Drew T
ffb6f1a40f
38 agents / 2.24M tok / 0 err. 32 findings raised -> 28 SURVIVED adversarial verification
(4 REFUTED, 16 downgraded). 40 scanners measured CLEAN. Full write-up: docs/tooling-audit.md ROUND 2.
THE ROOT CAUSE — one bug, ~10 times: a hand-maintained model of the corpus layout (a file
allowlist, a single-.c assumption, a func_-only regex, a REGION_SUB dict) sitting on top of a
filesystem that already answers the question. Every TU split silently widened it.
DECAY PROVEN: .run/fuel_manifest.json (Jul 8) recorded 130 stubs; the same tool today returns 30.
The Phase-26 splits moved ~100 stubs out from under a dict literal last edited in Phase 22 — and
nobody noticed, because an un-nominated target produces SILENCE, not an error.
MEASURED: 91.6% of ALL remaining project gain is invisible to target selection (true 994,633 ins;
the manifest sees 83,305). 117 of 127 reach-134 fns never nominated. harvest_verify cannot see
56,742 of 58,717 (96.6%) open stubs. wave_targets hands 78 of 87 targets a nonexistent asm path.
THREE RESULTS OVERTURN SETTLED CONCLUSIONS:
1. Phase-22's 'the permuter's fuel is exhausted' is UNSAFE. grinder banks through harvest_verify,
which sees ONE TU — 1,290 of its own 1,298 queued fns live in another. 99% could never have
banked. '0 banks since Phase 21' is equally consistent with 'the tool could not bank'.
2. The Phase-25/26 endgame plan is MAJORITY-FICTION. family-manifest.md advertises 2,758
multi-member families / 11.0 MB; 1,071 of them / 6.80 MB (62% of the byte-weight) are ALREADY
FULLY MATCHED. The ranking — the file's whole purpose — is sorted mostly on dead work.
3. A CORPUS defect the byte-gate is structurally blind to: symbols.us.txt:981 puts a main-EXE DATA
symbol (listCdBuffer = 0x80180000) into every overlay's symbol stack, but in overlay space that
address is CODE. splat cuts 97 real functions in half and invents 96 phantom ones = 193 slices
NOBODY CAN EVER MATCH, in 97 of 134 overlays — and the build stays byte-identical and green,
because the .s halves are pasted back verbatim. A perfect correctness oracle, a null coverage
oracle. What saved us: sig_image was RIGHT (58,524/58,621 vs spimdisasm; correct on all 97
disagreements). A SECOND INDEPENDENT ORACLE is the only reason it was visible at all.
FIX RESTRUCTURED around the root cause: ONE derived corpus oracle (A3) + ~10 DELETED scanners —
not ten fixed regexes. Plus the listCdBuffer corpus fix (A4) and the closeness oracle (A5, which
lies on 155 functions, feeding false walls into reserved_walls()).
decision-log (R31): the why, and the design lesson — a derived fact cannot rot; a hand-maintained
copy of it is a liability that grows with every structural change. We had no instrument that could
report ABSENCE: every gate we owned answered 'is this right?', none answered 'is this all?'
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.