Drew T
9794b13ed2
docs/family-manifest.md is the document the whole Phase-25/26 structural-family endgame was planned
from. Its matched-set oracle asked ov_SC01_077 ALONE: matched := {h_exact of that one overlay's
non-stub fns} | dedup hashes. So a function ABSENT from that overlay — or stubbed there but matched
in the other 133 — came out "unmatched" and was ranked as live work.
advertised real (derived)
multi-member families 2,758 -> 1,495
"hidden leverage" 11.0 MB -> 3.9 MB
matched-free lever 235/5.9 MB -> 57/1.0 MB
7.1 MB of the advertised leverage was DEAD WORK. And because `instances` counted every overlay
carrying a function — including the ones where it was already banked — the byte-weight RANKING (the
file's entire purpose: "draft these first") was sorted mostly on already-finished code, with the
real targets buried underneath. The A2 audit predicted "true frontier: 1,475 families / 3.9 MB";
derived independently here it is 1,495 / 3.9 MB.
R33: the invariant answers this with no oracle at all —
an h_exact class is WORK iff at least ONE of its instances is still an INCLUDE_ASM stub.
That also makes the dedup-hash union redundant (a dedup-shared member is by definition not a stub),
so the `hash:` regex over config/dedup.us.yaml is DELETED. `instances` now counts only the members
still to bank, so the leverage is the real x-N.
family_hseq: stub scan -> corpus (+100 curated-name stubs the func_-only regex could not see; they
had made 3 still-stubbed functions look like MATCHED exemplars, which every sweep then re-nominates,
produces nothing from, and books as a silent skip). Its hardcoded "expect ~663/~186/~1.85M" self-check
was a stale 2026-07-11 snapshot — 38 banking commits have landed since — and is now labelled a
point-in-time reference, not an invariant. (Verified my change can only GROW the frontier: +100 stubs.)
census_conflict_callees: scoped to src/<ov>/<ov>.c alone, so it saw 13 of 264 stubs and reported
"wave scope: 2 still-stub" when the truth is 57 — every downstream percentage computed against a
denominator 96% too small. Now 0/57 (the audit's exact figure). Its 0-conflict answer was right BY
LUCK; it is now right for a reason. MARKED FOR DELETION (R33): it re-derives from C text what
reconcile_tu.py answers from the build, and its parse holes fail in the UNSAFE direction (an unknown
callee is silently bucketed "conflict-free"). Delete once reconcile_tu is wired into its only consumer.
R14 near-miss, recorded: my first census patch handed collect_stubs() a set of NAMES where it wanted
ADDRESSES, so the membership test was always false and it printed 0/0. Caught only because 0
contradicted the audit's expected 57. A scanner that returns 0 is indistinguishable from a scanner
that found nothing — which is the entire thesis of this audit, and it very nearly bit me while
fixing it.
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.