Files
Sylpheed/docs/re
Sylpheed RE agent 66f31d5486 re: the genuinely-cut voice lines still have subtitles — and two id spaces differ
The 60 tokens absent from BOTH voice languages, itemised:

  45  VOICE_E_ family -- 44 numeric [0..43] plus the lettered VOICE_E_012B
  13  VOICE_C_ at 421, 423-426, 430, 432, 447-450, 470, 471 -- INSIDE the
      listed range [0..489], so interior gaps rather than a truncated tail
   2  VOICE_D_182 and _183, adjacent

These lines were written and captioned; only the audio is missing. Their
caption keys resolve to real text in the IXUD blocks:

  MSG_VOICE_C_355_000_00  "What are you doing? Quit wasting..."
  MSG_VOICE_C_367_000_00  "The final defense weapon is..."
  MSG_VOICE_C_347_000_00  (Japanese)
  MSG_VOICE_D_152_000_00  (Japanese)
  MSG_VOICE_E_044_000_00  (Japanese)

Three of the five sampled are still Japanese INSIDE the English pak --
captioned but never translated, matching the untranslated entries already
noted for the localised-text container.

Separately, a trap worth its own heading: within one message page the voice
bank token and the caption keys use DIFFERENT numbering.

  Message_106  voice VOICE_C_468   lines MSG_VOICE_C_385_000_00..02
  Message_129  voice VOICE_D_182   lines MSG_VOICE_D_152_000_00..02
  Message_044  voice VOICE_E_012B  ID    MSG_VOICE_E_044

Same family letter, different index space. Deriving one id from the other
will silently mis-pair audio with text -- which is the same class of mistake
as the demo-id voice binding this corpus already had to reject in-game.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01PMRJjbxLqZtsb5Vb7KunPE
2026-08-26 02:34:29 +00:00
..

Reverse-engineering knowledge base

This directory is the spec-side of the clean-room: it records what the original Project Sylpheed binary does (behaviour) and how its data is laid out, so that the Rust port can be implemented from these specs without re-deriving anything and without ever copying original code.

It exists to answer one question fast: "do we already know how X works, and how sure are we?"


The one rule that matters

Never document a claim more confidently than the evidence supports, and never paste original code here.

A wrong-but-confident note is worse than no note: someone builds on it and the bug hides for weeks. Every entry therefore carries an explicit confidence and its evidence. This mirrors the project method — measure the oracle, never infer; refute before believing.

Clean-room firewall

  • Allowed: behaviour descriptions, field offsets/types, formulas, state machines, observed input→output pairs, and references to the original by address (sub_821B68C0) or to xenia-rs/sylpheed.db.
  • Forbidden here and in crates/: pasted decompiled C/C++ or verbatim disassembled function bodies presented as the thing to reimplement. Cite the address; describe the behaviour in your own words. Disassembly is a tool for understanding, not a source to copy.

Confidence levels

Level Meaning Bar to reach it
CONFIRMED Behaviour verified against ground truth. ≥2 independent observations or one observation cross-checked against an oracle (canary framebuffer, a known-correct value, a second code path).
PROBABLE Strong single-source inference. One clean observation, or an unambiguous static read of the disassembly.
HYPOTHESIS Educated guess, not yet tested. Anything else. Must say what would confirm/refute it.

Promotion requires new evidence, not re-reading the old evidence. A HYPOTHESIS that "looks right again" is still a HYPOTHESIS. Only an independent check promotes it. If evidence later contradicts an entry, demote it and record the contradiction — do not silently edit the conclusion.


When to document

  • Right after a function/structure crosses from HYPOTHESIS to at least PROBABLE — before moving to the next code path, so the knowledge isn't lost or re-derived.
  • Whenever confidence changes (up or down) — append to the Evidence log, don't overwrite.
  • Not while it's still a pure guess with no evidence — a one-liner in the relevant backlog/plan is enough until there's something to stand on.

What to document

  • Functions/code pathsdocs/re/functions/<name>.md (one file per function or tight cluster).
  • Data structures / formatsdocs/re/structures/<name>.md.
  • Keep the index in INDEX.md (one line each: name · confidence · one-line summary).

Use the templates: _TEMPLATE.function.md, _TEMPLATE.structure.md.


How we find and confirm code paths (the toolchain)

Everything joins on the guest virtual address (PC) — code addresses are fixed by the XEX load, identical across our emulator and canary.

  • Static (cheap, try first): xenia-rs/sylpheed.db (DuckDB: 25 481 functions, xrefs, strings, vtables, imports). Query with xenia-rs/zq.pyzq.py grep <str>, zq.py xref <addr>, zq.py dis <lo> <hi>, zq.py fn <pc>. Entry points are usually a string (zq.py grep MSG_DEMO) or an import (movie/XMA API) xref'd back to the loader.
  • Dynamic (when static is ambiguous): run xenia-rs with its probe suite — --pc-probe / --audit-pc-probe-hex (fires at block entry), --mem-watch (mid-block reads/writes of a VA), --lr-trace (call/return chains), --trace-instructions, --dump-addr (read guest memory). These already exist; prefer them over hacking canary.
  • Oracle (correctness ground truth): canary — the Wine cross-build xenia-canary/build-cross/bin/Windows/Debug/xenia_canary.exe (the native Linux ELF crashes / does not run — do not use it). This is the only emulator that reaches the in-game menu; our xenia-rs never got past the intro video. Use canary to observe output (capture its framebuffer for texture colours), not usually to instrument code — though its build-cross toolchain does compile, so small C++ probes + rebuild are possible when needed. Run muted, one emulator process at a time, point it at the real ISO (not the symlink).

⚠️ VA-equality caveat: join code by PC (fixed), but never assume a data VA holds the same bytes across emulators — allocators differ. Compare data by content/layout.