4e249d9d63
The Decoder attached an honest caveat to its reproduction of the tone-curve
refutation -- its bins included the focus-state mismatch, so it was "not a clean
second opinion". Removing that caveat found a defect of mine.
IDENTIFYING THE FOCUSED BUTTON, with a known-answer control. Walking focus
through all five buttons and comparing each against a capture:
vs -options-focused vs live-main-menu
ptbtn01 NEW GAME 6351 531
ptbtn02 LOAD GAME 7087 7094
ptbtn03 TUTORIAL 6230 6237
ptbtn04 OPTIONS 1292 6364
ptbtn05 EXTRAS 6073 6080
The control picks OPTIONS by 4.7x -- the answer its own filename gives -- so the
test is trustworthy, and live-main-menu.png has NEW GAME focused by 11.5x. That
is what the port already focuses. Corroboration, NOT a decode: Q5's instability
stands (four boots gave TUTORIAL, TUTORIAL, NEW GAME, NEW GAME) and this
identifies one frame rather than a rule. Recorded in the authored entry.
THE DEFECT: `verify-capture` rendered menus with `--screen=`, which draws no
focus record, so it had been comparing main_menu to the oracle in a state the
oracle was never in.
main_menu 0.25% differing, RMSE 14.79 -> 0.06%, RMSE 13.21
extras 0.46%, RMSE 15.29 -> 0.20%, RMSE 13.38
A 4x improvement that was entirely my harness posing the port wrong rather than
the port drawing wrong. The first run of a new correctness harness reported a
discrepancy and three quarters of it was the harness.
AND THE DECODER'S CAVEAT RESOLVES TO NOTHING, measured rather than assumed:
re-deriving the transfer curve on the correctly-posed pair gives 1.20 / 1.26 /
1.18 / 1.10 / 1.03 / 0.94 at render 8..48, unchanged from the mismatched run. Its
reproduction stands as a second opinion after all.
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.