bb9626defe
TWO FINDINGS, one mine and one handed to me, and the second retires a premise I built on twice. THE P1 BASELINE HAD ROWS THAT PROVED NOTHING. `build_12` and `build_15` render pure black in BOTH renderers -- mean 0, max 0 -- so the difference is zero and `verify-screen` scored them `max 0 over3 0 OK`, the strongest verdict it has. Two of sixteen rows were comparing nothing against nothing. Worse than a missing test, because a missing test is visible in the count. Cause isolated by a control, not by reading: `build_00`/`build_01` are the same loading screen minus three elements and render fine (mean 1.913, max 214.5). The dressed variants add `pgloading_eff00`, a 1280x720 primitive resting OPAQUE BLACK at t=38 inside its own opening black hold, with no layer key so paint order puts it last. The rule I was about to write -- "rest.t before the last timed keyframe is the pathology" -- was killed by running the census first: 152 of 212 elements in this export have rest.t earlier than their last timed keyframe. It is the norm. What is actually unusual is the CONTENT, and its reach is one: `pgloading_eff00` is the only element in the export whose resting pose is a fully opaque full-frame quad. One instance is not a rule, so the renderer is unchanged and the HARNESS is fixed: a blank pair now reports BLANK -- both renderers drew nothing; this row proves nothing. `status` is untouched, so an unrelated DIFFERS still fails. THE VOICE EXPORT IS KNOWN INCOMPLETE. The Decoder booted Canary with --xma_param_probe and the game decodes ALL THREE streams CONCURRENTLY, in three XMA contexts whose byte sizes match the disc payloads exactly. So "three presentations of one take, pick one" is refuted by the running game and the question I had been arguing -- WHICH presentation -- has no answer. This one no census could have caught. Every measurement was right: the streams are equal-duration, one is silence, one is 0.60x another with the residual 26.8 dB down. The frame around them was wrong, and the file says ChannelMask 0x0002 on all three. It took the running game -- which is the mission's own sentence arriving in practice. BEHAVIOUR HELD DELIBERATELY. An equal-gain 1/n sum of channel pairs is not a downmix either -- MISSION section 6 pins an explicit matrix for exactly that reason -- and summing cost S00A 6.02 dB when one stream was silence. Swapping one guess for another on a message is what produced this entry twice. What changed is that the wrongness is now LOUD, because this failure sounds like success: one stream is clean audible dialogue. A top-level manifest warning per movie, the console line, and the authored entry all say `1 of 3 streams`. "They are 5.1" is recorded as the Decoder's HYPOTHESIS with its own counter-evidence attached, and nothing builds on it. What settles it is asked: a recording of the game's own output over ADV through the null sink, which turns channel roles into a fit against an oracle. Refutation attempt, survived: the Decoder's loading-screen variant map. Entries 0/1 carry 7 elements and 12/15 carry those seven plus baseeff, eff00 and loop5 -- exact in count and identity, and it is what made build_00 a control. 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.