📝 Posted:

2024-04-11 22:45 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0278, P0279

⌨ Commits:

b6a7285...f0fbaf6, f0fbaf6...20bac82

💰 Funded by:

Yanga, Blue Bolt

🏷 Tags:

th02

+

rec98

+

cutscene

+

file-format

+

animation

+

pc98

+

unused

+

midboss

+

waste

-

score

+

sigma

+

That was quick: In a surprising turn of events, Romantique Tp themselves came in just one day after the last blog post went up, updated me with their current and much more positive opinion on Sound Canvas VA, and confirmed that real SC-88Pro hardware clamps invalid Reverb Macro values to the specified range. I promised to release a new Sound Canvas VA BGM pack for free once I knew the exact behavior of real hardware, so let's go right back to Seihou and also integrate the necessary SysEx patches into the game's MIDI player behind a toggle. This would also be a great occasion to quickly incorporate some long overdue code maintenance and build system improvements, and a migration to C++ modules in particular. When I started the Shuusou Gyoku Linux port a year ago, the combination of modules and <windows.h> threw lots of weird errors and even crashed the Visual Studio compiler. But nowadays, Microsoft even uses modules in the Office code base. This must mean that these issues are fixed by now, right?
Well, there's still a bug that causes the modularized C++ standard library to be basically unusable in combination with the static analyzer, and somehow, I was the first one to report it. So it's 3½ years after C++20 was finalized, and somehow, modules are still a bleeding-edge feature and a second-class citizen in even the compiler that supports them the best. I want fast compile times already! 😕
Thankfully, Microsoft agrees that this is a bug, and will work on it at some point. While we're waiting, let's return to the original plan of decompiling the endings of the one PC-98 Touhou game that still needed them decompiled.

1. TH02's endings
2. TH02's Staff Roll
3. TH02's verdict screen, and its hidden challenge
4. TH02's end-of-stage bonus screens

After the textless slideshows of TH01, TH02 was the first Touhou game to feature lore text in its endings. Given that this game stores its 📝 in-game dialog text in fixed-size plaintext files, you wouldn't expect anything more fancy for the endings either, so it's not surprising to see that the END?.TXT files use the same concept, with 44 visible bytes per line followed by two bytes of padding for the CR/LF newline sequence. Each of these lines is typed to the screen in full, with all whitespace and a fixed time for each 2-byte chunk.
As a result, everything surrounding the text is just as hardcoded as TH01's endings were, which once again opens up the possibility of freely integrating all sorts of creative animations without the overhead of an interpreter. Sadly, TH02 only makes use of this freedom in a mere two cases: the picture scrolling effect from Reimu's head to Marisa's head in the Bad Endings, and a single hardware palette change in the Good Endings.

Hardcoding also still made sense for this game because of how the ending text is structured. The Good and Bad Endings for the individual shot types respectively share 55% and 77% of their text, and both only diverge after the first 27 lines. In straight-line procedural code, this translates to one branch for each shot type at a single point, neatly matching the high-level structure of these endings.

But that's the end of the positive or neutral aspects I can find in these scripts. The worst part, by far, is ZUN's approach to displaying the text in alternating colors, and how it impacts the entire structure of the code.
The simplest solution would have involved a hardcoded array with the color of each line, just like how the in-game dialogs store the face IDs for each text box. But for whatever reason, ZUN did not apply this piece of wisdom to the endings and instead hardcoded these color changes by… mutating a global variable before calling the text typing function for every individual line. This approach ruins any possibility of compressing the script code into loops. While ZUN did use loops, all of them are very short because they can only last until the next color change. In the end, the code contains 90 explicitly spelled-out calls to the 5-parameter line typing function that only vary in the pointer to each line and in the slower speed used for the one or two final lines of each ending. As usual, I've deduplicated the code in the ReC98 repository down to a sensible level, but here's the full inlined and macro-expanded horror:

All this redundancy bloats the two script functions for the 6 endings to a whopping 3,344 bytes inside TH02's MAINE.EXE. In particular, the single function that covers the three Good Endings ends up with a total of 631 x86 ASM instructions, making it the single largest function in TH02 and the 7^th longest function in all of PC-98 Touhou. If the 📝 single-executable build for TH02's debloated and anniversary branches ends up needing a few more KB to reduce its size below the original MAIN.EXE, there are lots of opportunities to compress it all.

The ending text can also be fast-forwarded by holding any key. As we've come to expect for this sort of ZUN code, the text typing function runs its own rendering loop with VSync delays and input detection, which means that we 📝 once 📝 again have to talk about the infamous quirk of the PC-98 keyboard controller in relation to held keys. We've still got 54 not yet decompiled calls to input detection functions left in this codebase, are you excited yet?!
Holding any key speeds up the text of all ending lines before the last one by displaying two kana/kanji instead of one per rendered frame and reducing the delay between the rendered frames to ¹/₃ of its regular length. In pseudocode:

for(i = 0; i < number_of_2_byte_chunks_on_displayed_line; i++) {
	input = convert_current_pc98_bios_input_state_to_game_specific_bitflags();
	add_chunk_to_internal_text_buffer(i);
	blit_internal_text_buffer_from_the_beginning();
	if(input == INPUT_NONE) {
		// Basic case, no key pressed
		frame_delay(frames_per_chunk);
	} else if((i % 2) == 1) {
		// Key pressed, chunk number is odd.
		frame_delay(frames_per_chunk / 3);
	} else {
		// Key pressed, chunk number is even.
		// No delay; next iteration adds to the same frame.
	}
}

This is exactly the kind of code you would write if you wanted to deliberately maximize the impact of this hardware quirk. If the game happens to read the current input state right after a key up scancode for the last previously held and game-relevant key, it will then wrongly take the branch that uninterruptibly waits for the regular, non-divided amount of VSync interrupts. In my tests, this broke the rhythm of the fast-forwarded text about once per line. Note how this branch can also be taken on an even chunk: Rendering glyphs straight from font ROM to VRAM is not exactly cheap, and if each iteration (needlessly) blits one more full-width glyph than the last one, the probability of a key up scancode arriving in the middle of a frame only increases.
The fact that TH02 allows any of the supported input keys to be held points to another detail of this quirk I haven't mentioned so far. If you press multiple keys at once, the PC-98's keyboard controller only sends the periodic key up scancodes as long as you are holding the last key you pressed. Because the controller only remembers this last key, pressing and releasing any other key would get rid of these scancodes for all keys you are still holding.
As usual, this ZUN bug only occurs on real hardware and with DOSBox-X's correct emulation of the PC-98 keyboard controller.

After the ending, we get to witness the most seamless transition between ending and Staff Roll in any Touhou game as the BGM immediately changes to the Staff Roll theme, and the ending picture is shifted into the same place where the Staff Roll pictures will appear. Except that the code misses the exact position by four pixels, and cuts off another four pixels at the right edge of the picture:

What follows is a comparatively large amount of unused content for a single scene. It starts right at the end of this underappreciated 11-frame animation loaded from ENDFT.BFT:

TH02's Staff Roll is also unique for the pre-made screenshots of all 5 stages that get shown together with a fancy rotating rectangle animation while the Staff Roll progresses in sync with the BGM. The first interesting detail shows up immediately after the first image, where the code jumps over one of the 320×200 quarters in ED06.PI, leaving the screenshot of the Stage 2 midboss unused.
All of the cutscenes in PC-98 Touhou store their pictures as 320×200 quarters within a single 640×400 .PI file. Anywhere else, all four quarters are supposed to be displayed with the same palette specified in the .PI header, but TH02's Staff Roll screenshots are also unique in how all quarters beyond the top-left one require palettes loaded from external .RGB files to look right. Consequently, the game doesn't clearly specify the intended palette of this unused screenshot, and leaves two possibilities:

It might seem obvious that the Stage 2 palette in 1️⃣ is the correct one, but ZUN indeed uses ED06B.RGB with the red-tinted white color for the following screenshot of the Meira fight. Not only does this palette not match Meira's in-game appearance, but it also discolors the rectangle animation and the surrounding Staff Roll text:

But when I went into Stage 2 to compare these colors to the in-game palette, I found something even more curious. ZUN obviously made this screenshot with the Reimu-C shot type, but one of the shot sprites looks slightly different from how it does in-game. These screenshots must have been made earlier in development when the sprite didn't yet feature the second ring at the top. The same applies to the Stage 4 screenshot later on:

Finally, the rotating rectangle animation delivers one more minor rendering bug. Each of the 20 frames removes the largest and outermost rectangle from VRAM by redrawing it in the same black color of the background before drawing the remaining rectangles on top. The corners of these rectangles are placed on a shrinking circle that starts with a radius of 256 pixels and is centered at (192, 200), which results in a maximum possible X coordinate of 448 for the rightmost corner of the rectangle. However, the Staff Roll text starts at an X coordinate of 416, causing the first two full-width glyphs to still fall within the area of the circle. Each line of text is also only rendered once before the animation. So if any of the rectangles then happens to be placed at an angle that causes its edges to overlap the text, its removal will cut small holes of black pixels into the glyphs:

At least the following verdict screen manages to have no bugs aside from the slightly imperfect centering of its table values, and only comes with a small amount of additional bloat. Let's get right to the mapping from skill points to the 12 title strings from END3.TXT, because one of them is not like the others:

So how would you get exactly 77 and achieve vanilla harmony? Here's the formula:

And with that, TH02's MAINE.EXE is both fully position-independent and ready for translation. There's a tiny bit of undecompiled bit of code left in the binary, but I'll leave that for rounding up a future TH02 decompilation push.

With one of the game's skill-based formulas decompiled, it's fitting to round out the second push with the other two. The in-game bonus tables at the end of a stage also have labels that we'd eventually like to translate, after all.
The bonus formula for the 4 regular stages is also the first place where we encounter TH02's rank value, as well as the only instance in PC-98 Touhou where the game actually displays a rank-derived value to the player. KirbyComment and Colin Douglas Howell accurately documented the rank mechanics over at Touhou Wiki two years ago, which helped quite a bit as rank would have been slightly out of scope for these two pushes. 📝 Similar to TH01, TH02's rank value only affects bullet speed, but the exact details of how rank is factored in will have to wait until RE progress arrives at this game's bullet system.
These bonuses are calculated by taking a sum of various gameplay metrics and multiplying it with the amount of point items collected during the stage. In the 4 regular stages, the sum consists of:

As rank can range from -6 to +4 on Easy and +16 on the other difficulties, this sum can range between:

The sum for the Extra Stage is not documented in 封魔録.TXT:

And that's two pushes packed full of the most bloated and copy-pasted code that's unique to TH02! So bloated, in fact, that TH02 RE as a whole jumped by almost 7%, which in turn finally pushed overall RE% over the 60% mark. 🎉 It's been a while since we hit a similar milestone; 50% overall RE happened almost 2 years ago during 📝 P0204, a month before I completed the TH01 decompilation.
Next up: Continuing to wait for Microsoft to fix the static analyzer bug until May at the latest, and working towards the newly popular dreams of TH03 netplay by looking at some of its foundational gameplay code.

📝 Posted:

2023-11-30 23:56 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0262, P0263

⌨ Commits:

ae2fc28...741d889, 741d889...46cd6e7

💰 Funded by:

Blue Bolt, [Anonymous]

🏷 Tags:

th04

+

th05

+

rec98

+

website

+

menu

+

waste

-

file-format

+

animation

+

And once again, the Shuusou Gyoku task was too complex to be satisfyingly solved within a single month. Even just finding provably correct loop sections in both the original and arranged MIDI files required some rather involved detection algorithms. I could have just defined what sounded like correct loops, but the results of these algorithms were quite surprising indeed. Turns out that not even Seihou is safe from ZUN quirks, and some tracks technically loop much later than you'd think they do, or don't loop at all. And since I then wanted to put these MIDI loops back into the game to ensure perfect synchronization between the recordings and MIDI versions, I ended up rewriting basically all the MIDI code in a cross-platform way. This rewrite also uncovered a pbg bug that has traveled from Shuusou Gyoku into Windows Touhou, where it survived until ZUN ultimately removed all MIDI code in TH11 (!)…

Fortunately, the backlog still had enough general PC-98 Touhou funds that I could spend on picking some soon-important low-hanging fruit, giving me something to deliver for the end of the month after all. TH04 and TH05 use almost identical code for their main/option menus, so decompiling it would make number go up quite significantly and the associated blog post won't be that long…

Wait, what's this, a bug report from touhou-memories concerning the website?

