thejayman77/retroDE_ps2

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thejayman77 ec82764bef Initial commit: retroDE_ps2 — first-of-its-kind PS2 GS FPGA core (DE25-Nano / Agilex 5)

RTL (GS rasterizer, EE core stub, platform bridge, LPDDR4B path), sim regression
(272 TBs), docs, and tooling. Copyrighted PS2 content (BIOS, game code, GS dumps,
and all dump-derived textures/traces) is excluded via .gitignore and stays local.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-06-29 20:10:50 -04:00

1.3 KiB

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Decision 0003: Golden Reference Strategy

Status: Locked

Context

The project needs software references for:

early boot and subsystem trace comparison,
broader behavior cross-checking,
dispute resolution when implementations differ.

The main candidates were DobieStation, PCSX2, Play!, or a custom-purpose reference.

Options considered

DobieStation as sole primary reference.
PCSX2 as sole primary reference.
Multiple references with role separation.
Play! as primary reference.
Purpose-built minimal reference.

Decision

Adopt multiple references with role separation.

Role split:

DobieStation: early boot and subsystem-oriented trace comparison.
PCSX2: breadth and behavior cross-checking.
Sony documentation and authoritative hardware references: tiebreak when available.

This project does not treat PCSX2 as a mere fallback; it is a peer reference used for a different purpose.

Consequences

Validation infrastructure must be able to normalize traces from more than one reference source.
Some disagreements will require manual triage rather than simple "reference wins" logic.
The project gets a smaller, more coherent early trace oracle while retaining access to broader real-world emulator behavior.
The validation contract and stub-module plan should name which reference is used for each milestone.