3d5b5bae13
The human identified that both agents were fighting the wrong subsystem, and
testing it here confirms the diagnosis and finds the limit.
A PulseAudio null sink s MONITOR is sampled on a wall clock: when the client is
late PulseAudio does not wait, it emits silence to keep its own timeline. So the
39.3 percent silence in the take-2 capture was never audio that went missing, it
was silence PulseAudio invented -- which is why PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC gave a
non-monotonic curve and never won. The instrument was wrong, not mistuned.
ALSA s file plugin has no clock; it tees exactly what the client writes, so a
slow producer yields a shorter file rather than a gap-riddled one. Control with
six distinct tones: 12.000 s against a 12.000 s source, 0.00 percent silence,
zero gaps, no duplicate channels. Channel order comes out as ALSA s
FL FR BL BR FC LFE rather than WAV s FL FR FC LFE BL BR -- deterministic and
invertible, not data loss.
Three configuration traps recorded in the order they bite: ALSA_CONFIG_PATH
replaces the whole config so the stock one must be included; but WITH that
include a pcm.!default override silently does not take, in either the inline or
the alias form, so the slave must be declared with an inline plugin type and no
include; and a pipe to head SIGPIPEs the producer before it writes, which looks
exactly like a broken config.
And the limit the proposer honestly flagged, now measured: a bare file tee is not
enough for Xenia, because its ALSA writer thread pads silence whenever the ring
buffer is empty (alsa_audio_driver.cc:359). Against a device that never blocks it
free-ran at about 250x real time -- 7.34 GB, 12746 s of nominal audio, in 50 s of
wall clock, nearly all driver-generated silence. Killed and deleted; it would
have filled the disk.
The configuration that satisfies both constraints is a tee in FRONT of a paced
slave: type file with slave.pcm { type pulse }. The file plugin captures what the
client writes and the slave supplies the clock, so the wall-clock silence
insertion happens downstream of the capture point. Control through that exact
config: 12.000 s, 0.00 percent silence, zero gaps.
Consequences for verification: short file becomes the failure mode, so a capture
check needs an expected-duration test alongside silence and gap rate, and a
runaway guard is not optional.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
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.