"Menu walk and navigation is fine. Video skips too. Extras open. New Game shows new game intro video." -- 2026-09-02 P5 is done. Its gate was "a human clicks through it", the retro said it had been waiting on that and not on code for the whole milestone, and it has happened. PORT-MISSION.md updated. The NEW GAME gap is accepted as-is. Four findings, three of them the Decoder's: F1 THE MENU REPEATS ON A HELD DIRECTION AND OURS DOES NOT. One step per deflection was authored as the conservative choice because nobody knew; a human has now watched the real game and it repeats, "at a medium pace... slow enough to see which item is selected". That settles the existence half of H1 against us. The RATE is still unmeasured and must not be guessed -- the description bounds it and supplies no number. Decoder measures initial delay and repeat interval as frame counts; the port implements the mechanism and waits for the numbers. F2 THE SFX ARE TOO LOUD BECAUSE THERE IS NO MIX AT ALL. Measured: confirm -17.7 dB mean / -0.0 dB peak, 3 dB hotter in mean than the music and 6.4 dB above move. No volume or gain value exists anywhere in export/ or authored/, so every clip plays at unity on one bus. Decoder: is per-cue or per-bus gain on the disc -- the cue table is the obvious place and cue 1103 is already decoded. Port: gains at PLAYBACK as data, and explicitly NOT normalisation in the exporter, which destroys the relationship between clips and cannot be undone by a modder. F3 SOMETHING IS MISSING ON THE TITLE SCREEN. The export carries one music file and the port plays nothing on the title. Which cue does the title play, and is there a sting on the plate or on accept? A negative needs a positive control: find the menu's cue by the same method first. F4 (A) SKIPS FORWARD THROUGH THE BOOT AND WE IMPLEMENT TWO OF THREE PRESSES. In the game: skip video, reveal plate immediately, accept plate. The middle one is missing here. Whether the game snaps both clocks forward or only reveals the plate is a question, not a detail -- and it is a cheap second route to the plate-arrival question, since a press that skips to the plate says where the game thinks the plate belongs. H3, the plate delay, is ACCEPTED -- "feels the same... sufficient". Left unattributed rather than closed green.
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
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.