verify-screen has pointed at since P1
`tools/port/verify-screen` line 20 has said "use `tools/verify-capture` for the
correctness question" since P1, and there was no such file. The port has had a
harness comparing itself to sylpheed-cli -- two renderers sharing its assumptions
-- and none comparing it to the game, while its own docs said otherwise. That gap
is what ORACLE-CAPTURES.md warns about: this corpus has been bitten three times
by two renderers agreeing, and every one was obvious against a capture.
Five screens against framebuffer captures of the real game:
main_menu RMSE 14.79 0.25% differing focus state may differ
extras RMSE 15.29 0.46% focus state may differ
title RMSE 21.07 1.82% ptloop sweeps never stop
publisher_logo RMSE 10.77 1.00%
developer_logos RMSE 9.37 0.39%
NO SCREEN SHOWS A LARGE CONNECTED BLOB -- the shape a missing element makes, and
the shape all three historical failures made.
And 74.1% of main_menu's differing pixels fall inside the ORACLE'S OWN focus
signature (live-main-menu vs live-main-menu-options-focused, the same screen with
a different button lit). So the bulk of that disagreement is a state mismatch,
not a defect.
REFUTATION ATTEMPT, on ui-render-tone-curve.md's `capture = 255*(render/255)^g`.
It survives where it was measured and not past it. Binning every structurally
matched pixel by render level gives the relationship directly, and the implied
exponent is NOT constant: 1.26 at render 16, 1.10 at 32, crossing 1.0 near 44,
down to 0.69 at 96. Above ~44 the capture is BRIGHTER than the render, which one
exponent cannot express -- and that is exactly why my whole-frame fits kept
returning 1.00, the two halves cancelling. The page's own stated reach ("nothing
constrains midtones or highlights") was not a hedge, it was the finding. Its 1.49
for this screen measures 1.18-1.26 in my darks; recorded as a disagreement rather
than resolved, since they fit selected flat patches and I binned everything.
Two earlier versions of this tool reported a best-fit gamma and were wrong both
times -- once fitting across a 74% structural mismatch, once extrapolating past
the measurement's stated reach. The fix was not a better fit but a different
instrument: it prints the curve, which somebody can argue with.
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.