Commit Graph
11 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
ReaperOfVeriod ccea53807a Resolve the shrub region bound: the chunk container closes it
The shrub region's end was the last unlocated bound in core_data. It was not
in the core index, and unlike moby->tie it had no successor boundary to chain
against, so the last shrub class in every level ran out to the lump's end and
the aggregates over it (the "3.5M records / 28MB of shrub body") were
artifacts of that oversized span.

Range measured: for each level, from the last shrub class's geometry offset to
the constant trailer. Nothing outside that range is read.

Method: scan forward from the last shrub class for the pair (a) the constant
two bytes f6 7c sitting immediately in front of (b) a chunk signature -- a
16-byte header ending 0xff, ten zero bytes, then four or more 0xf0-tagged
offsets. The two halves are each weak alone, and the halves are measured
separately: the marker pair occurs 25 to 103 times in a 5 to 17 MB lump, so
matching it alone picks dozens of wrong offsets; the chunk shape matches
random data often enough to need four tagged offsets before it is believed.

Result: on all 27 levels the marker sits exactly two bytes before the first
chunk header, and the two parts of the signature are never found apart. No
chunk signature occurs inside any last shrub body, on any level. The three
levels without shrub (10, 25, 26) carry the same marker before the container
that closes tie instead, which is what makes the locator a property of the
region rather than a shrub rule.

Consequences:

- All 358 shrub class bodies are bounded and are whole 8-byte records. That
  was not assertable while the last class in each level ran to the lump's end,
  and it is the check the boundary earns its keep for.
- 9,600 records in total, against the 8,938 previously measurable in
  successor-bounded spans; 662 of them sit in the 24 last-class bodies. The
  shrub region totals 2,033,776 bytes across the 24 levels that have one.
- The chunk container is 25,775,850 bytes across 27 levels (1,236 chunks,
  22,562 records). The container measurements were previously taken over "the
  900,000 bytes before the trailer", a window that did not align to its real
  extent: on level 0 it is 690,302 bytes, and 27 of 1,123 chunks were
  truncated at that invented edge. chunk_containers_resolve_on_every_level now
  reads the region from core_layout instead of measuring backwards from the
  end of the lump.

core_layout takes core_data now: the container's start is the one bound that
cannot be derived from the index. It gains the chunks region, so every byte of
level-specific core_data belongs to a named region. Where the signature is not
found the end stays None -- the region is left visible rather than clamped to
the tail.

Still open: the marker's meaning (constant across 27 levels, at exactly this
position, unnamed) and the shrub body payload's encoding.
2026-10-11 06:20:48 +02:00
ReaperOfVeriod 8d57a09b76 Bound the last region by core_data's constant trailer
Comparing all 27 levels byte-for-byte from the end: the last 231,952 bytes
(0x38A10) of every level's core_data are identical. Level-specific content
therefore ends at len - 0x38A10, which is a real bound for the final region
and is not core_data.len().

This closes shrub. Across the 24 levels that have a shrub region the bound
gives 24,442,928 bytes total, and the disc test asserts on every level that
the region ends strictly inside the lump rather than at its end.

What the trailer is remains unestablished -- fixed data, or padding from a
fixed-size decompression buffer -- but it is constant, which is all a bound
needs.

The data between the last shrub class and the trailer is high entropy: 183 to
256 distinct byte values per 4 KB block, mean 254, where texture data sits
under 200. It is real content of unknown type and is the most likely home for
moby_anim, now that the range between collision and moby has been ruled out
as texture.

A lump shorter than the trailer now yields end: None rather than a backwards
bound, covered by a test.
2026-10-11 03:09:21 +02:00
ReaperOfVeriod 8b98d388f7 Show region bounds in probe, which exposed an unnamed 6.2 MB region
Printing the region table next to the header fields makes the gap visible
without having to remember to consult core_layout, and it paid for itself
immediately.

