05be7d19f7
Agreed retro with the Decoder at docs/agents/RETRO-2026-08-31-agreed.md; their own review is at docs/agents/RETRO-2026-08-31.md on auto/frame-blend-draw-path. Twelve rules, of which the ones neither of us had: a refutation whose instrument is one of our renderers is not a refutation but "our renderer disagrees" (this cost weeks, both ways); a negative must carry a positive control, which no "undecodable with reach" page either of us has written ever did; and a disagreement is evidence about the chain disc -> decode -> render -> capture, not about the link being looked at. The gap underneath our controls, stated: they verified capability, not configuration. My additive material passed every control because they tested whether the method detects a blend difference, not whether this run had blend_mode set -- it was Godot's default MIX. Their vertex dump passed every control because they tested the NDC conversion, not whether it captured all six quads. Nothing applied to PROTOCOL.md. The register re-classification changes the file both agents read to decide what not to try, and two agents agreeing is not the right authority for that. Also committing the work that was pending when the stop came: verify-menu-audio now settles cue presence by suppression -- silence one cue's .ogg, re-record the same walk, and require its own correlation to collapse. All three cues sound (+0.158 / +0.637 / +0.526). The bed-only margin no longer renders a verdict: it called `move` NOT FOUND on three runs at 0.109-0.131 while the cue was demonstrably sounding, and across runs the same cue reads 0.131 and 0.158, so the threshold was never a property of the cue. The off-diagonal is reported as masking rather than asserted: silencing confirm raises back by 0.468 because the game plays them 90 ms apart under a 0.15 s template. An assertion there would fail forever on correct audio.
Sylpheed
A clean-room reverse engineering and port project for Project Sylpheed: Arc of Deception (Xbox 360, 2007).
Three things live here, in one repository so that a change spanning them lands as one commit:
| The decoders | crates/sylpheed-formats — the disc's formats, read and verified disc-wide |
| The port | port/ — a Godot 4 project, plus crates/sylpheed-export which converts a disc into the open asset tree it reads |
| The corpus | docs/re/ — what has been reverse engineered, with its evidence, its retractions and its dead ends |
You need your own copy of the game. No game content is in this repository and none ever will be. The exporter reads the disc you supply.
The oracle is the real game
sylpheed-cliand the Explorer are tools for verifying our decoding. They are hypotheses under test and they have been wrong. When something must be checked against the truth, the truth is the game running in Xenia Canary, captured — not any renderer of ours.
This is stated first because getting it backwards is the most expensive mistake this project has made.
Layout
crates/
sylpheed-formats/ the decoders. Disc-wide verified; the corpus is its spec
sylpheed-cli/ headless tools -- render a screen, dump a table, probe audio
sylpheed-viewer/ the Explorer: a human's window onto the disc. STATIC data only
sylpheed-export/ disc -> the open, moddable asset tree
port/ the Godot 4 project. Reads open formats ONLY
authored/ decisions that are NOT on the disc, each with its reason
data/
base/ generated by the exporter. Gitignored, never hand-edited
mods/ drop-in overrides. Yours
docs/
re/ the corpus: findings, refutations, method traps
game/ how the game is navigated -- menus, modals, flight
port/ the port's mission, its handoff contract, modding rules
-- and RUNNING.md, which is how you actually start it
agents/ how the agent team works together
tools/ capture harnesses, probes, the share tool
exchange/ transient inter-agent files. NOT in git
docker/ the agent containers
Where to start
docs/re/INDEX.md— what is decodeddocs/re/REFUTED.md— what has been tested and dieddocs/re/METHOD.md— traps this project has already paid fordocs/game/navigation.md— how the game is navigateddocs/port/MODDING.md— why the asset tree looks the way it does
Xenia Canary is a separate repository: it is a fork tracking upstream, and it carries our instrumentation.
Conventions
Confidence is per claim, never per document: ✅ CONFIRMED · 🟡 PROBABLE ·
❔ HYPOTHESIS · ❌ REFUTED. A withdrawn result is kept with its reasoning
rather than deleted — that is why the numbers here can be trusted.