Drew T
8b828f1ea6
- 45 -> 37 -> 33 -> 21 -> 11 -> 3 -> 2 -> 0, reproduced 3x from independent work dirs. Verified independently before believing it (R14): match_one MATCH (4763 ins), then harvest_verify --binary ov_SC03_116 BYTE-IDENTICAL, then R22 clean-fleet 140 passed, 0 failed of 140. distinct-code 3,838,143 -> 3,842,906 = 68.1% -> 68.2%. instr 80.5%. Agent was interrupted by a weekly API limit and RESUMED FROM ITS TRANSCRIPT -- its round-2 harness survived, nothing was re-derived. - §80 THE PROCESS CORRECTION, worth more than the match: A DO-NOT-RE-BUY ENTRY IS SCOPED TO ITS BASE, NOT TO THE FUNCTION. Three of round 1's ~40 measured negatives INVERTED on round 2's base -- the same edit (qsingle23) measured 1,040 mismatched on the 45-base and 11 on the 21-base. Re-testing the round-1 negative list cost ~20s and produced THREE of the seven winning levers. Such a table records (edit, base) -> result, NOT edit -> useless; after any lever that moves the base materially, RE-RUN THE NEGATIVE LIST. This retroactively qualifies every do-not-re-buy table in the cookbook (§45, §60b, §75a, §76, §78, §79). Concrete: round 1 measured "removing the va->$t2 pin costs 4% elsewhere" => keep the pin; on a base with c0..c3 at function scope, removing those pins is worth 21->13. Same experiment, opposite conclusion. - MY FLAGGED "#1 MOVE" LOST, and the failure is the finding. I briefed variable REUSE (§45-A / RC-14) as the top lever because it took func_8017F510 from 97->10. Swept in full here: EVERY merge lost, 43-3294 across 8 merges. Reason: the TRI and QUAD grants did not differ by RANK but by IDENTITY -- two independent allocno sets, and re-ranking inside one set cannot fix a two-set problem. Diagnose ranking-vs-identity before reaching for a merge. The actual fix (c0..c3 at FUNCTION scope, 33->21) was read off the two matched relatives (b5:310, b4:338) and confirmed against the target -- the 4th time today that reading a matched relative beat the clever lever. - PIN'S HIDDEN COST, cited: combine_regs' hard-register branch (local-alloc.c:1795, reached from :1295 with already_dead==0) records the pinned reg in qty_phys_sugg UNCONDITIONALLY -- no death guard. A pin invites local-alloc to tie producer chains into it. New cure R7: a zero-byte __asm__ ref keeping the pinned value live past the temp so find_free_reg can't honour the suggestion -- closed the last 2 ins (c1->$a0 is uniquely load-bearing; every alternative pin lost 64 ins). - §78's attribution primitive RUN and REPRODUCED: under -fno-schedule-insns, -fno-schedule-insns2 and both, order unchanged => the rgb transposition was never a sched.c decision. - Cold-start economics complete: round 1 = decode + exact length + exact frame + 99.06%; round 2 = the last 45, and cheaper. Budget TWO passes at this size. 5th source copy-paste artefact found.
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.