Drew T
8d4f2a38cb
Max-effort re-measurement of the three jr refusals I ledgered earlier this session.
Two of the three verdicts were FALSE. Every number below is SHA vs config/check.<ov>.sha
from a clean tree, with the restore re-verified.
func_8018057C / ov_SC01_009 : jr_isolate_all is BYTE-NEUTRAL
-> "JR-ISOLATE-BREAKS-BYTES" RETRACTED; original failure not reproducible.
func_80191C50 / ov_SC06_018 : isolate NEUTRAL -> carve DIVERGED
(got 1b1667ea, want cbbc4f44) -> the ONE real instrument failure. CONFIRMED.
func_8017BEBC / ov_SC04_004 : carve is BYTE-NEUTRAL (body-free)
-> failure is the TEMPLATED BODY, the OPPOSITE of what SS125 first claimed.
Re-probed once more from a verified-clean tree: still gate-fail. Reclassified
BODY-TEMPLATE-GATE-FAIL.
So the tidy "two apparent walls are ONE tooling problem" conclusion was wrong: they
are two different problems, and the third target has no demonstrated problem at all.
ROOT CAUSE, and it is mine not the tools': a grep-of-the-build-log gate inside a driver
that did not revert on abort. config/overlays.mk is SHARED, so target 1's half-applied
isolate was still in the tree while target 3 was measured. Separately reproduced the
SS42b stale-object trap head-on: `git checkout -- config/` WITHOUT a re-extract turned a
byte-identical overlay into [FAIL] got 8f28aa77 / want 38a3d919 (Phase-20's R22
corollary, live).
SS125 rewritten. The METHOD (split the carve from the body, one build) is kept and is
what refuted this section's own first conclusion; what is added is the instrument rules
that make its answer trustworthy: compare the SHA against config/check, never grep the
log; re-extract after every config change AND every revert; a driver that aborts a
target must revert it before the next; verify the BASELINE against canonical too.
Meta-lesson recorded: SS53 says a 0% from the wrong TOOL manufactures a doctrine — this
is the same failure one level up, a verdict from the wrong MEASUREMENT, and my own
diagnostic script is an instrument subject to R35 like any other.
Ledger corrected in place (3 entries, superseding the earlier misattributions), so the
scheduled repair is the right one. No source/config change; no bank affected; the fleet
is untouched at 140/140 (last full R22 this session, HEAD commit:1263).
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.