Drew T bb65d36341 fix(phase-26a): A1 — dedup_integrate was a gate that could print a FALSE GREEN
The audit's priority #1: a fail-closed byte-honesty validator whose silent skips nothing
downstream can catch. Three false-green paths, all measured, all now fail-closed with
negative controls.

R33 FIRST (derive, don't re-derive). The registry makes two claims; the tool only ever
checked one, and mis-described that one:
  C1 EQUIVALENCE ("these vrams hold the same code in the ORIGINAL") — checked against the
     sigs, which sign the ORIGINAL bytes. KEPT. But the docstring claimed it also caught
     SOURCE drift: it cannot. A sig is a property of the ROM, immutable w.r.t. src/. Source
     drift is caught by the BUILD. Docstring corrected (P9).
  C2 BANK ("matched once in the source header, instantiated at every member") — NEVER
     CHECKED. Now DERIVED from the build invariant: INCLUDE_ASM pastes the ORIGINAL asm, so
     a member NOT wrapped in it is byte-exact, and one that IS wrapped is not banked —
     whatever the registry says. C2a: the group's macro token must occur in its source file.
     C2b: no member may still be an INCLUDE_ASM stub.

THE THREE FALSE GREENS
 1. 1808 groups claimed a DEFINE_func_* macro; only 1801 exist. The 7 ghosts printed [ OK ] —
    hiding 532 member-instances / 22,344 instructions of REAL, UNBANKED work (4 fns matched in
    ov_SC01_077, still INCLUDE_ASM in the other 133 overlays).
 2. An absent .run/sig.<bin>.jsonl degraded to "0 validated, 0 failed" and EXIT 0. On a fresh
    clone the gate validated NOTHING and passed. Now fails; --allow-unsigned is the escape.
 3. The bank claim was never checked at all.

THE CAUSAL CHAIN (the audit's thesis in one example). 3 of the 4 hidden fns are defined in
ov_SC01_077_jr_8012ACE0.c — a _jr_* split file. dedup_propagate.overlay_files allowlists only
("_a","_o0","_o0b","_after"), so the propagator could not SEE them; the group was registered
anyway; dedup_integrate greenlit the lie. TWO silent-skip bugs compounding: one created the
hole, the other hid it. Harvest fuel -> .run/audit/a1_harvest_fuel.json, banked in A5.

BLAST RADIUS, MEASURED NOT PREDICTED (R14). Headline metrics UNCHANGED to the decimal
(instr-weighted 66.5%, distinct-code 46.8%) — weighted_metrics() derives from the invariant and
was structurally immune to the lying registry. FLEET REAL substantive unchanged (282,466):
progress.py had already been taught to distrust it (commit:0574). Only dedup_integrate still
believed it. A null result that CONFIRMS R33: the tool that refused to re-derive was the one
that was right.

- registry repaired: 1813 -> 1806 groups (7 ghosts removed; instances 223,725 -> 222,787)
- make report GREEN end-to-end: 1806 validated, 0 failed | C1 coverage 222,787/222,787 signed
- negative controls: stubbed member -> exit 1; missing sig -> exit 1; --allow-unsigned -> exit 0
- report-only tool: no compiled artifact depends on it, so no R22 clean-fleet is owed here
2026-07-14 02:50:28 -06:00
2026-06-10 22:02:07 -06:00
2026-06-10 22:02:07 -06:00

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 in ov_SC01_077 and propagated ×134 via tools/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.

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