On level 0 the collision region comes out 6216960 bytes, from 2615232 to
the first moby class at 8832192. Collision's own header declares a payload
of 903,248. So roughly 6.2 MB sits between the collision header and the
first moby class, and almost none of it is collision.

The successor rule is correct -- a region does end where the next one
begins -- but "the next" is not yet known there. collision..moby is
really collision + <something unnamed> .. moby. The name is wrong, not
the bound.

Candidates for the space, rough order of likelihood: moby and tie model
animation data, which is what moby_anim would need, then volumes, then
per-class runtime structures. Tfrag texture texels are already placed and
sit earlier in the lump.

Worth resolving before starting moby_anim, since that format is the most
likely tenant. Until then, any probe reading between the collision header
and the first moby class is reading something the region table does not
describe.
2026-10-11 03:03:46 +02:00
ReaperOfVeriod f6bbbf8d5f Add gc-extract probe to dump structures through the real parser
Reading these formats by unpacking raw offsets out of core_index.bin has
cost real time. The index interleaves single-word region offsets with
count/offset pairs, so miscounting one shifts every field after it: that
produced a page of implausible collision headers on all 27 levels, sent
me chasing a tie-breakoff that turned out not to exist, and nearly had me
"fix" a stride bug in code that was already right.

probe dumps a level's core header and all three class tables through
LevelCoreHeader, so a field name printed is the field name the parser
uses. It also reports how many entries carry geometry inside core_data,
which is what pins the class table strides rather than guessing at them:
shrub reads 7/7 sane at 0x30 against 4/7 read at 0x20.

Reading a structure by hand in a shell still works; this just stops it
being the default, and stops the offset arithmetic being re-derived every
time a new region is investigated.
2026-10-11 02:36:37 +02:00
ReaperOfVeriod 4c4a78d402 Identify the container the class tables point into: core_data itself
assets_compressed_size and assets_decompressed_size at index offsets
0x88 and 0x8c are 9,738,678 and 16,969,296 on level 0 -- exactly the
sizes of core_data before and after decompression. There is no separate
asset container. The "asset WAD" is core_data, and offset_in_asset_wad
indexes the decompressed form directly.

Checked rather than assumed, on all 27 levels: the decompressed size
equals core_data's exact length, every class offset is either 0 or inside
it, and the moby, tie and shrub spans do not overlap each other.

An offset of 0 means the slot has no geometry, not the start of the
lump; level 0's ninth moby class is 4909 at offset 0. Two assumptions
worth discarding while here -- the tables are not sorted by class number
(level 0's run 0, 1, 2, 14 ... 4909) and the offsets within a table are
not monotonic. Neither is needed, but both look true from the first few
entries.

The chunk descriptors after the named extents are not it: they exist on
only 3 of 27 levels, because level 0's four named extents tile the
container exactly. An asset blob there would be missing almost
everywhere.

What sits at the offsets is raw GS/VIF packet data rather than a further
container -- moby[0] begins 00 00 00 00 3f 16 02 55 6f 6f and tie[0]
00 01 00 00 70 50 00 00, which read as packet headers rather than a
magic number.

None of the three is decoded yet and this does not start that. Moby is
skeletal and is the largest single piece left before the rest of a level
can draw.

Also: the pipeline now writes each level's chunk descriptors where they
exist, and LevelCoreHeader decodes the asset lump's two sizes.
2026-10-11 02:03:31 +02:00
ReaperOfVeriod bcf0d1f0cc Decompress the gameplay extent: the level light bank now parses
gameplay is a WAD stream, exactly like core_data. The extractor was
writing it compressed, so the light bank framing read the WAD header's
stream length as a light count: level 0's offset at +0x04 was 0xa0d
and the "count" there was 698810368.

The file says so in its first six bytes: 57 41 44 79 0d 0a -- "WADy".

Decompressed, level 0's gameplay extent is 1,872,256 bytes, the offset at
+0x04 is 0xc2b20, and the count there is 5. Five directional light sets.

