P5's gate is "a human clicks through it". The artifact is a scripted walk that
proves the wiring rather than the intent -- up (wraps 01->05), five down, (A)
into EXTRAS, down, (B) back, landing on the main menu with focus RESTORED to
EXTRAS, ten PNGs one per settled step:
xvfb-run -a godot --path port -- --menu \
--script=up,down,down,down,down,down,accept,down,cancel --shots=/tmp/p5
--script posts InputEventAction through Input.parse_input_event so the presses
arrive at _unhandled_input exactly as a d-pad's would. Calling MenuFlow directly
would have been shorter and would have proved nothing: the wiring between a
press and the cursor is the part most likely to be broken, and a direct call is
exactly the part that skips it.
Derived vs authored, which P5 is the easiest place to blur:
* DERIVED -- the ORDER of the items, from each screen file's `buttons`, which
the exporter already fills from button-role elements sorted by resting Y.
* AUTHORED -- destinations, initial focus, what (B) does, and left/right being
a no-op. All measured off the running game (HANDOFF Q4/Q5) or chosen, none
on the disc, all in authored/flow.json with a why.
Four of five main-menu destinations are `goto: null` with a `blocked` note. That
is a MILESTONE BOUNDARY, not an unknown -- DIFFICULTY, the save list, the lesson
list and OPTIONS were all measured and live in archives this export does not
carry. `blocked` and `none` are kept apart so nobody later "discovers" the gap.
--headless CANNOT DRAW, and the port hung instead of saying so.
Measured, not assumed: under --headless Godot's dummy renderer never emits
RenderingServer.frame_post_draw, so every capture path awaited it forever --
--capture since P1, --film since P3, --shots as of now. With stdout block-
buffered the observable behaviour was SILENCE, FOREVER, which in a loop reads as
a job still working. Isolated by `--quit` (prints, exits 0) vs `--capture` (zero
bytes, killed at 40 s). Now those three flags refuse at STARTUP naming the
xvfb-run line that works, and --script no longer waits for a frame it is not
going to photograph -- so headless walks the menus in 4.5 s as a cheap
regression check needing no X server.
REFUTATION ATTEMPT, against the Decoder's 7eeae30 point 2 ("the oracle confirms
the game renders the ring's rotation"). Aimed there because PROTOCOL says to aim
at a claim the port is about to build on that rests on an estimator whose own
control the Decoder reported as +/-19.8 deg. IT SURVIVES, more strongly than
claimed.
Both captures draw the SAME sprite (ptbtneff01) 240 px apart, so "is it drawn
rotated" becomes "are these two crops one image at a different angle" -- no crop
offset needed and no reference to our own renderer. 360-bin angular luminance
profile over the annulus, circularly cross-correlated. Two controls first: known
rotations 0/30/90/150/210/270/330 recovered with 0 deg error, and a ring-free
patch of the same capture peaks at 0.369, so the estimator does not manufacture
matches. Then: A vs B 134 deg (corr 0.968), sprite vs A 76 deg, sprite vs B
210 deg -- and 210-76 = 134, which nothing in the method forced.
So 0 deg is NOT A POSE THE GAME SHOWS, and screen_view.gd draws the ring at
0 deg. That is now stated in the code as known-wrong rather than suspected. The
port did NOT start spinning it: the period has two unknowns and both are the
Decoder's -- the second keyframe is untimed, and "groups hold" predicts a stop
at 360 = 0 which contradicts both captures. Two frames of one focused button a
known time apart settle it. Filed in BLOCKED.md and asked over the channel.
BLOCKED.md's staleness check was half a check. It tested whether that page is
stale relative to HANDOFF; it cannot see the other direction, and the other
direction is what happened -- 7eeae30 lands 27 minutes AFTER HANDOFF was last
written and answers a question HANDOFF still lists as open. Added the missing
half: `git log --oneline 9ca1eb5..HEAD -- docs/re/`.
Also recorded, since the two were nearly confused: the ring's annulus centroid
lands within ~0.4 px of its design position under a ZERO crop offset, which
corroborates ORACLE-CAPTURES' "1279x675, top-left aligned" on a feature nobody
chose for the purpose. The earlier "text bands at design y + 23" is an offset
WITHIN the button sprite, not a crop offset.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01CtmUw5N5LJaMW1Njb8Ziey
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.