1. Tab switchers tended to break on certain Firefox versions, and
2. video playback didn't work on Microsoft Edge at all?

Those are definitely some high-priority bugs that demand immediate attention.

1. Microsoft Edge's anti-support of AV1
2. TH04/TH05's main/option menu
3. TH04/TH05's first-launch sound setup menu
4. TH05's title animation ☯️

The tab switcher issue was easily fixed by replacing the previous z-index trickery with a more robust solution involving the hidden attribute. The second one, however, is much more aggravating, because video playback on Edge has been broken ever since I 📝 switched the preferred video codec to AV1.
This goes so far beyond not supporting a specific codec. Usually, unsupported codecs aren't supposed to be an issue: As soon as you start using the HTML <video> tag, you'll learn that not every browser supports all codecs. And so you set up an encoding pipeline to serve each video in a mix of new and ancient formats, put the <source> tag of the most preferred codec first, and rest assured that browsers will fall back on the best-supported option as necessary. Except that Edge doesn't even try, and insists on staying on a non-playing AV1 video. 🙄

The codecs parameter for the <source> type attribute was the first potential solution I came across. Specifying the video codec down to the finest encoding details right in the HTML markup sounds like a good idea, similar to specifying sizes of images and videos to prevent layout reflows on long pages during the initial page load. So why was this the first time I heard of this feature? The fact that there isn't a simple ffprobe -show_html_codecs_string command to retrieve this string might already give a clue about how useful it is in practice. Instead, you have to manually piece the string together by grepping your way through all of a video's metadata…
…and then it still doesn't change anything about Edge's behavior, even when also specifying the string for the VP9 and VP8 sources. Calling the infamously ridiculous HTMLMediaElement.canPlayType() method with a representative parameter of "video/webm; codecs=av01.1.04M.08.0.000.01.13.00.0" explains why: Both the AV1-supporting Chrome and Edge return "probably", but only the former can actually play this format. 🤦

But wait, there is an AV1 video extension in the Microsoft Store that would add support to any unspecified favorite video app. Except that it stopped working inside Edge as of version 116. And even if it did: If you can't query the presence of this extension via JavaScript, it might as well not exist at all.
Not to mention that the favorite video app part is obviously a lie as a lot of widely preferred Windows video apps are bundled with their own codecs, and have probably long supported AV1.

In the end, there's no way around the utter desperation move of removing the AV1 <source> for Edge users. Serving each video in two other formats means that we can at least do something here – try visiting the GitHub release page of the P0234-1 TH01 Anniversary Edition build in Edge and you also don't get to see anything, because that video uses AV1 and GitHub understandably doesn't re-encode every uploaded video into a variety of old formats.
Just for comparison, I tried both that page and the ReC98 blog on an old Android 6 phone from 2014, and even that phone picked and played the AV1 videos with the latest available Chrome and Firefox versions. This was the phone whose available Firefox version didn't support VP9 in 2019, which was my initial reason for adding the VP8 versions. Looks like it's finally time to drop those… 🤔 Maybe in the far future once I start running out of space on this server.

Removing the <source> tags can be done in one of two places:

1. server-side, detecting Edge via the User-Agent header, or
2. client-side, using navigator.userAgentData.brands.

I went with 2) because more dynamic server-side code would only move us further away from static site generation, which would make a lot of sense as the next evolutionary step in the architecture of this website. The client-side solution is much simpler too, and we can defer the deletion until a user actually hovers over a specific video.
And while we're at it, let's also add a popup complaining about this whole state of affairs. Edge is heavily marketed inside Windows as "the modern browser recommended by Microsoft", and you sure wouldn't expect low-quality chroma-subsampled VP9 from such a tagline. With such a level of anti-support for AV1, Edge users deserve to know exactly what's going on, especially since this post also explains what they will encounter on other websites.

Alright, where was I? For TH01, the main menu was the last thing I decompiled before the 100% finalization mark, so it's rather anticlimactic to already cover the TH04/TH05 one now, with both of the games still being very far away from 100%, just because people will soon want to translate the description text in the bottom-right corner of the screen. But then again, the ZUN Soft logo animation would make for an even nicer final piece of decompiled code, especially since the bouncing-ball logo from TH01, TH02, and TH03 was the very first decompilation I did, all the way back in 2015.

The code quality of ZUN's VRAM-based menus has barely increased between TH01 and TH05. Both the top-level and option menu still need to know the bounding rectangle of the other one to unblit the right pixels when switching between the two. And since ZUN sure loved hardcoded and copy-pasted numbers in the PC-98 days, the coordinates both tend to be excessively large, and excessively wrong. Luckily, each menu item comes with its own correct unblitting rectangle, which avoids any graphical glitches that would otherwise occur.
As for actual observable quirks and bugs, these menus only contain one of each, and both are exclusive to TH04:

• Quitting out of the Music Room moves the cursor to the Start option. In TH05, it stays on Music Room.
• Changing the S.E. mode seems to do nothing within TH04's menus, and would only take effect if you also change the Music mode afterward, or launch into the game.

Now that 100% finalization of their OP.EXE binaries is within reach, all this bloat made me think about the viability of a 📝 single-executable build for TH04's and TH05's debloated and anniversary versions. It would be really nice to have such a build ready before I start working on the non-ASCII translations – not just because they will be based on the anniversary branch by default, but also because it would significantly help their development if there are 4 fewer executables to worry about.
However, it's not as simple for these games as it was for TH01. The unique code in their OP.EXE and MAINE.EXE binaries is much larger than Borland's easily removed C++ exception handler, so I'd have to remove a lot more bloat to keep the resulting single binary at or below the size of the original MAIN.EXE. But I'm sure going to try.

Speaking of code that can be debloated for great effect: The second push of this delivery focused on the first-launch sound setup menu, whose BGM and sound effect submenus are almost complete code duplicates of each other. The debloated branch could easily remove more than half of the code in there, yielding another ≈800 bytes in case we need them.
If hex-editing MIKO.CFG is more convenient for you than deleting that file, you can set its first byte to FF to re-trigger this menu. Decompiling this screen was not only relevant now because it contains text rendered with font ROM glyphs and it would help dig our way towards more important strings in the data segment, but also because of its visual style. I can imagine many potential mods that might want to use the same backgrounds and box graphics for their menus.

With the two submenus being shown in a fixed sequence, there's not a lot of room for the code to do anything wrong, and it's even more identical between the two games than the main menu already was. Thankfully, ZUN just reblits the respective options in the new color when moving the cursor, with no 📝 palette tricks. TH04's background image only uses 7 colors, so he could have easily reserved 3 colors for that. In exchange, the TH05 image gets to use the full 16 colors with no change to the code.

Rounding out this delivery, we also got TH05's rolling Yin-Yang Orb animation before the title screen… and it's just more bloat and landmines on a smaller scale that might be noticeable on slower PC-98 models. In total, there are three unnecessary inter-page copies of the entire VRAM that can easily insert lag frames, and two minor page-switching landmines that can potentially lead to tearing on the first frame of the roll or fade animation. Clearly, ZUN did not have smoothness or code quality in mind there, as evidenced by the fact that this animation simply displays 8 .PI files in sequence. But hey, a short animation like this is 📝 another perfectly appropriate place for a quick-and-dirty solution if you develop with a deadline.
And that's 1.30% of all PC-98 Touhou code finalized in two pushes! We're slowly running out of these big shared pieces of ASM code…

I've been neglecting TH03's OP.EXE quite a bit since it simply doesn't contain any translatable plaintext outside the Music Room. All menu labels are gaiji, and even the character selection menu displays its monochrome character names using the 4-plane sprites from CHNAME.BFT. Splitting off half of its data into a separate .ASM file was more akin to getting out a jackhammer to free up the room in front of the third remaining Music Room, but now we're there, and I can decompile all three of them in a natural way, with all referenced data.
Next up, therefore: Doing just that, securing another important piece of text for the upcoming non-ASCII translations and delivering another big piece of easily finalized code. I'm going to work full-time on ReC98 for almost all of December, and delivering that and the Shuusou Gyoku SC-88Pro recording BGM back-to-back should free up about half of the slightly higher cap for this month.

📝 Posted:

2023-11-01 23:58 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0258, P0259, P0260, P0261

⌨ Commits:

5876755...e8a0b3e, e8a0b3e...dfaa3c6, dfaa3c6...ed9ee93, ed9ee93...ae2fc28

💰 Funded by:

Blue Bolt, [Anonymous], Yanga, Splashman

🏷 Tags:

th02

+

th03

+

th04

+

th05

+

rec98

+

file-format

+

blitting

+

dialog

+

waste

-

glitch

+

animation

+

stage

+

mima-th02

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jank

+

And we're back to PC-98 Touhou for a brief interruption of the ongoing Shuusou Gyoku Linux port. Let's clear some of the Touhou-related progress from the backlog, and use the unconstrained nature of these contributions to prepare the 📝 upcoming non-ASCII translations commissioned by Touhou Patch Center. The current budget won't cover all of my ambitions, but it would at least be nice if all text in these games was feasibly translatable by the time I officially start working on that project.

At a little over 3 pushes, it might be surprising to see that this took longer than the 📝 TH03/TH04/TH05 cutscene system. It's obvious that TH02 started out with a different system for in-game dialog, but while TH04 and TH05 look identical on the surface, they only actually share 30% of their dialog code. So this felt more like decompiling 2.4 distinct systems, as opposed to one identical base with tons of game-specific differences on top.

The table of contents was pretty popular last time around, so let's have another one:

1. Overview of TH04's dialog system
2. Changes introduced in TH05
3. Command reference for the TH04 and TH05 systems
4. Overview of TH02's dialog system
5. TH02's face portrait images
6. Bugs during TH02's dialog box slide-in animation
7. Bugs and quirks in Mima's defeat dialog (might be lore-relevant)
8. TH03 win messages

Let's start with the ones from TH04 and TH05, since they are not that broken. For TH04, ZUN started out by copy-pasting the cutscene system, causing the result to inherit many of the caveats I already described in the cutscene blog post:

• It's still a plaintext format geared exclusively toward full-width Japanese text.
• The parser still ignores all whitespace, forcing ASCII text into hacks with unassigned Shift-JIS lead bytes outside the second byte of a 2-byte chunk.
• Commands are still preceded by a 0x5C byte, which renders as either a \ or a ¥ depending on your font and interpretation of Shift-JIS.
• Command parameters are parsed in exactly the same way, with all the same limits.
• A lot of the same script commands are identical, including 7 of them that were not used in TH04's original dialog scripts.

Then, however, he greatly simplified the system. Mainly, this was done by moving text rendering from the PC-98 graphics chip to the text chip, which avoids the need for any text-related unblitting code, but ZUN also added a bunch of smaller changes:

• The player must advance through every dialog box by releasing any held keys and then pressing any key mapped to a game action. There are no timeouts.
• The delay for every 2 bytes of text was doubled to 2 frames, and can't be overridden.
• Instead of holding ESC to fast-forward, pressing any key will immediately print the entire rest of a text box.
• Dialogs run in their own single-buffered frame loop, interrupting the rest of the game. The other VRAM page keeps the background pixels required for unblitting the face images.
• All script commands that affect the graphics layer are preceded by a 1-frame delay. ZUN most likely did this because of the single-buffered nature, as it prevents tearing on the first frame by waiting for the CRT beam to return to the top-left corner before changing any pixels.
• Both boxes are intended to contain up to 30 half-width characters on each of their up to 3 lines, but nothing in the code enforces these limits. There is no support for automatic line breaks or starting new boxes.

