D776 - The RTC tick is the host's wall clock in microseconds since 0001-01-01

Status: decided Date: 2026-10-08 known_by: assumed (the platform's published RTC interface: a tick is a microsecond from year one)

sceRtcGetCurrentTick writes the host's wall clock as a tick: microseconds since 0001-01-01 00:00 UTC in the proleptic Gregorian calendar. That is the Unix time plus 719,162 days, scaled to microseconds. The clock is orbistoun_hle::clocks::wall_clock, the one gettimeofday answers, so the two agree to the microsecond.

Why: PPSA03416 polls a condition with scePthreadCondTimedwait, reading the tick around every wait. Both were unimplemented, so each wait answered at once and the tick never moved: a million turns of the loop spent the run's whole call budget. A tick from a clock of its own would let the guest's two views of the time disagree. A logical clock would not move while the guest waits on a condition.