c1c8aa4288
The Port's arithmetic was right: a 160-unit sub-interval cannot outlast the 210-unit group containing it, and my hold (4.514 s) outlasted three cold-boot measurements of the whole group (3.37/3.50/3.51 s). My own capture says why, once asked the right question. The three numbers I quoted came from three regions of ONE run, and I never asked how fast the emulator was going in each: splash B (the hold) 3.39 labels/guest-second -> I reported 35.4 splash A (publisher) 15.33 -> I reported 40.0 the title (the plate) 23.20 -> I reported 56.8 Monotonic. The 'per-GamePart rate' is the pacing of the region it was measured in. Splash B was captured at 3.4 fps, an eighth of the title region. And the corpus already had this. boot-splash-dwells-are-declared.md says in its own words that the wall-clock dwell is an emulator-pacing artefact that varies run to run, with a no-input boot 15-20% long on the same declared timeline. I re-derived a documented artefact as a discovery and drew a false conclusion from it. The instrument lesson, which is the part worth keeping: I believed the guest timebase removed the artefact. It does not. The game's animation clock is not the guest timebase -- it is frame-coupled -- so a slow run advances less animation per guest second and no clock can see that from inside. My control asked 'does this timebase track real time', which is capability. The question that mattered was 'is the quantity I divide by coupled to the frame rate', and nothing I ran asked it. That is PROTOCOL's own warning, which I quoted at the other agent two iterations ago and then walked into. Restated: the clock is neither purely frame-counted (21 vs 33 labels for one animation) nor purely time-integrated (rate scales with frame rate). Consistent with a clamped per-frame delta, untested, and now the real open question. Consequence: no rate measured on this emulator is the console's; all are biased low. Best estimate stays the declared timeline against the fastest runs -- 60 units/s, 1.1% on the developer splash. The port keeps 60 for every screen and nothing needs averaging. Untouched: section 1 of splash-declared-vs-captured.md. It compares a disc table against vertex alphas at integer t and never divides by a duration, so the pacing artefact cannot reach it.
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.