TH05 then moved from TH04's plaintext scripts to the binary .TX2 format while removing all the unused commands copy-pasted from the cutscene system. Except for a single additional command intended to clear a text box, TH05's dialog system only supports a strict subset of the features of TH04's system.
This change also introduced the following differences compared to TH04:

• The game now stores the dialog of all 4 playable characters in the same file, with a (4 + 1)-word header that indicates the byte offset and length of each character's script. This way, it can load only the one script for the currently played character.
• Since there is no need for whitespace in a binary format, you can now use ASCII 0x20 spaces even as the first byte of a 2-byte text chunk! 🥳
• All command parameters are now mandatory.
• Filenames are now passed directly by pointer to the respective game function. Therefore, they now need to be null-terminated, but can in turn be as long as 📝 the number of remaining bytes in the allocated dialog segment. In practice though, the game still runs on DOS and shares its restriction of 8.3 filenames…
• When starting a new dialog box, any existing text in the other box is now colored blue.
• Thanks to ZUN messing up the return values of the command-interpreting switch function, you can effectively use only line break and gaiji commands in the middle of text. All other commands do execute, but the interpreter then also treats their command byte as a Shift-JIS lead byte and places it in text RAM together with whatever other byte follows in the script.
  This is why TH04 can and does put its \= commands into the boxes started with the 0 or 1 commands, but TH05 has to put its 0x02 commands before the equivalent 0x0D.

For modding these files, you probably want to use TXDEF from -Tom-'s MysticTK. It decodes these files into a text representation, and its encoder then takes care of the character-specific byte offsets in the 10-byte header. This text representation simplifies the format a lot by avoiding all corner cases and landmines you'd experience during hex-editing – most notably by interpreting the box-starting 0x0D as a command to show text that takes a string parameter, avoiding the broken calls to script commands in the middle of text. However, you'd still have to manually ensure an even number of bytes on every line of text.

In the entry function of TH05's dialog loop, we also encounter the hack that is responsible for properly handling 📝 ZUN's hidden Extra Stage replay. Since the dialog loop doesn't access the replay inputs but still requires key presses to advance through the boxes, ZUN chose to just skip the dialog altogether in the specific case of the Extra Stage replay being active, and replicated all sprite management commands from the dialog script by just hardcoding them.
And you know what? Not only do I not mind this hack, but I would have preferred it over the actual dialog system! The aforementioned sprite management commands effectively boil down to manual memory management, deallocating all stage enemy and midboss sprites and thus ensuring that the boss sprites end up at specific master.lib sprite IDs (patnums). The hardcoded boss rendering function then expects these sprites to be available at these exact IDs… which means that the otherwise hardcoded bosses can't render properly without the dialog script running before them.
There is absolutely no excuse for the game to burden dialog scripts with this functionality. Sure, delayed deallocation would allow them to blit stage-specific sprites, but the original games don't do that; probably because none of the two games feature an unblitting command. And even if they did, it would have still been cleaner to expose the boss-specific sprite setup as a single script command that can then also be called from game code if the script didn't do so. Commands like these just are a recipe for crashes, especially with parsers that expect fullwidth Shift-JIS text and where misaligned ASCII text can easily cause these commands to be skipped.

But then again, it does make for funny screenshot material if you accidentally the deallocation and then see bosses being turned into stage enemies:

With all the general details out of the way, here's the command reference:

0 1	0x00 0x01	Selects either the player character (0) or the boss (1) as the currently speaking character, and moves the cursor to the beginning of the text box. In TH04, this command also directly starts the new dialog box, which is probably why it's not prefixed with a \ as it only makes sense outside of text. TH05 requires a separate 0x0D command to do the same.
\=1	0x02 0x!!	Replaces the face portrait of the currently active speaking character with image #1 within her .CD2 file.
\=255	0x02 0xFF	Removes the face portrait from the currently active text box.
\l,filename	0x03 filename 0x00	Calls master.lib's super_entry_bfnt() function, which loads sprites from a BFNT file to consecutive IDs starting at the current patnum write cursor.
\c	0x04	Deallocates all stage-specific BFNT sprites (i.e., stage enemies and midbosses), freeing up conventional RAM for the boss sprites and ensuring that master.lib's patnum write cursor ends up at  128 /  180. In TH05's Extra Stage, this command also replaces 📝 the sprites loaded from MIKO16.BFT with the ones from ST06_16.BFT.
\d		Deallocates all face portrait images. The game automatically does this at the end of each dialog sequence. However, ZUN wanted to load Stage 6 Yuuka's 76 KiB of additional animations inside the script via \l, and would have once again run up against the master.lib heap size limit without that extra free memory.
\m,filename	0x05 filename 0x00	Stops the currently playing BGM, loads a new one from the given file, and starts playback.
\m$	0x05 $ 0x00	Stops the currently playing BGM. Note that TH05 interprets $ as a null-terminated filename as well.
\m*		Restarts playback of the currently loaded BGM from the beginning.
\b0,0,0	0x06 0x!!!! 0x!!!! 0x!!	Blits the master.lib patnum with the ID indicated by the third parameter to the current VRAM page at the top-left screen position indicated by the first two parameters.
\e0		Plays the sound effect with the given ID.
\t100		Sets palette brightness via master.lib's palette_settone() to any value from 0 (fully black) to 200 (fully white). 100 corresponds to the palette's original colors.
\fo1 \fi1		Calls master.lib's palette_black_out() or palette_black_in() to play a hardware palette fade animation from or to black, spending roughly 1 frame on each of the 16 fade steps.
\wo1 \wi1	0x09 0x!! 0x0A 0x!!	Calls master.lib's palette_white_out() or palette_white_in() to play a hardware palette fade animation from or to white, spending roughly 1 frame on each of the 16 fade steps. The TH05 version of 0x09 also clears the text in both boxes before the animation.
\n	0x0B	Starts a new line by resetting the X coordinate of the TRAM cursor to the left edge of the text area and incrementing the Y coordinate. The new line will always be the next one below the last one that was properly started, regardless of whether the text previously wrapped to the next TRAM row at the edge of the screen.
\g8		Plays a blocking 8-frame screen shake animation. Copy-pasted from the cutscene parser, but actually used right at the end of the dialog shown before TH04's Bad Ending.
\ga0	0x0C 0x!!	Shows the gaiji with the given ID from 0 to 255 at the current cursor position, ignoring the per-glyph delay.
\k0		Waits 0 frames (0 = forever) for any key to be pressed before continuing script execution.
	0x0D	Starts a new dialog box with the previously selected speaker. All text until the next 0xFF command will appear on screen. Inside dialogs, this is a no-op.
	0x0E	Takes the current dialog cursor as the top-left corner of a 240×48-pixel rectangle, and replaces all text RAM characters within that rectangle with whitespace. This is only used to clear the player character's text box before Shinki's final いくよ‼ box. Shinki has two consecutive text boxes in all 4 scripts here, and ZUN probably wanted to clear the otherwise blue text to imply a dramatic pause before Shinki's final sentence. Nice touch. (You could, however, also use it after a box-ending 0xFF command to mess with text RAM in general.)
\#		Quits the currently running loop. This returns from either the text loop to the command loop, or it ends the dialog sequence by returning from the command loop back to gameplay. If this stage of the game later starts another dialog sequence, it will start at the next script byte.
\$		Like \#, but first waits for any key to be pressed.
	0xFF	Behaves like TH04's \$ in the text loop, and like \# in the command loop. Hence, it's not possible in TH05 to automatically end a text box and advance to the next one without waiting for a key press.

At the end of the day, you might criticize the system for how its landmines make it annoying to mod in ASCII text, but it all works and does what it's supposed to. ZUN could have written the cleanest single and central Shift-JIS iterator that properly chunks a byte buffer into halfwidth and fullwidth codepoints, and I'd still be throwing it out for the upcoming non-ASCII translations in favor of something that either also supports UTF-8 or performs dictionary lookups with a full box of text.
The only actual bug can be found in the input detection, which once again doesn't correctly handle the infamous key up/key down scancode quirk of PC-98 keyboards. All it takes is one wrongly placed input polling call, and suddenly you have to think about how the update cycle behind the PC-98 keyboard state bytes might cause the game to run the regular 2-frame delay for a single 2-byte chunk of text before it shows the full text of a box after all… But even this bug is highly theoretical and could probably only be observed very, very rarely, and exclusively on real hardware.

The same can't be said about TH02 though, but more on that later. Let's first take a look at its data, which started out much simpler in that game. The STAGE?.TXT files contain just raw Shift-JIS text with no trace of commands or structure. Turning on the whitespace display feature in your editor reveals how the dialog system even assumes a fixed byte length for each box: 36 bytes per line which will appear on screen, followed by 4 bytes of padding, which the original files conveniently use to visually split the lines via a CR/LF newline sequence. Make sure to disable trimming of trailing whitespace in your editor to not ruin the file when modding the text…

靈夢：あんた、まだ名前も聞いてないの··
······に覚えられないわよ。・・・・・··
里香：あたいは、里香よ。覚えときなさ··
・・・い。・・・・・・················

Consequently, everything else is hardcoded – every effect shown between text boxes, the face portrait shown for each box, and even how many boxes are part of each dialog sequence. Which means that the source code now contains a long hardcoded list of face IDs for most of the text boxes in the game, with the rest being part of the dedicated hardcoded dialog scripts for ²/₃ of the game's stages.
Without the restriction to a fixed set of scripting commands, TH02 naturally gravitated to having the most varied dialog sequences of all PC-98 Touhou games. This flexibility certainly facilitated Mima's grand entrance animation in Stage 4, or the different lines in Stage 4 and 5 depending on whether you already used a continue or not. Marisa's post-boss dialog even inserts the number of continues into the text itself – by, you guessed it, writing to hardcoded byte offsets inside the dialog text before printing it to the screen. But once again, I have nothing to criticize here – not even the fact that the alternate dialog scripts have to mutate the "box cursor" to jump to the intended boxes within the file. I know that some people in my audience like VMs, but I would have considered it more bloated if ZUN had implemented a full-blown scripting language just to handle all these special cases.

Another unique aspect of TH02 is the way it stores its face portraits, which are infamous for how hard they are to find in the original data files. These sprites are actually map tiles, stored in MIKO_K.MPN, and drawn using the same functions used to blit the regular map tiles to the 📝 tile source area in VRAM. We can only guess why ZUN chose this one out of the three graphics formats he used in TH02:

• BFNT supports transparency, but sacrifices one of the 16 colors to do so. ZUN only used 15 colors for the face portraits, but might have wanted to keep open the option to use that 16^th color. The detailed backgrounds also suggest that these images were never supposed to be transparent to begin with.
• PI is used for all bigger and non-transparent images, but ZUN would have had to write a separate small function to blit a 48×48 subsection of such an image. That certainly wouldn't have stopped him in the TH01 days, but he probably was already past that point by this game.
• That only leaves .MPN. Sure, he did have to slice each face into 9 separate 16×16 "map" tiles to use this format, but that's a small price to pay in exchange for not having to write any new low-level blitting code, especially since he must have already had an asset pipeline to generate these files.

And since you're certainly wondering about all these black tiles at the edges: Yes, these are not only part of the file and pad it from the required 240×192 pixels to 256×256, but also kept in memory during a stage, wasting 9.5 KiB of conventional RAM. That's 172 seconds of potential input replay data, just for those people who might still think that we need EMS for replays.

Alright, we've got the text, we've got the faces, let's slide in the box and display it all on screen. Apparently though, we also have to blit the player and option sprites using raw, low-level master.lib function calls in the process? This can't be right, especially because ZUN always blits the option sprite associated with the Reimu-A shot type, regardless of which one the player actually selected. And if you keep moving above the box area before the dialog starts, you get to see exactly how wrong this is:

Let's look closer at Reimu's sprite during the slide-in animation, and in the two frames before:

This one image shows off no less than 4 bugs:

1. ZUN blits the stationary player sprite here, regardless of whether the player was previously moving left or right. This is a nice way of indicating that Reimu stops moving once the dialog starts, but maybe ZUN should have unblitted the old sprite so that the new one wouldn't have appeared on top. The game only unblits the 384×64 pixels covered by the dialog box on every frame of the slide-in animation, so Reimu would only appear correctly if her sprite happened to be entirely located within that area.

