12. N-way consensus as a substitute oracle

Nothing carries hardware, and on current trajectory nothing will until the hardware is available. That caps what the suite can claim: when obSCEne and an emulator disagree, the report cannot say which is wrong, and fail [assumed] is a verdict the recipient can decline without argument.

There is an oracle available that is not the hardware: agreement between independent implementations. obscene-tool consensus, taking N reports and printing only where they disagree, would change the message from "you failed check X" to "you are the only one of four that fails X". That is actionable without authority and costs a subcommand.

It also gives the provenance ladder a rung that can be climbed without hardware: assumed → consensus → hardware.

Two things it must not pretend. These emulators are not independent of each other - they read each other's source, and fpPS4's NID table is a superset of ps4libdoc's. This project made exactly that mistake once (D064), counting one source twice. So consensus must record which implementations agreed, so correlation stays visible rather than being laundered into a number.

The prerequisite turned out to be softer than this said. It claimed consensus needs a second emulator. The host build is a real implementation of the POSIX and C library surface, so disagreement against it is disagreement with something known to work - which is the closest thing to an oracle available without the hardware. consensus runs on host and shadPS4 today.

And Kyty is closed as a candidate, with evidence (D080). Its sceKernelWrite refuses standard output by design, and the puts fallback is registered under a library name this module does not import from. Getting a report out of it would mean importing the C library under a loader-specific name - an accommodation in the import table itself, which is worse than the three that already exist. It remains the only source of a named unresolved-import list, which is what it is uniquely good at.

Overtaken. This said craziiEmu was "the remaining candidate for a third report" - there are now five reports, from shadPS4, PS5PCEM, fpPS4, Kyty and prosper, and craziiEmu is not among them. The scarce thing is no longer a third report; it is a third current-generation one: PS5PCEM and prosper both complete, and two implementations produce only SPLITs and never an OUTLIER, so no majority can form and neither can be called wrong. An oracle needs three. (D197)

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