Drew T
f6e48b60c5
Drew: "make it more multi-threaded... I still see my cpu idle for far too long." Measured, fixed, and regression-tested against the S46-3 bank as a KNOWN ANSWER. - THE MEASUREMENT: 31s saturated (33 makes/48 cc1/load 27) then ~25s with ONE build alive while 31 cores idled, repeating. Causes: ex.map starts in list order so the giants land last, and apply/restore is single-threaded. - gate_all -> gate_failures: return EVERY failure the sweep already computed (~138 rounds -> 1). - Longest-first gate scheduling; results re-sorted into `changed` order so the verdict stays bit-identical to the serial loop's. - PER-OVERLAY INDEPENDENT SEARCH, IN PROCESSES. My first cut used threads and the box refuted it: 0-4 builds alive at load 3, because the work is regex over 15k-line files and 138 "parallel" searches all queued on the GIL. Same logic in a ProcessPoolExecutor: 14-29 builds, load 34.75, search phase ~100s. Safe because the shared header is written ONCE by the parent and each overlay owns its own .c files + build/<bin>/. Seeded with one in-process search first — a pool submitted at once gives every worker an empty suspect list and makes all 138 pay a full bisection. place_in_overlay extracted to module level so the worker and the in-process apply cannot drift (R33); compiles_standalone's fixed t.c is per-call now. - THE REGRESSION (the point, not the stopwatch): revert src/+config to pre-bank, re-run the identical command -> 29 functions (same), 141 overlays byte-identical, 682s vs ~1440s, and 285 exclusions vs ~350 => +62 MORE member instances (249,161). The old prefix-based necessity probe was OVER-EXCLUDING (charging 4 fns to 9 overlays that did not all need them); the per-overlay shrink minimises per overlay. The faster path is also more correct — a timing comparison would never have shown it. R22 213/213 + tools-health green. - STILL SERIAL, now the actual wall-clock (neither is a build): ~3min setup before the first gate (registered_addrs() yaml-parsing a 1949-group/249k-instance registry + 213 sig loads) and ~2.5min of sequential reconcile_caller_extern after the search. - Captured as defaults: docs/accelerators.md A8 + memory fleet-tool-parallelism-defaults. cookbook index regenerated (my §155c append left it stale — the gate caught it, exit 1).
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.