Drew T d9f1ccad45 docs(phase-29): T76 — byte-identical families bank 0 of 682; my recommendation was wrong
I recommended this as "the only remaining item with YIELD rather than findings — pure instr yield, no
new tooling". It banked NOTHING. Recording the reasoning error plainly.

WHERE IT FAILED: "byte-identical families bank 137/137" was true of T63/T64/T65/T68/T72 — but every
one of those had a specific blocker cleared FIRST. Byte-identity predicts the template is EXACT IF IT
COMPILES; it says nothing about whether it compiles. The still-unswept families are precisely those
never unblocked, so the property selects FOR being blocked. I had written that caveat two turns
earlier ("only true after each family's blocker is cleared; T58 swept 6 and banked 1") and then
ignored it when recommending.

THE BATCH: the 13 had already been drawn down to 6 by today's work; swept 5 (skipping func_80147364,
proven the narrow-param wall in T75) -> 0 banked / 682 failed.

DIAGNOSED TWO — two different causes, NEITHER the family's own function:
  func_80173A60 : conflicting types for func_80173B4C   (a CALLEE)
  func_8012F40C : conflicting types for RotTransPers    (a PsyQ LIBRARY symbol)
Same shape as 0x80143d28's ApplyMatrixSV. That is a THIRD distinct decl axis (not the def's, not the
shared header's) and nothing in the pipeline reconciles it.

HONEST STATE OF THE FAMILY LEVER — every cheap variant now measured: h_exact cores xN (spent),
byte-identical (0/682), byte-variant (1/10), -O0 (~1/137). The mechanical family sweep is EXHAUSTED
at 86.6% instr unless the callee-decl axis is addressed.

NEXT: cast_call_sites (§17a-1/§20) is the existing lever for the callee axis and is NOT in
family_sweep's pipeline — the same "lever unreachable from this path" shape as T56, ~410 members
behind it.
2026-07-29 20:17:00 -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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