ab1b8b2321
ruled out
Last iteration I recorded eff3's absence as unexplained after withdrawing a bad
explanation for it. The previous capture survived on disk with 6907 frames, and
the attract loop returns to the title, so it contains a SECOND build-in at
frames 5942..7025. eff3 is absent there too.
Three alternative explanations tested and failed:
* sampling phase -- eff3 is non-zero for t in (58,64), SIX units, against a
2.23-unit step. A window wider than the step cannot be missed; frames 133
(t=60.1) and 134 (t=62.3) sit inside it and draw eff2 and eff4 instead.
* a draw the log cannot see -- exactly 2 draws per frame carry no geometry,
on all 932 settled title frames, always the same full-screen-triangle
shader, and present on frames where no wipe element is active.
* a bad position guess -- dropping position entirely, ZERO quads anywhere on
screen in either build-in window have a width within +-30 of 408. The width
spectrum jumps straight from 262 to 748.
Draw counts across both entries: eff1 4, eff2 3, eff3 0, eff4 6, against ~5
expected each. The four are a right-aligned wipe (938+258, 788+408, 447+749,
64+1133, all ending at x~1196) -- a left-growing reveal in four widths, of
which the game draws three.
Why is NOT established: nothing in eff3's element record differs from its
neighbours. Classified measured, not decoded, and the port is told that
dropping eff3 means authoring a behaviour I cannot derive from the file.
Two further corrections, both to my own earlier claims:
* "frame 107 is the title composited once" was an over-read. It binds NO
texture and only 4 of its 27 draws log geometry. The second title entry
has no such frame.
* the two build-ins are NOT frame-identical. I had that from a coincidentally
aligned pair of rows; aligned properly only 4 of 46 frames match. They are
the same animation at different sampling phases -- which is precisely what
makes the eff3 result robust.
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.