The 6-channel capture I spent an iteration refuting was corrupt, and the Decoder found the cause: PulseAudio remapping between two mismatched channel maps, where a 6-channel remap SILENTLY DROPS AND DUPLICATES. Its control -- six channels, six tones, same sink, same parec -- came back 400/3200/200/800/800/200 for an input of 400/800/200/1600/3200/6400. Two source channels gone entirely. So the negative was right, and the byte-identical pair I reported was the thread that unravelled it. Worth recording precisely, because it nearly went unreported: it began as an idle look at two channels whose peak AND RMS matched to six decimals, and it only became evidence because a coincidence at six decimals is cheaper to hash than to explain. `tools/port/check-capture` makes that check one command -- split the file, hash every channel, fail on any duplicate pair -- and AUDIO-VERIFICATION.md gains a section 5 saying to run it FIRST, every time, plus the two conditions the same incident produced: start the recorder before the process, and log what was on screen against the recording's own clock so a miss is diagnosable. Controlled both directions, because a checker nobody controlled is what this incident is about: six distinct tones PASS; the remap's own output pattern FAILS naming all four pairs; the corrupt capture FAILS on ch2 == ch5. THE KNOWN-BAD CONTROL IS THE POINT. All six of its channels report a peak of -18.063656 dB, identical to six decimals, while containing three duplicate pairs. A level check cannot see this failure. That is why the tool hashes rather than measures, and why the corrupt capture's "plausible per-channel levels" were never evidence. The tool says of itself that it is necessary, not sufficient. Withdrawn with the file, both the Decoder's: "all six channels carry signal", and the non-zero-surround observation offered as weak support for 5.1. Unaffected: the three-XMA-context concurrency result, read from the emulator's log rather than the audio path, on two independent boots. The corrupt file is dropped from the exchange so the next agent cannot pick it up and repeat the work. Nothing in the export changed. 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.