2. All sprites are shifted up by 1 pixel in frame 2️⃣. This one is not a bug in the dialog system, but in the main game loop. The game runs the relevant actions in the following order:

   1. Invalidate any map tiles covered by entities
   2. Redraw invalidated tiles
   3. Decrement the Y coordinate at the top of VRAM according to the scroll speed
   4. Update and render all game entities
   5. Scroll in new tiles as necessary according to the scroll speed, and report whether the game has scrolled one pixel past the end of the map
   6. If that happened, pretend it didn't by incrementing the value calculated in #3 for all further frames and skipping to #8.
   7. Issue a GDC SCROLL command to reflect the line calculated in #3 on the display
   8. Wait for VSync
   9. Flip VRAM pages
   10. Start boss if we're past the end of the map

   The problem here: Once the dialog starts, the game has already rendered an entire new frame, with all sprites being offset by a new Y scroll offset, without adjusting the graphics GDC's scroll registers to compensate. Hence, the Y position in 3️⃣ is the correct one, and the whole existence of frame 2️⃣ is a bug in itself. (Well… OK, probably a quirk because speedrunning exists, and it would be pretty annoying to synchronize any video regression tests of the future TH02 Anniversary Edition if it renders one fewer frame in the middle of a stage.)

3. ZUN blits the option sprites to their position from frame 1️⃣. This brings us back to 📝 TH02's special way of retaining the previous and current position in a two-element array, indexed with a VRAM page ID. Normally, this would be equivalent to using dedicated prev and cur structure fields and you'd just index it with the back page for every rendering call. But if you then decide to go single-buffered for dialogs and render them onto the front page instead…
   Note that fixing bug #2 would not cancel out this one – the sprites would then simply be rendered to their position in the frame before 1️⃣.

4. And of course, the fixed option sprite ID also counts as a bug.

As for the boxes themselves, it's yet another loop that prints 2-byte chunks of Shift-JIS text at an even slower fixed interval of 3 frames. In an interesting quirk though, ZUN assumes that every box starts with the name of the speaking character in its first two fullwidth Shift-JIS characters, followed by a fullwidth colon. These 6 bytes are displayed immediately at the start of every box, without the usual delay. The resulting alignment looks rather janky with Genjii, whose single right-padded 亀 kanji looks quite awkward with the fullwidth space between the name and the colon. Kind of makes you wonder why ZUN just didn't spell out his proper name, 玄爺, instead, but I get the stylistic difference.
In Stage 4, the two-kanji assumption then breaks with Marisa's three-kanji name, which causes the full-width colon to be printed as the first delayed character in each of her boxes:

That's all the issues and quirks in the system itself. The scripts themselves don't leave much room for bugs as they basically just loop over the hardcoded face ID array at this level… until we reach the end of the game. Previously, the slide-in animation could simply use the tile invalidation and re-rendering system to unblit the box on each frame, which also explained why Reimu had to be separately rendered on top. But this no longer works with a custom-rendered boss background, and so the game just chooses to flood-fill the area with graphics chip color #0:

For Mima's final defeat dialog though, ZUN chose to not even show the box. He might have realized the issue by that point, or simply preferred the more dramatic effect this had on the lines. The resulting issues, however, might even have ramifications for such un-technical things as lore and character dynamics. As it turns out, the code for this dialog sequence does in fact render Mima's smiling face for all boxes?! You only don't see it in the original game because it's rendered to the other VRAM page that remains invisible during the dialog sequence:

Here's how I interpret the situation:

• The function that launches into the final part of the dialog script starts with dedicated code to re-render Mima to the back page, on top of the previously rendered planet background. Since the entire script runs on the front page (and thus, on top of the previous frame) and the game launches into the ending immediately after, you don't ever get to see this new partial frame in the original game.
  Showing this partial frame would also ensure that you can actually read the dialog text without a surrounding box. Then, the white letters won't ever be put on top of any white bullets – or, worse, be completely invisible if the dialog is triggered in the middle of Reimu-B's bomb animation, which fills VRAM with lots of white pixels.
  Hence, we've got enough evidence to classify not showing the back page as a ZUN bug. 🐞
• However, Mima's smiling face jars with the words she says here. Adding the face would deviate more significantly from the original game than removing the player shot, item, bullet, or spark sprites would. It's imaginable that ZUN just forgot about the dedicated code that re-rendered just Mima to the back page, but the faces add something to the dialog, and ZUN would have clearly noticed and fixed it if their absence wasn't intended. Heck, ZUN might have just put something related to Mima into the code because TH02's dialog system has no way of not drawing a face for a dialog box. Filling the face area with graphics chip color #0, as seen in the first and third boxes of the Extra Stage pre-boss dialog, would have been an alternative, but that would have been equally wrong with regard to the background.
  Hence, the invisible face portrait from the original game is a ZUN quirk. 🎺

So, the future TH02 Anniversary Edition will fix the bug by showing the back page, but retain the quirk by rewriting the dialog code to not blit the face.

And with that, we've secured all in-game dialog for the upcoming non-ASCII translations! The remaining ²/₃ of the last push made for a good occasion to also decompile the small amount of code related to TH03's win messages, stored in the @0?TX.TXT files. Similar to TH02's dialog format, these files are also split into fixed-size blocks of 3×60 bytes. But this time, TH03 loads all 60 bytes of a line, including the CR/LF line breaking codepoints in the original files, into the statically allocated buffer that it renders from. These control characters are then only filtered to whitespace by ZUN's graph_putsa_fx() function. If you remove the line breaks, you get to use the full 60 bytes on every line.
The final commits went to the MIKO.CFG loading and saving functions used in TH04's and TH05's OP.EXE, as well as TH04's game startup code to finally catch up with 📝 TH05's counterpart from over 3 years ago. This brought us right in front of the main menu rendering code in both TH04 and TH05, which is identical in both games and will be tackled in the next PC-98 Touhou delivery.

Next up, though: Returning to Shuusou Gyoku, and adding support for SC-88Pro recordings as BGM. Which may or may not come with a slight controversy…

📝 Posted:

2022-07-10 11:48 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0203, P0204

⌨ Commits:

4568bf7...86cdf5f, 86cdf5f...0c682b5

💰 Funded by:

GhostRiderCog, [Anonymous], Yanga

🏷 Tags:

th01

+

rec98

+

meta

+

gameplay

+

card-flipping

+

player

+

shot

+

mod

+

rng

+

bomb

+

waste

-

Let's start right with the milestones:

• More than 50% of all PC-98 Touhou game code has now been reverse-engineered! 🎉 While this number isn't equally distributed among the games, we've got one game very close to 100% and reverse-engineered most of the core features of two others. During the last 32 months of continuous funding, I've averaged an overall speed of 1.11% total RE per month. That looks like a decent prediction of how much more time it will take for 100% across all games – unless, of course, I'd get to work towards some of the non-RE goals in the meantime.
• 70 functions left in TH01, with less than 10,000 ASM instructions remaining! Due to immense hype, I've temporarily raised the cap by 50% until August 15. With the last TH01 pushes delivering at roughly 1.5× of the currently calculated average speed, that should be more than enough to get TH01 done – especially since I expect YuugenMagan to come with lots of redundant code. Therefore, please also request a secondary priority for these final TH01 RE contributions.

So, how did this card-flipping stage obstacle delivery get so horribly delayed? With all the different layouts showcased in the 28 card-flipping stages, you'd expect this to be among the more stable and bug-free parts of the codebase. Heck, with all stage objects being placed on a 32×32-pixel grid, this is the first TH01-related blog post this year that doesn't have to describe an alignment-related unblitting glitch!

That alone doesn't mean that this code is free from quirky behavior though, and we have to look no further than the first few lines of the collision handling for round bumpers to already find a whole lot of that. Simplified, they do the following:

pixel_t delta_y_between_orb_and_bumper = (orb.top - bumper.top);
if(delta_y_between_orb_and_bumper <= 0) {
	orb.top = (bumper.top - 24);
} else {
	orb.top = (bumper.top + 24);
}

Immediately, you wonder why these assignments only exist for the Y coordinate. Sure, hitting a bumper from the left or right side should happen less often, but it's definitely possible. Is it really a good idea to warp the Orb to the top or bottom edge of a bumper regardless?
What's more important though: The fact that these immediate assignments exist at all. The game's regular Orb physics work by producing a Y velocity from the single force acting on the Orb and a gravity factor, and are completely independent of its current Y position. A bumper collision does also apply a new force onto the Orb further down in the code, but these assignments still bypass the physics system and are bound to have some knock-on effect on the Orb's movement.

To observe that effect, we just have to enter Stage 18 on the 地獄/Jigoku route, where it's particularly trivial to reproduce. At a 📝 horizontal velocity of ±4, these assignments are exactly what can cause the Orb to endlessly bounce between two bumpers. As rudimentary as the Orb's physics may be, just letting them do their work would have entirely prevented these loops:

Now, you might be thinking that these Y assignments were just an attempt to prevent the Orb from colliding with the same bumper again on the next frame. After all, those 24 pixels exactly correspond to ⅓ of the height of a bumper's hitbox with an additional pixel added on top. However, the game already perfectly prevents repeated collisions by turning off collision testing with the same bumper for the next 7 frames after a collision. Thus, we can conclude that ZUN either explicitly coded bumper collision handling to facilitate these loops, or just didn't take out that code after inevitably discovering what it did. This is not janky code, it's not a glitch, it's not sarcasm from my end, and it's not the game's physics being bad.

But wait. Couldn't these assignments just be a remnant from a time in development before ZUN decided on the 7-frame delay on further collisions? Well, even that explanation stops holding water after the next few lines of code. Simplified, again:

pixel_t delta_x_between_orb_and_bumper = (orb.left - bumper.left);
if((orb.velocity.x == +4) && (delta_x_between_orb_and_bumper < 0)) {
	orb.velocity.x = -4;
} else if((orb.velocity.x == -4) && (delta_x_between_orb_and_bumper > 0)) {
	orb.velocity.x = +4;
}

What's important here is the part that's not in the code – namely, anything that handles X velocities of -8 or +8. In those cases, the Orb simply continues in the same horizontal direction. The manual Y assignment is the only part of the code that actually prevents a collision there, as the newly applied force is not guaranteed to be enough:

Forgetting to handle ⅖ of your discrete X velocity cases is simply not something you do by accident. So we might as well say that ZUN deliberately designed the game to behave exactly as it does in this regard.

Bumpers also come in vertical or horizontal bar shapes. Their collision handling also turns off further collision testing for the next 7 frames, and doesn't do any manual coordinate assignment. That's definitely a step up in cleanliness from round bumpers, but it doesn't seem to keep in mind that the player can fire a new shot every 4 frames when standing still. That makes it immediately obvious why this works:

That's the most well-known case of reducing the Orb's horizontal velocity to 0 by exactly hitting it with shots in its center and then button-mashing it through a horizontal bar. This also works with vertical bars and yields even more interesting results there, but if we want to have any chance of understanding what happens there, we have to first go over some basics:

• Collision detection for all stage obstacles is done in row-major order from the top-left to the bottom-right corner of the playfield.
• All obstacles are collision-tested independently from each other, with the collision response code immediately following the test.
• The hitboxes for bumper bars extend far past their 32×32 sprites to make sure that the Orb can collide with them from any side. They are a pixel-perfect* 87×56 pixels for horizontal bars, and 57×87 pixels for vertical ones. Yes, that's no typo, they really do differ in one pixel.
• Changing the Y velocity during such a collision just involves applying a new force with the magnitude of the negated current Y velocity, which can be done multiple times during a frame without changing the result. This explains why the force is correctly inverted in the clip above, despite the Orb colliding with two bumpers simultaneously.
• Lacking a similar force system, the X coordinate is simply directly inverted.

However, if that were everything the game did, kicking the Orb into a column of vertical bumper bars would lead them to behave more like a rope that the Orb can climb, as the initial collision with two hitboxes cancels out the intended sign change that reflects the Orb away from the bars:

While that would have been a fun gameplay mechanic on its own, it immediately breaks apart once you place two vertical bumper bars next to each other. Due to how these bumper bar hitboxes extend past their sprites, any two adjacent vertical bars will end up with the exact same hitbox in absolute screen coordinates. Stage 17 on the 魔界/Makai route contains exactly such a layout:

ZUN's workaround: Setting a "vertical bumper bar block flag" after any collision with such a bar, which simply disables any collision with any vertical bar for the next 7 frames. This quick hack made all vertical bars work as intended, and avoided the need for involving the Orb's X velocity in any kind of physics system.

