3a048de536
The Decoder generalised my empty-band case into the rule I now keep: a control that only compares two things cannot tell you the comparison is happening. An empty band list, a blank frame, an empty register -- each makes a checker agreeable rather than wrong, and agreeable is indistinguishable from correct in a log. Swept my tools against inputs containing nothing. audit-kinds exited 0 on a tree with no authored/*.json, having printed '0 kind label(s)' and reported clean. verify-transcode-fidelity would call every transcode faithful with no videos in the manifest, having compared none. check-claims exited 1 from a FileNotFoundError inside the withdrawal hook -- which in that script's own vocabulary means 'a refuted claim is still being asserted', so a wrong directory got diagnosed as a dirty corpus. A real failure with a fabricated reason, the third instance of that family after my control anchoring at the wrong document. All three now exit 2, check-claims via a preflight that names the roots it needs. Both self-tests gained the liveness case driven as subprocesses: audit-kinds --selftest runs itself in an empty directory and requires 2, and check-claims --control is now six cases -- clean 0, unmarked 1, marked 0, outside-root 0, empty register 2, nothing to scan 2. What makes this worth an iteration rather than tidying: none of these tools was ever wrong on real input. What none of them could do was tell 'I checked and it was fine' from 'I checked nothing', and every green line I have quoted was the first of those only because the directory happened to be right. Also recorded: their ring_row.py used 'main_menu_item(ring_row(f)) is not None' as a main-menu test, and a TITLE frame passes it -- the gutter carries a bright cluster at y=243 inside tolerance of row 0. No result they sent me is affected, for a structural reason rather than a lucky one: (B) from a submenu goes to the menu, never the title, so the weak test was never shown the frame that breaks it. I have not re-derived their focus results and am not treating this as a reason to; what I have is their statement of the exposure and the structural argument, recorded as that rather than as verification. Every asserting check passes, 14 of them. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01N7FiFFFwbvG2uxdcEh8HyF
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.