RustRaptor/docs/hd-opening-cards.md

Opening-credit HD rendering

The existing HD setting can display supplied replacements for the standalone opening-credit pictures. Each keeps its original 320×200 canvas and top-left origin, with original-picture fallback when a replacement is absent or rejected.

Picture	Original ID	Unfaded source palette
APOGEE_PIC	1002b	POGPAL_DAT
CYGNUS_PIC	1002d	CYGPAL_DAT

Cinematic::still_picture exposes the current card and its unfaded palette. HdAssets::sprite_static_palette quantizes supplied artwork using all 256 colors of that palette. Gameplay water/fire/flash index classes do not apply to these static palettes. The indexed cache distinguishes this policy from ordinary gameplay sprites while sharing source validation, RGBA residency and derived disk assets. Existing cinematic presentation applies the fade afterward, so black or partially faded colors never become quantization inputs.

Opening timing, music and PCM patch generation are unchanged. AGX delta films and bitmap fonts retain their classic artwork and playback. This rendering support adds no artwork coverage; actual opening-card remasters still require source-palette, composition and artistic review before registration.

Synthetic tests cover both cards at 1× and 4×, colors above index 239, complete fade phases, missing/rejected replacement fallback, separate cache policies, and unchanged world/pilot/RNG plus cinematic audio/music event streams. The complete synthetic opening remains 569 ticks. Local original-data checks also pass: the opening retains 966 ticks and the AGX intro retains 925 ticks, with their original cue times and palettes. The focused run passed 28 portable checks and both original-data cinematic checks on 2026-10-10.

Run the desktop route fixtures from RustRaptor/ with cargo test --locked --lib opening_card. The cinematic and palette/cache suites are cargo test --locked --lib cinematics::tests:: and cargo test --locked --lib hd::tests::. Original-data checks require RAPTOR_TEST_DATA=../data cargo test --locked --lib cinematics::tests:: -- --ignored.