Edit (2022-07-12): This flag only works around glitches that would be caused by simultaneously colliding with more than one vertical bar. The actual response to a bumper bar collision still remains unaffected, and is very naive:

• Horizontal bars always invert the Orb's Y velocity
• Vertical bars invert either the Y or X velocity depending on whether the Orb's current X velocity is 0 (Y) or not (X)

Here's the hitbox overlay for 地獄/Jigoku Stage 19, and here's an updated version of the 📝 Orb physics debug mod that now also shows bumper bar collision frame numbers: 2022-07-10-TH01OrbPhysicsDebug.zip See the th01_orb_debug branch for the code. To use it, simply replace REIIDEN.EXE, and run the game in debug mode, via game d on the DOS prompt. If you encounter a gameplay situation that doesn't seem to be covered by this blog post, you can now verify it for yourself. Thanks to touhou-memories for bringing these issues to my attention! That definitely was a glaring omission from the initial version of this blog post.

With that clarified, we can now try mashing the Orb into these two vertical bars:

At first, that workaround doesn't seem to make a difference here. As we expect, the frame numbers now tell us that only one of the two bumper bars in a row activates, but we couldn't have told otherwise as the number of bars has no effect on newly applied Y velocity forces. On a closer look, the Orb's rise to the top of the playfield is in fact caused by that workaround though, combined with the unchanged top-to-bottom order of collision testing. As soon as any bumper bar completed its 7 collision delay frames, it resets the aforementioned flag, which already reactivates collision handling for any remaining vertical bumper bars during the same frame. Look out for frames with both a 7 and a 1, like the one marked in the video above: The 7 will always appear before the 1 in the row-major order. Whenever this happens, the current oscillation period is cut down from 7 to 6 frames – and because collision testing runs from top to bottom, this will always happen during the falling part. Depending on the Y velocity, the rising part may also be cut down to 6 frames from time to time, but that one at least has a chance to last for the full 7 frames. This difference adds those crucial extra frames of upward movement, which add up to send the Orb to the top. Without the flag, you'd always see the Orb oscillating between a fixed range of the bar column.
Finally, it's the "top of playfield" force that gradually slows down the Orb and makes sure it ultimately only moves at sub-pixel velocities, which have no visible effect. Because 📝 the regular effect of gravity is reset with each newly applied force, it's completely negated during most of the climb. This even holds true once the Orb reached the top: Since the Orb requires a negative force to repeatedly arrive up there and be bounced back, this force will stay active for the first 5 of the 7 collision frames and not move the Orb at all. Once gravity kicks in at the 5^th frame and adds 1 to the Y velocity, it's already too late: The new velocity can't be larger than 0.5, and the Orb only has 1 or 2 frames before the flag reset causes it to be bounced back up to the top again.

Portals, on the other hand, turn out to be much simpler than the old description that ended up on Touhou Wiki in October 2005 might suggest. Everything about their teleportations is random: The destination portal, the exit force (as an integer between -9 and +9), as well as the exit X velocity, with each of the 📝 5 distinct horizontal velocities having an equal chance of being chosen. Of course, if the destination portal is next to the left or right edge of the playfield and it chooses to fire the Orb towards that edge, it immediately bounces off into the opposite direction, whereas the 0 velocity is always selected with a constant 20% probability.

The selection process for the destination portal involves a bit more than a single rand() call. The game bundles all obstacles in a single structure of dynamically allocated arrays, and only knows how many obstacles there are in total, not per type. Now, that alone wouldn't have much of an impact on random portal selection, as you could simply roll a random obstacle ID and try again if it's not a portal. But just to be extra cute, ZUN instead iterates over all obstacles, selects any non-entered portal with a chance of ¼, and just gives up if that dice roll wasn't successful after 16 loops over the whole array, defaulting to the entered portal in that case.
In all its silliness though, this works perfectly fine, and results in a chance of 0.75^{16(𝑛 - 1)} for the Orb exiting out of the same portal it entered, with 𝑛 being the total number of portals in a stage. That's 1% for two portals, and 0.01% for three. Pretty decent for a random result you don't want to happen, but that hurts nobody if it does.

The one tiny ZUN bug with portals is technically not even part of the newly decompiled code here. If Reimu gets hit while the Orb is being sent through a portal, the Orb is immediately kicked out of the portal it entered, no matter whether it already shows up inside the sprite of the destination portal. Neither of the two portal sprites is reset when this happens, leading to "two Orbs" being visible simultaneously.
This makes very little sense no matter how you look at it. The Orb doesn't receive a new velocity or force when this happens, so it will simply re-enter the same portal once the gameplay resumes on Reimu's next life:

And that's it! At least the turrets don't have anything notable to say about them 📝 that I haven't said before.

That left another ½ of a push over at the end. Way too much time to finish FUUIN.exe, way too little time to start with Mima… but the bomb animation fit perfectly in there. No secrets or bugs there, just a bunch of sprite animation code wasting at least another 82 bytes in the data segment. The special effect after the kuji-in sprites uses the same single-bitplane 32×32 square inversion effect seen at the end of Kikuri's and Sariel's entrance animation, except that it's a 3-stack of 16-rings moving at 6, 7, and 8 pixels per frame respectively. At these comparatively slow speeds, the byte alignment of each square adds some further noise to the discoloration pattern… if you even notice it below all the shaking and seizure-inducing hardware palette manipulation.
And yes, due to the very destructive nature of the effect, the game does in fact rely on it only being applied to VRAM page 0. While that will cause every moving sprite to tear holes into the inverted squares along its trajectory, keeping a clean playfield on VRAM page 1 is what allows all that pixel damage to be easily undone at the end of this 89-frame animation.

Next up: Mima! Let's hope that stage obstacles already were the most complex part remaining in TH01…

📝 Posted:

2022-01-31 09:17 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0174, P0175, P0176, P0177, P0178, P0179, P0180, P0181

⌨ Commits:

27f901c...a0fe812, a0fe812...40ac9a7, 40ac9a7...c5dc45b, c5dc45b...5f0cabc, 5f0cabc...60621f8, 60621f8...9e5b344, 9e5b344...091f19f, 091f19f...313450f

💰 Funded by:

Ember2528, Yanga

🏷 Tags:

th01

+

rec98

+

gameplay

+

boss

+

sariel

+

danmaku-pattern

+

rng

+

waste

-

pc98

+

blitting

+

good-code

+

glitch

+

tcc

+

unused

+

jank

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Here we go, TH01 Sariel! This is the single biggest boss fight in all of PC-98 Touhou: If we include all custom effect code we previously decompiled, it amounts to a total of 10.31% of all code in TH01 (and 3.14% overall). These 8 pushes cover the final 8.10% (or 2.47% overall), and are likely to be the single biggest delivery this project will ever see. Considering that I only managed to decompile 6.00% across all games in 2021, 2022 is already off to a much better start!

So, how can Sariel's code be that large? Well, we've got:

• 16 danmaku patterns; including the one snowflake detonating into a giant 94×32 hitbox
• Gratuitous usage of floating-point variables, bloating the binary thanks to Turbo C++ 4.0J's particularly horrid code generation
• The hatching birds that shoot pellets
• 3 separate particle systems, sharing the general idea, overall code structure, and blitting algorithm, but differing in every little detail
• The "gust of wind" background transition animation
• 5 sets of custom monochrome sprite animations, loaded from BOSS6GR?.GRC
• A further 3 hardcoded monochrome 8×8 sprites for the "swaying leaves" pattern during the second form

In total, it's just under 3,000 lines of C++ code, containing a total of 8 definite ZUN bugs, 3 of them being subpixel/pixel confusions. That might not look all too bad if you compare it to the 📝 player control function's 8 bugs in 900 lines of code, but given that Konngara had 0… (Edit (2022-07-17): Konngara contains two bugs after all: A 📝 possible heap corruption in test or debug mode, and the infamous 📝 temporary green discoloration.) And no, the code doesn't make it obvious whether ZUN coded Konngara or Sariel first; there's just as much evidence for either.

Some terminology before we start: Sariel's first form is separated into four phases, indicated by different background images, that cycle until Sariel's HP reach 0 and the second, single-phase form starts. The danmaku patterns within each phase are also on a cycle, and the game picks a random but limited number of patterns per phase before transitioning to the next one. The fight always starts at pattern 1 of phase 1 (the random purple lasers), and each new phase also starts at its respective first pattern.

Sariel's bugs already start at the graphics asset level, before any code gets to run. Some of the patterns include a wand raise animation, which is stored in BOSS6_2.BOS:

The "lowered wand" sprite is missing in this file simply because it's captured from the regular background image in VRAM, at the beginning of the fight and after every background transition. What I previously thought to be 📝 background storage code has therefore a different meaning in Sariel's case. Since this captured sprite is fully opaque, it will reset the entire 128×128 wand area… wait, 128×128, rather than 96×96? Yup, this lowered sprite is larger than necessary, wasting 1,967 bytes of conventional memory.
That still doesn't quite explain the second sprite in BOSS6_2.BOS though. Turns out that the black part is indeed meant to unblit the purple reflection (?) in the first sprite. But… that's not how you would correctly unblit that?

Just like Konngara, Sariel continues the approach of using a single function per danmaku pattern or custom entity. While I appreciate that this allows all pattern- and entity-specific state to be scoped locally to that one function, it quickly gets ugly as soon as such a function has to do more than one thing.
The "bird function" is particularly awful here: It's just one if(…) {…} else if(…) {…} else if(…) {…} chain with different branches for the subfunction parameter, with zero shared code between any of these branches. It also uses 64-bit floating-point double as its subpixel type… and since it also takes four of those as parameters (y'know, just in case the "spawn new bird" subfunction is called), every call site has to also push four double values onto the stack. Thanks to Turbo C++ even using the FPU for pushing a 0.0 constant, we have already reached maximum floating-point decadence before even having seen a single danmaku pattern. Why decadence? Every possible spawn position and velocity in both bird patterns just uses pixel resolution, with no fractional component in sight. And there goes another 720 bytes of conventional memory.

Speaking about bird patterns, the red-bird one is where we find the first code-level ZUN bug: The spawn cross circle sprite suddenly disappears after it finished spawning all the bird eggs. How can we tell it's a bug? Because there is code to smoothly fly this sprite off the playfield, that code just suddenly forgets that the sprite's position is stored in Q12.4 subpixels, and treats it as raw screen pixels instead. As a result, the well-intentioned 640×400 screen-space clipping rectangle effectively shrinks to 38×23 pixels in the top-left corner of the screen. Which the sprite is always outside of, and thus never rendered again.
The intended animation is easily restored though:

Also, did you know that birds actually have a quite unfair 14×38-pixel hitbox? Not that you'd ever collide with them in any of the patterns…

Another 3 of the 8 bugs can be found in the symmetric, interlaced spawn rays used in three of the patterns, and the 32×32 debris "sprites" shown at their endpoint, at the edge of the screen. You kinda have to commend ZUN's attention to detail here, and how he wrote a lot of code for those few rapidly animated pixels that you most likely don't even notice, especially with all the other wrong pixels resulting from rendering glitches. One of the bugs in the very final pattern of phase 4 even turns them into the vortex sprites from the second pattern in phase 1 during the first 5 frames of the first time the pattern is active, and I had to single-step the blitting calls to verify it.
It certainly was annoying how much time I spent making sense of these bugs, and all weird blitting offsets, for just a few pixels… Let's look at something more wholesome, shall we?

