Drew T
c05ea15cbe
A .c file in src/ looks decompiled. 199 functions are not: they are the target
assembly pasted into a C string literal (§265), byte-identical BY CONSTRUCTION
and completely unexplained. 45 are PsyQ/CRT routines where that is defensible;
154 are GAME CODE, 171 of the 199 in main, the largest being SaveLoadRoutine at
1,165 instructions.
They were invisible because progress.py's classify() matched INCLUDE_ASM,
INCLUDE_RODATA and C definitions, and a file-scope __asm__ block is none of
those -- so each landed in NO bucket, either swallowed by a surrounding
construct or surfacing as the single `UNPLACED (parse hole)` line the tool has
been printing all along.
progress.py gains a VERBATIM __asm__ bodies line: counted byte-identical (it is,
by construction) but NEVER as REAL. main's headline moves 45.88% -> 42.15%.
Nothing regressed and no work was lost -- the denominator was missing 173
functions that are real remaining work.
THE COUNTING LESSON IS THE REUSABLE PART. Counting these by hand went
116 -> 112 -> 108 -> 178 -> 199 across five attempts in one session, every
intermediate number reported confidently. All five errors were one shape, a
pattern narrower than the claim it supported:
* the sources use BOTH ".ent\tNAME\n" and ".ent NAME\n" -- anchoring on either
silently drops every instance of the other;
* a bare ".ent\t" fragment yields a phantom function literally named `t`, six
times, which is the only reason the error was noticed;
* __asm__ appears in 3,182 of 4,224 sources, almost all the §3a barrier, so
counting files or counting __asm__ measures nothing;
* `.globl NAME` + `NAME:` proves EXPORT, not CODE -- the first real run
reported jtbl_80072ED4/EEC/F0C/F24 as four "functions";
* a hand-written SDK name list reported 170 game functions because it did not
know VectorNormalSS / SquareRoot12 / OuterProduct12 are libgte.
So the tool does not trust one regex: THREE independent detectors that must
agree with disagreement reported as a defect (R34 -- that is what caught the
jump tables); SDK-ness DERIVED from the 14 shipped PsyQ archives via nm (2,227
symbols) rather than a list (R33); coverage asserted so a definition-shaped
block no detector claims fails loudly (R32/R43); and --selftest carrying a
known-true case of every spelling plus the phantom `t` and the jtbl regression.
Cookbook §448, SETUP row. Law: when a count comes from a text pattern, the
pattern has a denominator too -- validate it against one known-true case of
every FORM the corpus contains before quoting the number.
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.