Drew T
84706c9860
Two ways to spend a free drafting window on a tail that is 92% walls.
ONE_PER_GID=0 — the sibling collapse exists because a same-gid sibling banks by mechanical
remap once its exemplar cracks, so drafting it pays for what the remap does free. That prices
AGENT TOKENS as the scarce resource. On the free ox window they are not, and the collapse is
what makes 3,271 open crackable functions look like 334 drawable skeletons — of which 308 are
gen6+ walls whose exemplars have already refused six waves each. A sibling drafted directly
can crack on its OWN terms instead of waiting on an exemplar that never will.
Measured on a live draw rather than argued:
uncollapsed 627 cards / 44,403 ins / 160 binaries / 215 gate groups = 2.9 drafts per rebuild
collapsed 334 cards / 30,926 ins / 104 binaries / 127 gate groups = 2.6 drafts per rebuild
The gate cost is per (binary, TU) group and chunked, so siblings landing in binaries the wave
already touches are close to free at the gate — the card count nearly doubles and the gate gets
MORE efficient per build, not less.
ATTEMPTS=K — K independent shots at each card. The gate cost does not multiply: reloc_filter
keys by fn and staging writes <binary>/<fn>.c, so a function still gets exactly one whole-binary
build per wave; the attempts compete to BE that build, ranked by match_one, which is local and
needs no build. Alternates stay on disk for a later recovery pass. Default 1 (no-op).
A BUG I CAUGHT IN MY OWN SELECTOR before it shipped: it passed binof[fn] (a BINARY NAME) where
match_one wants --asm-subdir (an asm DIRECTORY). Every attempt would have scored identically at
infinity and the picker would have silently degraded to first-seen while appearing to rank —
the same "true number about the wrong thing" class as the day's other defects. Fixed with a
subof map, and a missing subdir now returns neutral instead of a fake score.
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.