So far, we've only seen the PC-98 GRCG being used in RMW (read-modify-write) mode, which I previously 📝 explained in the context of TH01's red-white HP pattern. The second of its three modes, TCR (Tile Compare Read), affects VRAM reads rather than writes, and performs "color extraction" across all 4 bitplanes: Instead of returning raw 1bpp data from one plane, a VRAM read will instead return a bitmask, with a 1 bit at every pixel whose full 4-bit color exactly matches the color at that offset in the GRCG's tile register, and 0 everywhere else. Sariel uses this mode to make sure that the 2×2 particles and the wind effect are only blitted on top of "air color" pixels, with other parts of the background behaving like a mask. The algorithm:

1. Set the GRCG to TCR mode, and all 8 tile register dots to the air color
2. Read N bits from the target VRAM position to obtain an N-bit mask where all 1 bits indicate air color pixels at the respective position
3. AND that mask with the alpha plane of the sprite to be drawn, shifted to the correct start bit within the 8-pixel VRAM byte
4. Set the GRCG to RMW mode, and all 8 tile register dots to the color that should be drawn
5. Write the previously obtained bitmask to the same position in VRAM

Quite clever how the extracted colors double as a secondary alpha plane, making for another well-earned good-code tag. The wind effect really doesn't deserve it, though:

• ZUN calculates every intermediate result inside this function over and over and over again… Together with some ugly pointer arithmetic, this function turned into one of the most tedious decompilations in a long while.
• This gradual effect is blitted exclusively to the front page of VRAM, since parts of it need to be unblitted to create the illusion of a gust of wind. Then again, anything that moves on top of air-colored background – most likely the Orb – will also unblit whatever it covered of the effect…

As far as I can tell, ZUN didn't use TCR mode anywhere else in PC-98 Touhou. Tune in again later during a TH04 or TH05 push to learn about TDW, the final GRCG mode!

Speaking about the 2×2 particle systems, why do we need three of them? Their only observable difference lies in the way they move their particles:

1. Up or down in a straight line (used in phases 4 and 2, respectively)
2. Left or right in a straight line (used in the second form)
3. Left and right in a sinusoidal motion (used in phase 3, the "dark orange" one)

Out of all possible formats ZUN could have used for storing the positions and velocities of individual particles, he chose a) 64-bit / double-precision floating-point, and b) raw screen pixels. Want to take a guess at which data type is used for which particle system?

If you picked double for 1) and 2), and raw screen pixels for 3), you are of course correct! Not that I'm implying that it should have been the other way round – screen pixels would have perfectly fit all three systems use cases, as all 16-bit coordinates are extended to 32 bits for trigonometric calculations anyway. That's what, another 1.080 bytes of wasted conventional memory? And that's even calculated while keeping the current architecture, which allocates space for 3×30 particles as part of the game's global data, although only one of the three particle systems is active at any given time.

That's it for the first form, time to put on "Civilization of Magic"! Or "死なばもろとも"? Or "Theme of 地獄めくり"? Or whatever SYUGEN is supposed to mean…

… and the code of these final patterns comes out roughly as exciting as their in-game impact. With the big exception of the very final "swaying leaves" pattern: After 📝 Q4.4, 📝 Q28.4, 📝 Q24.8, and double variables, this pattern uses… decimal subpixels? Like, multiplying the number by 10, and using the decimal one's digit to represent the fractional part? Well, sure, if you really insist on moving the leaves in cleanly represented integer multiples of ⅒, which is infamously impossible in IEEE 754. Aside from aesthetic reasons, it only really combines less precision (10 possible fractions rather than the usual 16) with the inferior performance of having to use integer divisions and multiplications rather than simple bit shifts. And it's surely not because the leaf sprites needed an extended integer value range of [-3276, +3276], compared to Q12.4's [-2047, +2048]: They are clipped to 640×400 screen space anyway, and are removed as soon as they leave this area.

This pattern also contains the second bug in the "subpixel/pixel confusion hiding an entire animation" category, causing all of BOSS6GR4.GRC to effectively become unused:

At least their hitboxes are what you would expect, exactly covering the 30×30 pixels of Reimu's sprite. Both animation fixes are available on the th01_sariel_fixes branch.

After all that, Sariel's main function turned out fairly unspectacular, just putting everything together and adding some shake, transition, and color pulse effects with a bunch of unnecessary hardware palette changes. There is one reference to a missing BOSS6.GRP file during the first→second form transition, suggesting that Sariel originally had a separate "first form defeat" graphic, before it was replaced with just the shaking effect in the final game.
Speaking about the transition code, it is kind of funny how the… um, imperative and concrete nature of TH01 leads to these 2×24 lines of straight-line code. They kind of look like ZUN rattling off a laundry list of subsystems and raw variables to be reinitialized, making damn sure to not forget anything.

Whew! Second PC-98 Touhou boss completely decompiled, 29 to go, and they'll only get easier from here! 🎉 The next one in line, Elis, is somewhere between Konngara and Sariel as far as x86 instruction count is concerned, so that'll need to wait for some additional funding. Next up, therefore: Looking at a thing in TH03's main game code – really, I have little idea what it will be!

Now that the store is open again, also check out the 📝 updated RE progress overview I've posted together with this one. In addition to more RE, you can now also directly order a variety of mods; all of these are further explained in the order form itself.

📝 Posted:

2021-11-29 01:56 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0168, P0169

⌨ Commits:

c2de6ab...8b046da, 8b046da...479b766

💰 Funded by:

rosenrose, Blue Bolt

🏷 Tags:

th04

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th05

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rec98

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boss

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yuuka-5

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blitting

+

bug

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master.lib

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waste

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mod

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EMS memory! The infamous stopgap measure between the 640 KiB ("ought to be enough for everyone") of conventional memory offered by DOS from the very beginning, and the later XMS standard for accessing all the rest of memory up to 4 GiB in the x86 Protected Mode. With an optionally active EMS driver, TH04 and TH05 will make use of EMS memory to preload a bunch of situational .CDG images at the beginning of MAIN.EXE:

1. The "eye catch" game title image, shown while stages are loaded
2. The character-specific background image, shown while bombing
3. The player character dialog portraits
4. TH05 additionally stores the boss portraits there, preloading them at the beginning of each stage. (TH04 instead keeps them in conventional memory during the entire stage.)

Once these images are needed, they can then be copied into conventional memory and accessed as usual.

Uh… wait, copied? It certainly would have been possible to map EMS memory to a regular 16-bit Real Mode segment for direct access, bank-switching out rarely used system or peripheral memory in exchange for the EMS data. However, master.lib doesn't expose this functionality, and only provides functions for copying data from EMS to regular memory and vice versa.
But even that still makes EMS an excellent fit for the large image files it's used for, as it's possible to directly copy their pixel data from EMS to VRAM. (Yes, I tried!) Well… would, because ZUN doesn't do that either, and always naively copies the images to newly allocated conventional memory first. In essence, this dumbs down EMS into just another layer of the memory hierarchy, inserted between conventional memory and disk: Not quite as slow as disk, but still requiring that memcpy() to retrieve the data. Most importantly though: Using EMS in this way does not increase the total amount of memory simultaneously accessible to the game. After all, some other data will have to be freed from conventional memory to make room for the newly loaded data.

The most idiomatic way to define the game-specific layout of the EMS area would be either a struct or an enum. Unfortunately, the total size of all these images exceeds the range of a 16-bit value, and Turbo C++ 4.0J supports neither 32-bit enums (which are silently degraded to 16-bit) nor 32-bit structs (which simply don't compile). That still leaves raw compile-time constants though, you only have to manually define the offset to each image in terms of the size of its predecessor. But instead of doing that, ZUN just placed each image at a nice round decimal offset, each slightly larger than the actual memory required by the previous image, just to make sure that everything fits. This results not only in quite a bit of unnecessary padding, but also in technically the single biggest amount of "wasted" memory in PC-98 Touhou: Out of the 180,000 (TH04) and 320,000 (TH05) EMS bytes requested, the game only uses 135,552 (TH04) and 175,904 (TH05) bytes. But hey, it's EMS, so who cares, right? Out of all the opportunities to take shortcuts during development, this is among the most acceptable ones. Any actual PC-98 model that could run these two games comes with plenty of memory for this to not turn into an actual issue.

On to the EMS-using functions themselves, which are the definition of "cross-cutting concerns". Most of these have a fallback path for the non-EMS case, and keep the loaded .CDG images in memory if they are immediately needed. Which totally makes sense, but also makes it difficult to find names that reflect all the global state changed by these functions. Every one of these is also just called from a single place, so inlining them would have saved me a lot of naming and documentation trouble there.
The TH04 version of the EMS allocation code was actually displayed on ZUN's monitor in the 2010 MAG・ネット documentary; WindowsTiger already transcribed the low-quality video image in 2019. By 2015 ReC98 standards, I would have just run with that, but the current project goal is to write better code than ZUN, so I didn't. 😛 We sure ain't going to use magic numbers for EMS offsets.

The dialog init and exit code then is completely different in both games, yet equally cross-cutting. TH05 goes even further in saving conventional memory, loading each individual player or boss portrait into a single .CDG slot immediately before blitting it to VRAM and freeing the pixel data again. People who play TH05 without an active EMS driver are surely going to enjoy the hard drive access lag between each portrait change… TH04, on the other hand, also abuses the dialog exit function to preload the Mugetsu defeat / Gengetsu entrance and Gengetsu defeat portraits, using a static variable to track how often the function has been called during the Extra Stage… who needs function parameters anyway, right?

This is also the function in which TH04 infamously crashes after the Stage 5 pre-boss dialog when playing with Reimu and without any active EMS driver. That crash is what motivated this look into the games' EMS usage… but the code looks perfectly fine? Oh well, guess the crash is not related to EMS then. Next u–

OK, of course I can't leave it like that. Everyone is expecting a fix now, and I still got half of a push left over after decompiling the regular EMS code. Also, I've now RE'd every function that could possibly be involved in the crash, and this is very likely to be the last time I'll be looking at them.

Turns out that the bug has little to do with EMS, and everything to do with ZUN limiting the amount of conventional RAM that TH04's MAIN.EXE is allowed to use, and then slightly miscalculating this upper limit. Playing Stage 5 with Reimu is the most asset-intensive configuration in this game, due to the combination of

• 6 player portraits (Marisa has only 5), at 128×128 pixels each
• a 288×256 background for the boss fight, tied in size only with the ones in the Extra Stage
• the additional 96×80 image for the vertically scrolling stars during the stage, wastefully stored as 4 bitplanes rather than a single one. This image is never freed, not even at the end of the stage.

Remove any single one of the above points, and this crash would have never occurred. But with all of them combined, the total amount of memory consumed by TH04's MAIN.EXE just barely exceeds ZUN's limit of 320,000 bytes, by no more than 3,840 bytes, the size of the star image.

But wait: As we established earlier, EMS does nothing to reduce the amount of conventional memory used by the game. In fact, if you disabled TH04's EMS handling, you'd still get this crash even if you are running an EMS driver and loaded DOS into the High Memory Area to free up as much conventional RAM as possible. How can EMS then prevent this crash in the first place?

The answer: It's only because ZUN's usage of EMS bypasses the need to load the cached images back out of the XOR-encrypted 東方幻想.郷 packfile. Leaving aside the general stupidity of any game data file encryption*, master.lib's decryption implementation is also quite wasteful: It uses a separate buffer that receives fixed-size chunks of the file, before decrypting every individual byte and copying it to its intended destination buffer. That really resembles the typical slowness of a C fread() implementation more than it does the highly optimized ASM code that master.lib purports to be… And how large is this well-hidden decryption buffer? 4 KiB.

So, looking back at the game, here is what happens once the Stage 5 pre-battle dialog ends:

1. Reimu's bomb background image, which was previously freed to make space for her dialog portraits, has to be loaded back into conventional memory from disk
2. BB0.CDG is found inside the 東方幻想.郷 packfile
3. file_ropen() ends up allocating a 4 KiB buffer for the encrypted packfile data, getting us the decisive ~4 KiB closer to the memory limit
4. The .CDG loader tries to allocate 52 608 contiguous bytes for the pixel data of Reimu's bomb image
5. This would exceed the memory limit, so hmem_allocbyte() fails and returns a nullptr
6. ZUN doesn't check for this case (as usual)
7. The pixel data is loaded to address 0000:0000, overwriting the Interrupt Vector Table and whatever comes after
8. The game crashes

The 4 KiB encryption buffer would only be freed by the corresponding file_close() call, which of course never happens because the game crashes before it gets there. At one point, I really did suspect the cause to be some kind of memory leak or fragmentation inside master.lib, which would have been quite delightful to fix.
Instead, the most straightforward fix here is to bump up that memory limit by at least 4 KiB. Certainly easier than squeezing in a cdg_free() call for the star image before the pre-boss dialog without breaking position dependence.

