Three defects, all mine, found by checking instead of assuming. **They never exchanged a word.** SendMessage=0, ListAgents=0 across both new sessions. PROTOCOL.md specified in detail what a message MAY and MAY NOT do and never said how to send one or that the other agent was addressable -- they knew that last time only because the human told them directly, and rebuilding with fresh volumes wiped it. Policy without mechanism is prose. Now documented with the two addresses, a worked example, and an instruction to introduce themselves on the first iteration rather than waiting to have a question. **The decoder lost the disc and the ISO.** They used to arrive inside the project mount and silently stopped when /work became a clone. Silently is the word: the disc-gated tests SELF-SKIP without SYLPHEED_DISC and report green, so a whole test suite would have passed while measuring nothing. Both are now mounted explicitly, the ISO at a stable path so run-canary does not depend on host directory names. **Both agents shared one Claude state directory.** They share the host's ~/.claude, and once both working directories became /work they resolved to the same projects/-work/ -- two supposedly independent agents writing to one place, which undoes the point of separate checkouts. Each now has its own volume, seeded once from the host with credentials only, so a token refresh writes locally and neither can corrupt the host's auth. Also widened the pacing rule. It banned ScheduleWakeup by name; the decoder then scheduled itself an hourly cron job -- not harmful, but the same instinct that ended a run yesterday, through a door I had left open. Now: no self-scheduling by any route. Mount audit after the changes: shared and intentional are the exchange volume and the read-only credential seed. Everything else -- repo, Claude state, cargo, target, canary, disc, ISO -- is per agent or one-sided.
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.