Drew T f5498c3c66 feat(phase-30 S43): the 0xECC family — ONE crack banks 12 overlays / 11,364 ins [R22 PENDING]
⚠️ R22 CLEAN-FLEET OWED (two agents still reading asm/, so `make clean` is unsafe). Each of the 12
was gated whole-binary AND independently re-checked against its own config/check.<bin>.sha (12/12),
stubs confirmed replaced — but incremental (§130). Treat as UNCONFIRMED until the clean run.

- THREE isolated cheap-Opus agents, briefed with §150/§151 + the mandatory all-drafts scan,
  CONVERGED INDEPENDENTLY: func_8017C6F4's 947-ins body exists in 12 OVERLAYS under 5 DIFFERENT
  NAMES at 6 DIFFERENT ADDRESSES, each differing by exactly TWO per-overlay symbols (screen-rect
  helper + 64x64 cell table). Gated 12/12, 0 failed. 11,364 ins from this morning's single crack.
- WHY IT HID ~30 PHASES (cookbook §152): name-keyed grouping scattered it across 5 names,
  address-keyed across 6 addresses (and the address collides with an unrelated 15-ins body in 3
  other overlays), and h_seq-keyed scattered it too — which is why the Phase-26 sweeps missed it.
  THE KEY IS BYTE SIZE: `grep -rl 'nonmatching .*, 0xECC' asm/*/nonmatchings/*/` returns exactly
  the 12, reads the asm (cannot go stale like family_hseq.json), no false positives. Refines the
  Phase-26 "h_seq is spent" finding: h_seq is worth exactly ONE size-keyed sweep behind each FRESH
  core crack — here it paid 11:1.
- TWO CAUTIONS THAT TRAVEL WITH IT: (1) a MASKED tool cannot validate a remap — match_one and
  rtu_match both mask jal/%hi/%lo, exactly the fields a remap edits, so a wrong symbol map still
  reports MATCH; gate remaps by the whole-binary SHA only. (2) a stale residual is NOT evidence two
  functions differ — I briefed "func_8017C59C scores 340, different body"; refuted in one command
  (that 340 came from a pre-§150-fix draft, which scores nonzero against its own target too).
- OPEN TOOL DEFECT (R32): family_remap's unit backscan halts at the first #define, so it carried
  16/16 gte macros and 0/10 typedefs, silently — the §146 gap from the other side.
- MY ERROR, RETRACTED IN THE LOG (S43-9): I reported the 263x5 cluster as "5 byte-identical, 1,315
  ins". FALSE — the drafts had been reverted, so I measured the INCLUDE_ASM STUB BASELINE, which is
  byte-identical by construction. R34's trap, self-inflicted by hand-building instead of using
  harvest_verify. Nothing was banked there; the cluster is UNRESOLVED. ("41 behemoth drafts" was
  likewise a file count — 79 files, 20 distinct functions.)
2026-08-05 17:40:27 -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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