding goes into the file and section it belongs to, in the same form, with a line in the symptom index; a fact about one game goes into that game's note.