| moby |
The game's own name for a movable world object: Spyro (sometimes), a gem, an enemy, a chest, a 3D HUD element. |
| class |
A moby's type, m_Class. It selects the model the moby draws with and the code that runs it, and it is the key most overrides and material selectors are written against. |
| tick |
One simulation step, 29.913 per second (NTSC 1125000/37609). Gameplay state advances only on a tick, so a mod that changes what the game does works in tick context. |
| VBL |
The PSX vertical blank, 59.826 Hz, two per tick. The CLI word "frame" means VBL: --frame-limit counts these. |
| present |
One drawn frame. How many presents a tick gets depends on the machine and on --render-fps, so a present count is never a contract. |
| canonical, sub-tick |
The scene extracted at the tick itself is canonical. Scenes drawn between two ticks are sub-tick and carry alpha, how far past the tick they sit, from 0 up to 1. |
| extraction |
The walk that turns guest state into draw data, once per scene. Refine callbacks run here. |
| guest RAM |
The game's 2 MB of PSX memory, held as a byte array in the process. Writing it changes gameplay; everything else a mod does cannot. |
| vaddr |
A PSX virtual address, the 0x80… form the game uses internally. api->guest(vaddr) turns one into a host pointer. Guest structs store vaddrs, never host pointers. |
| arena |
Guest memory a mod owns, from api->guest_alloc. It is timeline state: savestates, rewind and runahead carry and restore it like any other guest bytes, which host statics are not. |
| tick context, present context |
Where a call runs. Guest RAM writes, api->call, guest_alloc and registration are legal in tick context and refused in present context, which covers present hooks and UI section bodies. |
override, base() |
A mod's function that replaces a game function, and the call that runs the next override in the chain and then the original. Where base() sits in the body makes the override a pre-hook, a post-hook or a replacement. |
| mutative |
A mod that writes guest RAM, declared as sim_mutative in the manifest. Memory cards are tagged with the mutative set that wrote them. |
| savestate, rewind, runahead |
Timeline features: capture and restore a moment, step backwards, speculatively run ticks ahead. Each needs the mod to declare how its own state behaves (state, runahead), and each is refused for an undeclared mod. |