Or, even better, let's nuke all these memory limits from orbit because they make little sense to begin with, and fix every other potential out-of-memory crash that modders would encounter when adding enough data to any of the 4 games that impose such limits on themselves. Unless you want to launch other binaries (which need to do their own memory allocations) after launching the game, there's really no reason to restrict the amount of memory available to a DOS process. Heck, whenever DOS creates a new one, it assigns all remaining free memory by default anyway.
Removing the memory limits also removes one of ZUN's few error checks, which end up quitting the game if there isn't at least a given maximum amount of conventional RAM available. While it might be tempting to reserve enough memory at the beginning of execution and then never check any allocation for a potential failure, that's exactly where something like TH04's crash comes from.
This game is also still running on DOS, where such an initial allocation failure is very unlikely to happen – no one fills close to half of conventional RAM with TSRs and then tries running one of these games. It might have been useful to detect systems with less than 640 KiB of actual, physical RAM, but none of the PC-98 models with that little amount of memory are fast enough to run these games to begin with. How ironic… a place where ZUN actually added an error check, and then it's mostly pointless.

Here's an archive that contains both fix variants, just in case. These were compiled from the th04_noems_crash_fix and mem_assign_all branches, and contain as little code changes as possible.
Edit (2022-04-18): For TH04, you probably want to download the 📝 community choice fix package instead, which contains this fix along with other workarounds for the Divide error crashes. 2021-11-29-Memory-limit-fixes.zip

So yeah, quite a complex bug, leaving no time for the TH03 scorefile format research after all. Next up: Raising prices.

📝 Posted:

2021-11-08 10:59 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0165, P0166, P0167

⌨ Commits:

7a0e5d8...f2bca01, f2bca01...e697907, e697907...c2de6ab

💰 Funded by:

Ember2528

🏷 Tags:

th01

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rec98

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gameplay

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animation

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blitting

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bullet

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glitch

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waste

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boss

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singyoku

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mima-th01

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elis

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tcc

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menu

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palette

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OK, TH01 missile bullets. Can we maybe have a well-behaved entity type, without any weirdness? Just once?

Ehh, kinda. Apart from another 150 bytes wasted on unused structure members, this code is indeed more on the low end in terms of overall jank. It does become very obvious why dodging these missiles in the YuugenMagan, Mima, and Elis fights feels so awful though: An unfair 46×46 pixel hitbox around Reimu's center pixel, combined with the comeback of 📝 interlaced rendering, this time in every stage. ZUN probably did this because missiles are the only 16×16 sprite in TH01 that is blitted to unaligned X positions, which effectively ends up touching a 32×16 area of VRAM per sprite.
But even if we assume VRAM writes to be the bottleneck here, it would have been totally possible to render every missile in every frame at roughly the same amount of CPU time that the original game uses for interlaced rendering:

• Note that all missile sprites only use two colors, white and green.
• Instead of naively going with the usual four bitplanes, extract the pixels drawn in each of the two used colors into their own bitplanes. master.lib calls this the "tiny format".
• Use the GRCG to draw these two bitplanes in the intended white and green colors, halving the amount of VRAM writes compared to the original function.
• (Not using the .PTN format would have also avoided the inconsistency of storing the missile sprites in boss-specific sprite slots.)

That's an optimization that would have significantly benefitted the game, in contrast to all of the fake ones introduced in later games. Then again, this optimization is actually something that the later games do, and it might have in fact been necessary to achieve their higher bullet counts without significant slowdown.

Unfortunately, it was only worth decompiling half of the missile code right now, thanks to gratuitous FPU usage in the other half, where 📝 double variables are compared to float literals. That one will have to wait 📝 until after SinGyoku.

After some effectively unused Mima sprite effect code that is so broken that it's impossible to make sense out of it, we get to the final feature I wanted to cover for all bosses in parallel before returning to Sariel: The separate sprite background storage for moving or animated boss sprites in the Mima, Elis, and Sariel fights. But, uh… why is this necessary to begin with? Doesn't TH01 already reserve the other VRAM page for backgrounds?
Well, these sprites are quite big, and ZUN didn't want to blit them from main memory on every frame. After all, TH01 and TH02 had a minimum required clock speed of 33 MHz, half of the speed required for the later three games. So, he simply blitted these boss sprites to both VRAM pages, leading the usual unblitting calls to only remove the other sprites on top of the boss. However, these bosses themselves want to move across the screen… and this makes it necessary to save the stage background behind them in some other way.

Enter .PTN, and its functions to capture a 16×16 or 32×32 square from VRAM into a sprite slot. No problem with that approach in theory, as the size of all these bigger sprites is a multiple of 32×32; splitting a larger sprite into these smaller 32×32 chunks makes the code look just a little bit clumsy (and, of course, slower).
But somewhere during the development of Mima's fight, ZUN apparently forgot that those sprite backgrounds existed. And once Mima's 🚫 casting sprite is blitted on top of her regular sprite, using just regular sprite transparency, she ends up with her infamous third arm:

Ironically, there's an unused code path in Mima's unblit function where ZUN assumes a height of 48 pixels for Mima's animation sprites rather than the actual 64. This leads to even clumsier .PTN function calls for the bottom 128×16 pixels… Failing to unblit the bottom 16 pixels would have also yielded that third arm, although it wouldn't have looked as natural. Still wouldn't say that it was intentional; maybe this casting sprite was just added pretty late in the game's development?

So, mission accomplished, Sariel unblocked… at 2¼ pushes. That's quite some time left for some smaller stage initialization code, which bundles a bunch of random function calls in places where they logically really don't belong. The stage opening animation then adds a bunch of VRAM inter-page copies that are not only redundant but can't even be understood without knowing the hidden internal state of the last VRAM page accessed by previous ZUN code…
In better news though: Turbo C++ 4.0 really doesn't seem to have any complexity limit on inlining arithmetic expressions, as long as they only operate on compile-time constants. That's how we get macro-free, compile-time Shift-JIS to JIS X 0208 conversion of the individual code points in the 東方★靈異伝 string, in a compiler from 1994. As long as you don't store any intermediate results in variables, that is…

But wait, there's more! With still ¼ of a push left, I also went for the boss defeat animation, which includes the route selection after the SinGyoku fight.
As in all other instances, the 2× scaled font is accomplished by first rendering the text at regular 1× resolution to the other, invisible VRAM page, and then scaled from there to the visible one. However, the route selection is unique in that its scaled text is both drawn transparently on top of the stage background (not onto a black one), and can also change colors depending on the selection. It would have been no problem to unblit and reblit the text by rendering the 1× version to a position on the invisible VRAM page that isn't covered by the 2× version on the visible one, but ZUN (needlessly) clears the invisible page before rendering any text. Instead, he assigned a separate VRAM color for both the 魔界 and 地獄 options, and only changed the palette value for these colors to white or gray, depending on the correct selection. This is another one of the 📝 rare cases where TH01 demonstrates good use of PC-98 hardware, as the 魔界へ and 地獄へ strings don't need to be reblitted during the selection process, only the Orb "cursor" does.

Then, why does this still not count as good-code? When changing palette colors, you kinda need to be aware of everything else that can possibly be on screen, which colors are used there, and which aren't and can therefore be used for such an effect without affecting other sprites. In this case, well… hover over the image below, and notice how Reimu's hair and the bomb sprites in the HUD light up when Makai is selected:

This push did end on a high note though, with the generic, non-SinGyoku version of the defeat animation being an easily parametrizable copy. And that's how you decompile another 2.58% of TH01 in just slightly over three pushes.

Now, we're not only ready to decompile Sariel, but also Kikuri, Elis, and SinGyoku without needing any more detours into non-boss code. Thanks to the current TH01 funding subscriptions, I can plan to cover most, if not all, of Sariel in a single push series, but the currently 3 pending pushes probably won't suffice for Sariel's 8.10% of all remaining code in TH01. We've got quite a lot of not specifically TH01-related funds in the backlog to pass the time though.

Due to recent developments, it actually makes quite a lot of sense to take a break from TH01: spaztron64 has managed what every Touhou download site so far has failed to do: Bundling all 5 game onto a single .HDI together with pre-configured PC-98 emulators and a nice boot menu, and hosting the resulting package on a proper website. While this first release is already quite good (and much better than my attempt from 2014), there is still a bit of room for improvement to be gained from specific ReC98 research. Next up, therefore:

• Researching how TH04 and TH05 use EMS memory, together with the cause behind TH04's crash in Stage 5 when playing as Reimu without an EMS driver loaded, and
• reverse-engineering TH03's score data file format (YUME.NEM), which hopefully also comes with a way of building a file that unlocks all characters without any high scores.

📝 Posted:

2021-10-20 09:58 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0162, P0163, P0164

⌨ Commits:

81dd96e...24b3a0d, 24b3a0d...6d572b3, 6d572b3...7a0e5d8

💰 Funded by:

Ember2528, Yanga

🏷 Tags:

th01

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rec98

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gameplay

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player

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shot

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animation

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glitch

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waste

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jank

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unused

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No technical obstacles for once! Just pure overcomplicated ZUN code. Unlike 📝 Konngara's main function, the main TH01 player function was every bit as difficult to decompile as you would expect from its size.

With TH01 using both separate left- and right-facing sprites for all of Reimu's moves and separate classes for Reimu's 32×32 and 48×* sprites, we're already off to a bad start. Sure, sprite mirroring is minimally more involved on PC-98, as the planar nature of VRAM requires the bits within an 8-pixel byte to also be mirrored, in addition to writing the sprite bytes from right to left. TH03 uses a 256-byte lookup table for this, generated at runtime by an infamous micro-optimized and undecompilable ASM algorithm. With TH01's existing architecture, ZUN would have then needed to write 3 additional blitting functions. But instead, he chose to waste a total of 26,112 bytes of memory on pre-mirrored sprites…

Alright, but surely selecting those sprites from code is no big deal? Just store the direction Reimu is facing in, and then add some branches to the rendering code. And there is in fact a variable for Reimu's direction… during regular arrow-key movement, and another one while shooting and sliding, and a third as part of the special attack types, launched out of a slide.
Well, OK, technically, the last two are the same variable. But that's even worse, because it means that ZUN stores two distinct enums at the same place in memory: Shooting and sliding uses 1 for left, 2 for right, and 3 for the "invalid" direction of holding both, while the special attack types indicate the direction in their lowest bit, with 0 for right and 1 for left. I decompiled the latter as bitflags, but in ZUN's code, each of the 8 permutations is handled as a distinct type, with copy-pasted and adapted code… The interpretation of this two-enum "sub-mode" union variable is controlled by yet another "mode" variable… and unsurprisingly, two of the bugs in this function relate to the sub-mode variable being interpreted incorrectly.

Also, "rendering code"? This one big function basically consists of separate unblit→update→render code snippets for every state and direction Reimu can be in (moving, shooting, swinging, sliding, special-attacking, and bombing), pasted together into a tangled mess of nested if(…) statements. While a lot of the code is copy-pasted, there are still a number of inconsistencies that defeat the point of my usual refactoring treatment. After all, with a total of 85 conditional branches, anything more than I did would have just obscured the control flow too badly, making it even harder to understand what's going on.
In the end, I spotted a total of 8 bugs in this function, all of which leave Reimu invisible for one or more frames:

• 2 frames after all special attacks
• 2 frames after swing attacks, and
• 4 frames before swing attacks

Thanks to the last one, Reimu's first swing animation frame is never actually rendered. So whenever someone complains about TH01 sprite flickering on an emulator: That emulator is accurate, it's the game that's poorly written.

