[ProhibitedTV]

Live evidence

The latest V8 run reached gameplay but failed I Love Rock & Roll at 13%. The retained failure screen exposes two concrete lifecycle bugs before we tune note timing further:

1. the screen visibly reports DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM even though config/guitar_hero.yaml requests difficulty: easy, so the stylized difficulty poster is preserving a previous selection and V7/V8's fallback assumption that fresh Quick Play starts on Easy is false;
2. after the supervisor restarted while the emulator was sitting on SONG FAILED, V8 logged title settling/start behavior, meaning the failure card was being misclassified as the title screen instead of handled as a failure state.

V9 changes

• add an explicit non-OCR SONG FAILED detector based on the retained live topology: dark central plaque, dense white type, saturated yellow RETRY row, green CONTINUE footer, and absence of the red BACK badge that distinguishes the difficulty poster
• let failure ownership preempt inherited title/difficulty heuristics even after a supervisor restart
• default failed-song handling to NEW SONG during calibration so the run returns through setlist/difficulty rather than endlessly retrying the wrong retained difficulty
• deterministically home the four-row difficulty selector with three Up presses before applying the configured target; this removes the invalid assumption that the selected row is already Easy
• preserve V8's joint highway tracking
• mask impossible fret lanes by difficulty: Easy only green/red/yellow, Medium adds blue, Hard/Expert use all five
• add telemetry for failure-card evidence, active lane count, homing transactions, and suppressed inactive-lane hits

Regression coverage

Adds tests proving that V9:

• recognizes the retained failure-card topology from BOOT/restart state and chooses New Song instead of pressing Start
• does not confuse the difficulty poster (red BACK footer) with SONG FAILED
• emits up, up, up, confirm for configured Easy and up, up, up, down, confirm for configured Medium
• suppresses blue/orange gameplay inputs on Easy while still allowing yellow
• exports V9 through the active registry alias

This is intentionally still diagnostic: the next useful live run is now a real Easy chart, which isolates note timing from the accidental Medium difficulty and from disabled-lane false inputs.

[chatgpt-codex-connector]

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[chatgpt-codex-connector]

Route template-owned failures through the configured action

When a high-confidence gh_song_failed template identifies the screen but _failed_card_score() remains below threshold—for example with a differently filtered local capture—_classify() still returns FAILED through the existing template hints while leaving _failed_card_active false. This guard then delegates to the inherited failure handler, which hard-codes Confirm/Retry, so the configured default new_song action is ignored and the run may retry the retained wrong difficulty instead of returning through difficulty selection.

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