Drew T
b89fcc2edc
THE WORST DEFECT IN THE AUDIT IS NOT IN A SCANNER. It is one default argument in the CALLER of a
scanner we had already fixed.
# tools/gate_stage.py:315
summary = run_gate(a.drafts, binary=b, src=a.src or f"src/{b}/{b}.c", ...) # ALWAYS the main .c
`src` RESTRICTS the byte-gate to ONE translation unit, and _gate1 does `if src: cmd += ["--src", src]`
-- always truthy. A3 had just taught harvest_verify to DERIVE each draft's home TU *when --src is
omitted*, lifting the byte-gate's reach from 4.9% to 100%. gate_stage NEVER OMITS IT. The fix was
neutralised by its own caller's default, and the PRIMARY BANKING PATH -- every wave, the grinder, the
orchestrator, bulk_harvest -- remained structurally unable to bank 250 of ov_SC01_077's 263 stubs.
WHY IT SURVIVED 26 PHASES: harvest_verify cannot splice a draft whose stub is not in the TU it was
pointed at, so the draft never verifies -- and is then logged as near/failed, i.e. AS A MATCHING
PROBLEM. The wave reports a poor close-rate; the function goes to the backlog as a compiler residual.
A tool that CANNOT bank a function is indistinguishable, in every log this project keeps,
from a function that CANNOT BE banked.
PROOF, same draft / same gate / same second: gate_stage rejected func_80129C40; harvest_verify run
directly (no --src) VERIFIED it byte-identical and banked it.
AND A COUNTING BUG THAT HID THE HIDING (gate_stage:261): when match_one says MATCH but the whole-binary
gate rejects, the record is logged status="near" and THE COUNTER IS NEVER INCREMENTED. A 63-draft run
printed `banked 0, near 0, failed 0` -- three zeros that do not sum to 63 -- for phases. Nobody ever
added them up. (The number was not wrong. It was ABSENT.)
ALSO FIXED, sig_unify (the same disease, one level down): it SILENTLY DROPPED 190 of 196 drafts (97%).
`cur_stubs` was read from the main .c (13 of 263 stubs), so any draft whose stub lives in a _jr_ carve
hit `if fn not in cur_stubs: continue` -- dropped BEFORE THE WRITE: never copied to --out, never gated,
never logged, while the summary printed "drafts unified: 6" and read like success. THIS IS GATE_STAGE'S
STAGE-2 RECOVERY -- the pass whose whole job is to rescue the stage-1 failures -- and it has been a
no-op for nearly every draft it was meant to save. Now: TU derived per draft (corpus.stubs), canon
derived from cdecl.tu_scope (cpp -- macro-injected decls finally visible), and _keep() so an
already-acceptable decl is left alone (the §19 "sig_unify regresses canonical drafts" failure mode).
Reach: 6 -> 196 drafts; callee-externs rewritten 2 -> 90; own def-sig 2 -> 86.
MEASURED, all three consumers migrated (196 never-banked drafts):
near 5 -> 116 failed 190 -> 17
=> 173 of 190 "failures" were PLUMBING, not codegen: now compiling and SCORED instead of invisible.
THE PRIZE (measured, not claimed): the backlog holds 1,588 entries at closeness==0 -- body byte-exact
per match_one, whole-binary gate rejected. 1,215 have been banked since by other paths. 373 ARE STILL
OPEN STUBS WHOSE BODIES ARE ALREADY BYTE-EXACT, sitting in a ledger that calls them unrecoverable.
⚠ THE HARVEST ITSELF IS NOT IN THIS COMMIT, AND IS NOT CLAIMED (P9). Gating the 63 ov_SC01_077 ones
dragged `dedup_propagate --auto-from --recover` behind it; it ran >1h and hit its timeout -- its
first-ever run over the FULL corpus (A6/A7 unblocked the 407 files it could never see). It MUTATES THE
TREE BEFORE IT GATES, so the kill left 859 files + engine_core.h (+544 lines) written and UN-GATED with
the registry never updated. R22 on that tree: 44 passed / 92 FAILED -> `git checkout -- src/ config/`,
fleet restored to 136/136. Nothing lost (H4: the tree was clean, so the revert was one command).
Two real lessons, recorded: dedup_propagate is NOT crash-safe and must never run under a timeout it can
hit; and a 63-draft experiment must not drag an unbounded fleet-wide propagation behind it.
R22 clean-fleet after revert: 136 passed, 0 failed of 136. src/ and config/ clean.
cookbook §51g LAW 11: A FIX IS NOT LANDED UNTIL ITS CALLER STOPS OVERRIDING IT. After fixing a
scanner, grep every call site and ask whether a caller's default re-disables it. An audit that stops
at the callee is half an audit.
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.