All 80,274 vertices of level 0 now go through LightTfrags, and the
renderer's fallback line no longer appears. The frame's colour
distribution goes from 295 to 737 distinct sampled colours and takes on
the level's warm cast.

This corrects a recorded negative result that was simply wrong.
docs/roadmap.md carried "gameplay does not decode with the WAD LZ77
decoder, all 27 levels fail identically, so the input is wrong rather
than the decoder", with bit order and header length also ruled out.
That was true of the data being parsed and wrong about the cause: the
decoder was never the problem, it was being handed a file that had not
been through it.

Same lesson as the origin bug, from the other direction. A recorded
failure without a positive control is easy to record and easy to leave;
the control here is trivial and should have been run first -- decompress
and look.

The renderer keeps counting and reporting how many vertices it lit,
because a silent fallback to stored colours looks plausible and is wrong.
Lighting magnitudes remain unverified: that needs comparison against
reference frames via the PCSX2 loop, which is still to come.
2026-10-10 03:27:52 +02:00
ReaperOfVeriod 90f02890f8 Decode tfrag normals from the overlay's sine table
Normals are per-vertex, and the tfrag's light records store them as an
azimuth and elevation *index* into a 256-entry sine table rather than as
angles. This decodes that table and builds normals for the renderer.

The reference reads the table from an ELF at BOOT_NORMAL_TABLE_VADDR
(0x165500) and notes every level overlay carries a copy. The overlay has
no ELF header -- it is a raw loadable image starting with code -- so there
is no program header to map a virtual address through, and the offset is
not fixed either: level 0 has the table at 0xb650c, level 5 at 0xcca30,
level 26 at 0xb6284.

So it is located by content. Every table starts with exactly (1.0, 0.0),
angle zero, and the scan then requires all 256 entries to match
cos(i*pi/128), sin(i*pi/128). Validating the whole curve is what makes the
search safe: a lone (1.0, 0.0) pair of floats occurs by accident in a
2.7 MB executable, and a test plants one as a decoy. The values are read
from the disc rather than recomputed, since those are the numbers the game
indexes.

A normal is (cos(az)cos(el), sin(az)cos(el), sin(el)) *negated* -- the
stored normals point into the surface -- and then given the same Z-up to
Y-up swap as positions, or the lighting comes out sideways. The azimuth
and elevation fields are stored signed but index 0..=255, so entry 200
must be read as 200, not as -56; there is a test for that.

Also frames and parses the level light bank from the gameplay extent, and
the pipeline now writes overlay.bin. The per-vertex lighting evaluation
is not written yet, so the renderer stays unlit by default. GC_ENGINE_LIT=1
substitutes a host directional light for inspection -- that is a stand-in,
not the game's lighting, and it is deliberately not the default.

The hash table is regenerated for the 27 new overlay.bin files: now 5,213
files and 5,762,497,559 bytes.
2026-10-10 03:09:07 +02:00
ReaperOfVeriod 29fdf89f53 Decode level textures: 8-bit indices through a CSM1 palette
Adds texture.rs and makes the pipeline write gs_ram.bin, which it had
been skipping. Nothing could be decoded before this: the CLUTs live
there.

A level texture is not pixels, it is palette indices -- width*height
bytes at core_data[textures_base + data_offset], with colour coming from
a 256-entry CLUT at gs_ram[palette * 0x100]. gs_ram is a byte range in
the level's data extent header at offset 0x10, 518,656 bytes on level 0.

Two PS2 conventions have to be honoured and neither is a design choice:
within each 32-entry CLUT group the two middle 8-entry blocks are
swapped (bits 3 and 4 of the index are exchanged, an involution), and
alpha runs 0..=0x80 rather than 0..=255 with 0x80 fully opaque.

The mip chain splits across two buffers: levels 0 and 1 are in the
texture block with level 1 immediately after level 0, and levels 2 and 3
are resident in gs_ram at mipmap*0x100 and pad*0x100. Tfrag textures are
square so every level halves evenly.

