D062 - The console generation is a build option, because the loaders disagree and all of them are right

Status: decided, correcting D061 in the same session.

D061 set e_ident[EI_ABIVERSION] to 2 and claimed the change was safe for shadPS4 because that emulator "reads this field only to name it in a log line and does not gate on it".

That was wrong. shadPS4 rejects the module outright:

IsElfFile: e_ident[EI_ABIVERSION] expected 0x00 is (0x2)

The claim came from grepping for the field name, finding a function that formats it for a log, and stopping there. The check is forty lines away in the same file. A grep that finds an answer is not the same as finding the answer, and the sweep went from 666 records to zero.

The conflict is real and nobody is at fault. shadPS4 is a previous-generation emulator and refusing a module marked for the current generation is the entire purpose of the field. Kyty accepts 0 or 2 and reads 2 as current; craziiEmu reads it the same way. A single constant cannot satisfy both, and neither should be worked around.

So the generation is a build parameter: make module GEN=5 by default, GEN=4 to run under a previous-generation emulator. scripts/sweep.ps1 defaults to 4 because it drives shadPS4.

Not a disguise. A GEN=4 build tells that loader something true about what it was built as. The alternative - leaving the byte at zero always - was telling every current-generation loader something false, which is what D061 correctly identified and half-fixed.

The probe is for the current generation. That is the default, and the other build exists because the most complete emulator available is for the previous one.