Drew T
bcd44badc9
Honest result: NO YIELD. What it produced is a re-measured frontier, a real fix to my own T53 work,
and both failures diagnosed rather than left as "0/N".
FRONTIER RE-MAPPED (T52's +132 moved it): family_hseq -> 2,647 target families, 513 substantial,
64 with a banked exemplar AND live stubs. Caveat recorded: the top two by byte-weight (0x8013c414
180KB, 0x8013c0f8 84KB) are -O0, and _o0 families are already measured at ~1/137 — do not be drawn
by their weight.
FAMILY 1 func_8014032C (183 ins x 136 ~ 25,000 ins): sample 0/8, last_err empty. Read one sibling's
real gate result (§53/§59) past the -j16 interleave and the §58 memcpy red herring — TWO causes:
(1) conflicting types for D_80115128 — the T48/T51 class, which tu-scoped should have caught;
(2) jtbl_rodata_pads "more rodata .align than pad specs — table-count drift vs the carve", a
DISTINCT class jtbl_family_bank's own comment documents as NOT isolate-fixable (§91 --like
role trap).
After fixing (1): still 0/8. Cause 2 is the live blocker — carve work, not decl work. NOT ground
further; it is a documented wall.
THE T53 DEFECT, FOUND AND FIXED: contested() scanned only the draft's BLOCK-scope externs, because
T51's motivating family had them hand-written in the body. But gather_externs carries decls in at
FILE scope, and those are exactly the ones scope_data_externs.fix DROPS when the TU already declares
the symbol — its give-up branch, the fatal case the lever exists for. Measured: scope_data_fix
dropped 3 symbols while contested() returned []. So the stage never fired on its own class. Now
scope-independent; regression-checked against T51's case using the pre-T51 TU from git (old ==
new, added []), and it now finds D_80115128 on the T55 target.
FAMILY 2 func_80144090 (154 ins x 136 ~ 21,000 ins), chosen because has_mid_jr=False avoids the
carve: 0/136. Diagnosed: conflicting types for D_800A651C (2210 vs 379) — the SAME class.
family_sweep gates via PLAIN harvest_verify by design, so it never sees the tu-scoped lever, which
lives only in jtbl_family_bank. Probed: the lever would move D_800A651C + D_800AF648 (deletion-only)
and REFUSES D_800B9A02 as "3 file-scope decls above (ambiguous)" — an over-conservative refusal,
since duplicate-IDENTICAL externs are legal C.
THE FINDING: the same decl-scope collision class gates the frontier's mechanical families — it cost
T52's family 133 of 137 siblings, and it blocks both families probed here. The lever exists and is
byte-proven; it is not reachable from the sweep path most families use.
No src/ or config/ change: no bank, no metric move. Tree verified clean after every probe.
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.