Drew T
f11bf13b4f
tools/seed_ref.py gains --contained/--contained-control: an open stub that is a banked body plus or minus WHOLE BLOCKS — the class edit distance ranks badly. Branch-offset masking was required (unmasked offsets veto exactly the target pairs) and a min-side-25 floor (89% of raw hits were prologue/epilogue vacuity). Ranks by (substitutions+regions, cover), not by d. Controls: planted-deletion positive 60/60, random-pair base rate 0/397, R32 population 346/346, and a post-refactor --near regression reproducing the stored slice exactly. Banked on first use: ov_SC01_077/func_80184D50 = banked ov_SC03_007/func_8018283C minus its trailing `&= 0x7FFFFFFF;` — MATCH, closeness 0, 98/98. * cookbook §390: minimum distance is not minimum work (rank by effort; a deletion is free, a substitution is thought), the lookalike filter r = d/min(nins) ~ 0.3 (17 of 30 "cousins" were boilerplate coincidence), and the three fleet-wide nulls that close the scanner question — 0 new / 9 / 2. Spend integration effort, not scanner effort. * cookbook §391: a byte-aligned struct copies in FOUR instructions (lwl/lwr/swl/ swr), a word-aligned one in TWO. Never invent an aggregate type to make a draft compile — an invented word-aligned Blk8 lost exactly 8 ins across two copies and read as a believable "near, closeness 70" codegen residual. * accelerators #18: a claim derived from BYTES is not a claim verified by a COMPILER. Every similarity/correctness claim must name the tier it reached (stream containment / compiled standalone / whole-binary gate / clean fleet); a report that says "verified" without one invites the strongest reading. Non-reproduction is a finding — say so rather than assuming your own setup. * playbook §2a-2: the twin ladder (exact -> RELOC-ONLY -> CONTAINED -> cousin -> cold), take the cheapest tier available, widen only when the tier above is empty. * SETUP inventory row; generic-decomp-package: rank by work, and stop building scanners once the well is dry.
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.