Verification is two-layered, because every step here is a table lookup
and a wrong CLUT remap still produces a well-formed image of the wrong
thing. All 1,595 tfrag textures across all 27 levels decode; 96.8% are
fully opaque and 96.3% use more than eight colours. On top of that,
`gc-extract dump-texture` writes any texture or mip level as a PPM.
Level 0 texture 0 comes back as a clean bevelled metal panel with rivets
and specular highlights, and texture 74 as a vent grille whose punched
windows are fully transparent. That tool is worth keeping: it is the
cheapest way to tell a decode that is merely well-formed from one that
is right.

The hash table is regenerated for the 27 new gs_ram.bin files, now 5,186
files and 5,685,541,143 bytes.
2026-10-10 02:30:56 +02:00
ReaperOfVeriod 16c04db559 Fix level extents read as bytes, and extract the level geometry
A defect in the Phase 1 extractor, found by reading the data extent's contents:
level extents are declared in sector counts, the generic G/ pair table uses byte
counts, and level containers were being routed through the generic path. So
LEVEL0.WAD's data extent -- 6,484 sectors -- was taken as 6,484 bytes. Every
test still passed, because a truncated file is still a file.

The extent's own header gave it away: it declares an uncompressed total of
13,277,920 bytes, and 13,277,920 / 6,484 is 2047.7. A ratio landing on 2048 is
a unit error, not a compression ratio. Across 27 levels this had been discarding
roughly 300 MB of level content.

Level containers now go through the typed LevelHeader instead. Level 0 yields:

  data.bin         13,279,232   the data extent
  core_data.wad     9,738,678   the geometry, compressed
  core_data.bin    16,969,296   the geometry, decompressed
  core_index.bin       31,600   the geometry directory
  gameplay.bin       659,456
  sound_bank.bin   1,503,232

core_data is a WAD LZ77 stream -- the format already implemented for the game --
and it decompresses cleanly. The first real level content this project has
recovered.

New: LevelDataHeader parses the data extent's own header, a table of byte ranges
naming the level overlay executable, the geometry directory, the GS RAM image,
the HUD banks and the geometry. Note this is a third meaning for a "size" field
on the same disc, after sector counts in the level header and byte counts in the
generic table; all three are documented together in level-data.md so the next
parser does not rediscover this the hard way.

The geometry directory's offsets were checked against the geometry rather than
taken on trust: all twelve land inside the 16.9 MB of decompressed core_data,
which is what confirms the header is being read correctly. The class tables
themselves do not yet decode under the documented layout, and that is recorded
as open work in plan/level-assets.md rather than papered over.

75 unit tests, 9 integration tests against the real disc. Hash table regenerated
at 5,159 files and 5,671,915,799 bytes -- hashes only, no content. Extraction
now writes to ~/Documents/gc-extracted rather than /tmp, which is 16 GB and did
not have room for a 5.3 GB output.
2026-10-09 16:28:26 +02:00
ReaperOfVeriod 027373e65b Add the disc pipeline: identify, unpack and verify
Phase 1 of the roadmap. The disc is now turned into verified asset files, and
the result is checked against a committed hash table rather than against
whatever happens to be on disk.

  gc-extract identify disc.iso        SCUS_972.68 v1.01 NTSC, ELF SHA-1 matches
  gc-extract unpack   disc.iso out/   5135 files, 4,500,106,960 bytes, 10.8s
  gc-extract verify   out/ table.tsv  OK: 5135 files match

All 92 G/*.WAD containers parse. MPEG1 and MPEG2 are raw video and pass
through whole; the other 90 are indexed containers whose extents are extracted
individually.

Formats recovered and written up in docs/formats/:

- iso9660.rs. R&C2 lists its assets in the filesystem, unlike R&C1, so a
  directory walk is the primary asset index. Three details that all fail
  quietly rather than loudly: directory records store every 32-bit field twice
  (little-endian then big-endian), the CD001 signature is at sector offset 1
  rather than 0x8001, and the directory flag at record offset 25 is
  authoritative where the identifier's trailing slash is not.

