Drew T
69dee1d429
T50 func_80135260 family: the §53 carve path banked 4/137 (all SC07), 133 gate-fail, tree clean after every revert. The 3,744-site conform_decls between runs changed NOTHING for this family (99 attempts observed mid-run, 0 banks) — it is byte-neutral and axis-complete so not harmful, but my inference that this family shared func_80177DA8's blocker was WRONG: same SC07-only signature, different cause. THE REAL BLOCKER, LOCATED: staged siblings are correctly remapped (family_remap works). The draft requires 4-byte POINTER decls for the contested data symbols — the canonical extern u8 + (*(u16**)&sym) form makes gcc CSE &sym into two callee-saved regs, costing a 7th saved register and 3 extra instructions (the identical +3 measured on the exemplar). And every sibling host TU carries the same FILE-SCOPE blocker the exemplar did: verified on ov_SC01_000, whose host TU declares the contested symbols at file scope (lines 3053-3056) alongside 18 block-scope occurrences. A file-scope decl constrains every later function in that TU — the T48 finding. So the fix is the T48 lever replicated x137: scope those decls into their consumers per sibling TU. Byte-neutral on the exemplar (proven in two steps). That is a TOOL, and it is worth ~18,000 ins. Also: gather_externs' warning naming func_80135D20 is a COMMENT-SCANNING FALSE POSITIVE (the symbol appears only in header prose and is defined in another split file). Fires on all 137, masks real causes. Same class as the Phase-19 garbled-hint bug. CHECKPOINT REVISED (supersedes the earlier SESSION-23 block): 975 functions banked, reconciled against the metric (fn-count 319,549 -> 320,524) with the per-task recount agreeing exactly. Fleet 85.5% instr / 76.1% distinct / 90.62% fn-count. R22 140/140 run 11x, dedup 1886/0, 0 NON_MATCHING. Ranked START-HERE (decl-scoping tool first), the four strategic changes, my five recorded errors — whose common thread is inference from partial output instead of measuring — and the carried defects.
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 inov_SC01_077and propagated ×134 viatools/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.