Drew T
70a99aa9f7
harvest_verify is the sole arbiter (G3/P9) and has never accepted a wrong match. It also could not
REACH most of the work: it scanned the single file the caller passed as --src and silently dropped
every draft whose stub lived elsewhere. An overlay's source spans up to 14 .c files, so:
open overlay stubs it could not see : 56,742 of 58,717 (96.6%)
ov_SC01_077 reachable by the gate : 13 of 264 (4.9%) -> 264 of 264 (100%)
THREE of the six callers passed no --src at all (orchestrator.py, grinder.py, idiom_hunt.py) and so
inherited gate_stage's `src = src or f"src/{binary}/{binary}.c"` default. For grinder.py that means
1,290 of its own 1,298 QUEUED FUNCTIONS COULD NEVER BANK, however good the permuter's output was.
=> Phase-22's "the permuter's fuel is exhausted" was never a safe conclusion. Re-test (A12).
gate_stage knew the right answer and then handed the gate the wrong file: its negative control
ALREADY globs every split .c to build bin_stubs. The default is now removed; --src is passed only
when a caller deliberately restricts the gate to one TU.
WHAT CHANGED, PRECISELY: only the SPLICE LOCATION. Each draft is now spliced into whichever TU
actually holds its stub, derived from tools/corpus.py. Every TU links into the same image, so ONE
`make build BINARY=<bin>` still gates them all — correct AND strictly fewer builds than the
per-split re-gate it replaces.
SAFETY (this is the byte-gate, so the argument is explicit): the VERDICT is untouched — `make build`
+ SHA1 == the locked hash. INCLUDE_ASM pastes the ORIGINAL assembly, so a wrong draft always changes
the bytes and always fails SHA1. A bug in the splice can therefore make the tool FAIL TO BANK; it
CANNOT make it falsely bank. The failure mode is conservative by construction.
VERIFIED end-to-end (2 real builds, tree clean before and after):
* discovery: 264 live stubs across 12 TUs (was: only those in the single --src file)
* IDENTITY known-answer test: 3 drafts whose stubs live in THREE DIFFERENT split TUs
(_jr_801734BC, _after, _jr_8012ACE0) — all discovered, spliced into their own files, built,
SHA-matched, committed, restored. Final SHA d19c9580 BYTE-IDENTICAL. Under the old code all
three were silently dropped as "not stubbed".
* `git checkout -- src/` recovers, exactly as the docstring promises.
Also derived rather than defaulted: --good-sha now reads config/check.<bin>.sha (a caller that
passed --binary but forgot --good-sha used to gate an overlay against RESIDENT's SHA), and
match_one_closeness resolves the asm subdir PER FUNCTION — one subdir for a whole batch is the same
single-TU bug, and pointing match_one at the wrong one scores a draft against a DIFFERENT function's
asm, producing a phantom non-zero closeness that lands in the backlog and feeds reserved_walls().
No committed source or config changed, so no build artifact can have moved; the byte-gate was
exercised twice and returned BYTE-IDENTICAL both times.
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.