Drew T 25402b2eb4 feat(phase-30 S43): FABLE5 CRACKS func_8017C6F4 pin-free — banked ×4 (~3,788 ins) [R22 PENDING]
⚠️ R22 CLEAN-FLEET VERIFY IS OWED, NOT DONE. All four gates below were INCREMENTAL builds
(§130: an incremental build can report BYTE-IDENTICAL for a change a clean build cannot link).
Committed now only to protect the work — a second Fable5 agent is reading asm/, so `make clean`
would destroy its inputs mid-run. The clean-fleet run follows the moment that agent finishes;
treat these four banks as UNCONFIRMED until then.

- THE CRACK (Drew approved the Fable5 escalation, R27): byte-exact, PIN-FREE, 947 ins. My §147-E
  "qty_compare tie, unreachable from source" diagnosis was WRONG. The residual was VARIABLE
  IDENTITY: (1) the X-pass and Y-pass min/max intermediates are DIFFERENT variables (8, not 4
  reused); (2) mnc/mxc do not exist — the cell clamps reuse the prim-loop mn/mx (X) and mny/my (Y).
  Ablations: split-only 63, reuse-only 624, conjunction MATCH. That is also why S42's "separate
  X vs Y variables" probe was filed as a failure (it was half the fix), and why every allocator
  lever was inert — pins, §148-C sliders, declaration order and 14 permuter restarts cannot reach
  a draft with the wrong NUMBER OF PSEUDOS.
- VERIFIED INDEPENDENTLY BEFORE BELIEVING IT (R14): I re-ran match_one -> MATCH (947 ins), then
  the whole-binary gate per binary.
- BANKED ×4 (every 948-ins sibling of this body), each byte-identical:
  ov_SC03_126 c48a8bb8 · ov_SC03_003 898bf52a · ov_SC04_021 33614234 · ov_SC05_019 3f5b4f13.
  family_remap produced all three siblings cleanly.
- §146 SEEN AGAIN: all three siblings first failed with `PLUMBING: parse error before 'MTX_C6F4'`
  — _carry_macros carries #defines but NOT typedefs; prepending the 9 typedef lines fixed all
  three. That label is legible ONLY because of this session's classifier fix; before it, it read
  "CC1-FAIL: make: *** Error N" and cost a manual splice-and-rebuild each.
- cookbook §150 (decode register ownership from the MATCHING diff regions before touching the
  allocator; per-instance register asymmetry ⇒ per-instance variables; the deleted-self-move tell
  and the global.c:719-vs-:729 death-before-store exemption behind it). §147-E corrected: it named
  the wrong allocator — these are global.c allocnos, not local qty_compare quantities.
2026-08-05 17:07:41 -06:00
2026-06-10 22:02:07 -06:00
2026-06-10 22:02:07 -06:00

BFM-decomp

A matching decompilation of Brave Fencer Musashi (PlayStation, SLUS-00726, USA 1998) — the first public decompilation effort for this game.

What "matching" means

The goal is C source code that, compiled with the original-era toolchain (PsyQ 4.x / GCC 2.7.2-family + ASPSX via maspsx), produces a byte-for-byte identical SLUS_007.26 and, eventually, byte-identical overlay binaries. SHA1 checksums are the ground truth; "functionally equivalent" does not count.

No ROM content

This repository contains no game assets, no disassembly output, and no ROM-derived data — only source code, build configuration, symbol names/addresses, hashes, and documentation. To build or contribute you must provide your own dump of the game disc (4-track BIN/CUE, redump layout). See .gitignore for the firewall.

Project status

Latest (Phase 19, 2026-06-20): the project builds 136 binaries byte-identical from a clean tree (the EXE + the resident engine + all 134 location overlays); make check-all → 136/136. Fleet byte-identical-from-source is 58.0% (function-instance-weighted; see the PhaseEnds for the byte-weighted ~30% figure and what it includes). Shared engine functions are matched once in ov_SC01_077 and propagated ×134 via tools/dedup_propagate.py. (The narrative below is Phase-11/12-era; a full refresh is part of the public-flip prep.)

Gen1 (foundation) complete — the matching pipeline is proven end-to-end. make extract && make build && make check rebuilds SLUS_007.26 byte-for-byte identical (SHA1 143dbb89…) from C + assembly, reproducibly across many sessions.

  • Compiler pinned by evidence: gcc-2.7.2-psx -O2 -G0 -mips1 -mcpu=3000 + maspsx --aspsx-version=2.56 --expand-div.
  • 52 functions hand-matched to byte-identical machine code — including the LZSS streaming decompressor — with a decomp-permuter + matching-cookbook "flywheel" to accelerate the next.
  • 959 PsyQ SDK functions linked byte-identical (libcd, libgs, libgte, libspu/libsnd, libgpu, libc2, libmcrd, libapi/libcard, libetc) straight from the real PsyQ 4.0 libraries instead of re-decompiling them — bringing byte-identical-from-source coverage of the EXE to ~50%.
  • File-loader / overlay system reverse-engineered, with the resident engine blob + location overlays' load addresses proven byte-identical against a live PCSX-Redux RAM dump.

About half the EXE is still INCLUDE_ASM stubs (correct bytes, not yet C), and the bulk of the game lives in compressed overlays inside the .CD archives — Gen2 (overlays & engine at scale) is underway:

  • The build toolchain is binary-agnostic (one parameterized pipeline builds any binary), and the always-resident engine blob rebuilds byte-for-byte from source (SHA1 8e17e02f…) — the second binary reconstructed exactly, after the EXE — and is now 86% hand-matched C (123 / 146 functions, up from 0): its scripting turned out to be compiled-MIPS state/mode dispatch, not a bytecode VM, and the save-file + sound (SQV) formats are documented. The harvest used a reusable swarm-of-agents + bit-for-bit byte-gate method (a wrong match can't be accepted) — tools/harvest_verify.py + tools/match_one.py, which carry straight into the overlay phase.
  • A cross-binary deduplication pipeline is live: a Ghidra-free signer fingerprints all 134 location overlays, and the report finds ~9,000 byte-identical function groups shared across binaries (~28 MB of collapsible code) — a single engine function is byte-identical in all 134 overlays. This is "one match unlocks many": each engine match will be auto-credited across the overlay fleet.

Current phase and detailed progress live in phase-ends/ (newest PhaseEnd_*.md = current state); methodology, rules, and the full roadmap are in PROJECT_CONTEXT.md; environment setup in docs/SETUP.md.

This project is developed primarily by Claude Code driving Ghidra through an MCP server; see CLAUDE.md.

License

Private repository for now. AGPL-3.0 is planned at public release, modeled on sotn-decomp. tools/brave-CUE/ is CUE's BRAVE extractor (GPL, source included) and retains its own license.

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