- global_wad.rs. Container headers hold a table of extents. All 92 indexed
  containers use {offset in sectors, size in bytes}. Measured, not assumed: the
  sector-count reading places every entry of all 27 LEVEL<n> and all 27
  AUDIO<n> containers out of range, while the byte reading places all of them
  correctly. SCENE<n> is the one exception, a flat sector list whose extents
  are sized by the next value.

- wad.rs. Insomniac's LZ77 stream: four flag-selected packet classes, with 0-3
  trailing literal bytes per packet carried in unused low bits. This is not a
  bit stream, which is why it resists the usual LZ77 reading.

- buf.rs. A bounds-checked reader, so untrusted 2003 disc data produces typed
  errors rather than panics.

gc-extract carries the three stages and a SHA-1 implementation with FIPS 180-4
test vectors, so identification works without pulling in a crypto dependency.

Verification: 54 unit tests, plus four integration tests that run only when
GC_DISC names a disc. Those four check identification against the recorded
values, cross-check the Rust identifier against tools/identify-disc.py, parse
all 92 containers, and confirm a full unpack matches the committed table. The
committed table is 316 KB of sizes and SHA-1s for all 5,135 files: hashes only,
no game content, so it is safe to version and it turns "matches retail" into
something a test can assert.

docs/plan/disc-pipeline.md records two wrong turns, because both are easy to
repeat and both failed by producing plausible wrong output rather than an
error: the container table was read backwards, and the LZ77 stream was modelled
as a bit stream. The first survived because it happened to be correct on the
one container used for manual checking.
2026-10-09 16:08:30 +02:00
ReaperOfVeriod a02f79a6d1 Initialise native Rust port of Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando
Sets up the foundation for reimplementing the PS2 game in Rust rather than
emulating it. Nothing is implemented yet; this is the scaffold, the verified
target and the working agreements that keep a long project coherent.

Target disc, verified against a real image:

  SCUS_972.68 v1.01, USA Black Label, NTSC 60 Hz
  boot ELF 2,618,684 bytes, SHA-1 bacda860...d098a77, entry 0x00131AE8

The entry point independently matches the value recorded by the rac2-gc-decomp
community reference, which cross-confirms the identification. This is the exact
build the upstream research pins; Greatest Hits v2.00 is a different binary and
is not the target. NTSC matters beyond label compatibility: PAL discs run 50 Hz,
which would make chargeboots and other speed-sensitive movement run at 5/6
speed. Verifying the disc before writing movement code avoids discovering that
in Phase 5.

Contents:

- Five-crate workspace (formats, extract, game, video, engine) on Bevy 0.19.1,
  matching the version ReRAC uses so its Graphics Synthesizer and VU work stays
  portable. `cargo check --workspace` is clean.

- tools/identify-disc.py, which reproduces the identification against any
  disc image and distinguishes a truncated dump from a non-PS2 image.

- .githooks/pre-commit, refusing game data from entering git history: disc
  image extensions, asset directories, container signatures at offset 0, and
  files over 50 MiB. Verified against seven cases including a disc image
  renamed to look like source. Now that this pushes to a remote, this matters
  more than it would have locally.

- AGENTS.md, the operating agreements: no game data ever, reproduce the PS2
  float model rather than approximating it, bound every read, verify against
  the real disc.

- PROVENANCE.md, recording that this follows ReRAC (ISC) and learns from
  rac2-gc-decomp (MIT). Wrench is used as a written specification only and no
  GPLv3 code is copied, since that would relicense everything derived from it.
  RAC2Decomp is explicitly not used: its provenance is disputed in the upstream
  community reference, and it targets the wrong region.

- docs/roadmap.md, phased so the riskiest unknowns are retired early. The two
  that matter: overlay relocation transfers from ReRAC and makes 27 level
  overlays tractable, while VU1 microcode is binary and is the hardest single
  item. Phase 5 is a deliberately scoped Veldin vertical slice as the go/no-go.
2026-10-09 15:42:10 +02:00