The Decoder reconciled three of their own pages that held incompatible positions -- 2 units per guest frame, time-integrated at 56.8, and 1 unit per present -- with one mechanism: the clock advances ONE UNIT PER VBLANK, and presents may be dropped without the clock caring. It explains steps that are always multiples of 17, and the same animation spanning 21 labels in one capture and 33 in another, which a strict per-present clock cannot produce. Their rate result is a manipulation, not an observation: 255 declared units take 4.263/4.162 s at a 60 Hz vblank and 8.450 s at --framerate_limit=30. The vblank rate sets the unit rate; a console vblanks at 60. So the justification for 60 has now been "2 units per rendered frame" (retired), "the game presents at 60 Hz" (superseded), and now "one unit per 60 Hz vblank". THE NUMBER HAS NEVER MOVED. Worth noticing rather than celebrating: a value whose reason changes three times while it survives is either robust or under-constrained, and the honest label is still `authored`. 📌 THIS PORT INSTANTIATES THEIR NULL MODEL, which is the one thing this side can contribute to that argument. Their reasoning turns on "a time-integrated clock predicts 4.25 s in BOTH conditions". This port IS a working time-integrated clock at 60 units/s, and its splash dwell across a 4.0x change in its own rendering rate is 4.28/4.26/4.27/4.26 s -- flat to 0.5 %. Their counterfactual is demonstrated rather than assumed. ⚠️ Labelled: that is evidence about the NULL, not about the game. It says what a time-integrated clock does, not what the game's clock is. 🟡 And per-vblank vs per-present stays open, with the discriminating experiment named on their side. IT IS IMMATERIAL TO THIS PORT AND THEY SHOULD NOT RUN IT ON THE PORT'S ACCOUNT: the two models differ only when the console DROPS a present -- per-vblank keeps real-time pace through a drop, per-present slows. This port is time-based, so it matches per-vblank exactly and would run marginally ahead of per-present during drops only. On a console presenting every vblank they coincide, and these screens are a handful of quads. Nothing in the port changes. Not settled: findings 3 and 4, both still with no surviving named cause; the clock origin, which the Decoder reports blocked because no capture reaches the title; the ~1.0-1.2 menu residual; the allowance's grep trigger. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018AHUQvXGyNcKonSEWsgWcX
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
-- and RUNNING.md, which is how you actually start it
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.