And guess what, this function doesn't even contain everything you'd associate with per-frame player behavior. While it does handle Yin-Yang Orb repulsion as part of slides and special attacks, it does not handle the actual player/Orb collision that results in lives being lost. The funny thing about this: These two things are done in the same function…

Therefore, the life loss animation is also part of another function. This is where we find the final glitch in this 3-push series: Before the 16-frame shake, this function only unblits a 32×32 area around Reimu's center point, even though it's possible to lose a life during the non-deflecting part of a 48×48-pixel animation. In that case, the extra pixels will just stay on screen during the shake. They are unblitted afterwards though, which suggests that ZUN was at least somewhat aware of the issue?
Finally, the chance to see the alternate life loss sprite is exactly ⅛.

As for any new insights into game mechanics… you know what? I'm just not going to write anything, and leave you with this flowchart instead. Here's the definitive guide on how to control Reimu in TH01 we've been waiting for 24 years:

Pellets are deflected during all gray states. Not shown is the obvious "double-tap Z and X" transition from all non-(#1) states to the Bomb state, but that would have made this diagram even more unwieldy than it turned out. And yes, you can shoot twice as fast while moving left or right.

While I'm at it, here are two more animations from MIKO.PTN which aren't referenced by any code:

With that monster of a function taken care of, we've only got boss sprite animation as the final blocker of uninterrupted Sariel progress. Due to some unfavorable code layout in the Mima segment though, I'll need to spend a bit more time with some of the features used there. Next up: The missile bullets used in the Mima and YuugenMagan fights.

📝 Posted:

2021-10-09 21:29 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0160, P0161

⌨ Commits:

e491cd7...42ba4a5, 42ba4a5...81dd96e

💰 Funded by:

Yanga, [Anonymous]

🏷 Tags:

th01

+

rec98

+

gameplay

+

resident

+

bullet

+

boss

+

mima-th01

+

animation

+

waste

-

glitch

+

tcc

+

Nothing really noteworthy in TH01's stage timer code, just yet another HUD element that is needlessly drawn into VRAM. Sure, ZUN applies his custom boldfacing effect on top of the glyphs retrieved from font ROM, but he could have easily installed those modified glyphs as gaiji.
Well, OK, halfwidth gaiji aren't exactly well documented, and sometimes not even correctly emulated 📝 due to the same PC-98 hardware oddity I was researching last month. I've reserved two of the pending anonymous "anything" pushes for the conclusion of this research, just in case you were wondering why the outstanding workload is now lower after the two delivered here.

And since it doesn't seem to be clearly documented elsewhere: Every 2 ticks on the stage timer correspond to 4 frames.

So, TH01 rank pellet speed. The resident pellet speed value is a factor ranging from a minimum of -0.375 up to a maximum of 0.5 (pixels per frame), multiplied with the difficulty-adjusted base speed for each pellet and added on top of that same speed. This multiplier is modified

• every time the stage timer reaches 0 and HARRY UP is shown (+0.05)
• for every score-based extra life granted below the maximum number of lives (+0.025)
• every time a bomb is used (+0.025)
• on every frame in which the rand value (shown in debug mode) is evenly divisible by (1800 - (lives × 200) - (bombs × 50)) (+0.025)
• every time Reimu got hit (set to 0 if higher, then -0.05)
• when using a continue (set to -0.05 if higher, then -0.125)

Apparently, ZUN noted that these deltas couldn't be losslessly stored in an IEEE 754 floating-point variable, and therefore didn't store the pellet speed factor exactly in a way that would correspond to its gameplay effect. Instead, it's stored similar to Q12.4 subpixels: as a simple integer, pre-multiplied by 40. This results in a raw range of -15 to 20, which is what the undecompiled ASM calls still use. When spawning a new pellet, its base speed is first multiplied by that factor, and then divided by 40 again. This is actually quite smart: The calculation doesn't need to be aware of either Q12.4 or the 40× format, as ((Q12.4 * factor×40) / factor×40) still comes out as a Q12.4 subpixel even if all numbers are integers. The only limiting issue here would be the potential overflow of the 16-bit multiplication at unadjusted base speeds of more than 50 pixels per frame, but that'd be seriously unplayable.
So yeah, pellet speed modifications are indeed gradual, and don't just fall into the coarse three "high, normal, and low" categories.

That's ⅝ of P0160 done, and the continue and pause menus would make good candidates to fill up the remaining ⅜… except that it seemed impossible to figure out the correct compiler options for this code?
The issues centered around the two effects of Turbo C++ 4.0J's -O switch:

1. Optimizing jump instructions: merging duplicate successive jumps into a single one, and merging duplicated instructions at the end of conditional branches into a single place under a single branch, which the other branches then jump to
2. Compressing ADD SP and POP CX stack-clearing instructions after multiple successive CALLs to __cdecl functions into a single ADD SP with the combined parameter stack size of all function calls

But how can the ASM for these functions exhibit #1 but not #2? How can it be seemingly optimized and unoptimized at the same time? The only option that gets somewhat close would be -O- -y, which emits line number information into the .OBJ files for debugging. This combination provides its own kind of #1, but these functions clearly need the real deal.

The research into this issue ended up consuming a full push on its own. In the end, this solution turned out to be completely unrelated to compiler options, and instead came from the effects of a compiler bug in a totally different place. Initializing a local structure instance or array like

const uint4_t flash_colors[3] = { 3, 4, 5 };

always emits the { 3, 4, 5 } array into the program's data segment, and then generates a call to the internal SCOPY@ function which copies this data array to the local variable on the stack. And as soon as this SCOPY@ call is emitted, the -O optimization #1 is disabled for the entire rest of the translation unit?!
So, any code segment with an SCOPY@ call followed by __cdecl functions must strictly be decompiled from top to bottom, mirroring the original layout of translation units. That means no TH01 continue and pause menus before we haven't decompiled the bomb animation, which contains such an SCOPY@ call. 😕
Luckily, TH01 is the only game where this bug leads to significant restrictions in decompilation order, as later games predominantly use the pascal calling convention, in which each function itself clears its stack as part of its RET instruction.

What now, then? With 51% of REIIDEN.EXE decompiled, we're slowly running out of small features that can be decompiled within ⅜ of a push. Good that I haven't been looking a lot into OP.EXE and FUUIN.EXE, which pretty much only got easy pieces of code left to do. Maybe I'll end up finishing their decompilations entirely within these smaller gaps?
I still ended up finding one more small piece in REIIDEN.EXE though: The particle system, seen in the Mima fight.

I like how everything about this animation is contained within a single function that is called once per frame, but ZUN could have really consolidated the spawning code for new particles a bit. In Mima's fight, particles are only spawned from the top and right edges of the screen, but the function in fact contains unused code for all other 7 possible directions, written in quite a bloated manner. This wouldn't feel quite as unused if ZUN had used an angle parameter instead… Also, why unnecessarily waste another 40 bytes of the BSS segment?

But wait, what's going on with the very first spawned particle that just stops near the bottom edge of the screen in the video above? Well, even in such a simple and self-contained function, ZUN managed to include an off-by-one error. This one then results in an out-of-bounds array access on the 80th frame, where the code attempts to spawn a 41^st particle. If the first particle was unlucky to be both slow enough and spawned away far enough from the bottom and right edges, the spawning code will then kill it off before its unblitting code gets to run, leaving its pixel on the screen until something else overlaps it and causes it to be unblitted.
Which, during regular gameplay, will quickly happen with the Orb, all the pellets flying around, and your own player movement. Also, the RNG can easily spawn this particle at a position and velocity that causes it to leave the screen more quickly. Kind of impressive how ZUN laid out the structure of arrays in a way that ensured practically no effect of this bug on the game; this glitch could have easily happened every 80 frames instead. He almost got close to all bugs canceling out each other here!

Next up: The player control functions, including the second-biggest function in all of PC-98 Touhou.

📝 Posted:

2021-09-28 16:05 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0158, P0159

⌨ Commits:

bf7bb7e...c0c0ebc, c0c0ebc...e491cd7

💰 Funded by:

Yanga

🏷 Tags:

th01

+

rec98

+

gameplay

+

card-flipping

+

rng

+

score

+

bomb

+

animation

+

jank

+

waste

-

Of course, Sariel's potentially bloated and copy-pasted code is blocked by even more definitely bloated and copy-pasted code. It's TH01, what did you expect?

But even then, TH01's item code is on a new level of software architecture ridiculousness. First, ZUN uses distinct arrays for both types of items, with their own caps of 4 for bomb items, and 10 for point items. Since that obviously makes any type-related switch statement redundant, he also used distinct functions for both types, with copy-pasted boilerplate code. The main per-item update and render function is shared though… and takes every single accessed member of the item structure as its own reference parameter. Like, why, you have a structure, right there?! That's one way to really practice the C++ language concept of passing arbitrary structure fields by mutable reference…
To complete the unwarranted grand generic design of this function, it calls back into per-type collision detection, drop, and collect functions with another three reference parameters. Yeah, why use C++ virtual methods when you can also implement the effectively same polymorphism functionality by hand? Oh, and the coordinate clamping code in one of these callbacks could only possibly have come from nested min() and max() preprocessor macros. And that's how you extend such dead-simple functionality to 1¼ pushes…

Amidst all this jank, we've at least got a sensible item↔player hitbox this time, with 24 pixels around Reimu's center point to the left and right, and extending from 24 pixels above Reimu down to the bottom of the playfield. It absolutely didn't look like that from the initial naive decompilation though. Changing entity coordinates from left/top to center was one of the better lessons from TH01 that ZUN implemented in later games, it really makes collision detection code much more intuitive to grasp.

The card flip code is where we find out some slightly more interesting aspects about item drops in this game, and how they're controlled by a hidden cycle variable:

• At the beginning of every 5-stage scene, this variable is set to a random value in the [0..59] range
• Point items are dropped at every multiple of 10
• Every card flip adds 1 to its value after this mod 10 check
• At a value of 140, the point item is replaced with a bomb item, but only if no damaging bomb is active. In any case, its value is then reset to 1.

Then again, score players largely ignore point items anyway, as card combos simply have a much bigger effect on the score. With this, I should have RE'd all information necessary to construct a tool-assisted score run, though?
Edit: Turns out that 1) point items are becoming increasingly important in score runs, and 2) Pearl already did a TAS some months ago. Thanks to spaztron64 for the info!

The Orb↔card hitbox also makes perfect sense, with 24 pixels around the center point of a card in every direction.

The rest of the code confirms the card flip score formula documented on Touhou Wiki, as well as the way cards are flipped by bombs: During every of the 90 "damaging" frames of the 140-frame bomb animation, there is a 75% chance to flip the card at the [bomb_frame % total_card_count_in_stage] array index. Since stages can only have up to 50 cards 📝 thanks to a bug, even a 75% chance is high enough to typically flip most cards during a bomb. Each of these flips still only removes a single card HP, just like after a regular collision with the Orb.
Also, why are the card score popups rendered before the cards themselves? That's two needless frames of flicker during that 25-frame animation. Not all too noticeable, but still.

And that's over 50% of REIIDEN.EXE decompiled as well! Next up: More HUD update and rendering code… with a direct dependency on rank pellet speed modifications?

📝 Posted:

2021-08-23 23:43 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0153, P0154, P0155, P0156

⌨ Commits:

624e0cb...d05c9ba, d05c9ba...031b526, 031b526...9ad578e, 9ad578e...4bc6405

💰 Funded by:

Ember2528

🏷 Tags:

th01

+

rec98

+

gameplay

+

boss

+

konngara

+

danmaku-pattern

+

waste

-

rng

+

📝 7 pushes to get Konngara done, according to my previous estimate? Well, how about being twice as fast, and getting the entire boss fight done in 3.5 pushes instead? So much copy-pasted code in there… without any flashy unused content, apart from four calculations with an unclear purpose. And the three strings "ANGEL", "OF", "DEATH", which were probably meant to be rendered using those giant upscaled font ROM glyphs that also display the STAGE # and HARRY UP strings? Those three strings are also part of Sariel's code, though.

On to the remaining 11 patterns then! Konngara's homing snakes, shown in the video above, are one of the more notorious parts of this battle. They occur in two patterns – one with two snakes and one with four – with all of the spawn, aim, update, and render code copy-pasted between the two. Three gameplay-related discoveries here:

• The homing target is locked once the Y position of a snake's white head diamond is below 300 pixels.
• That diamond is also the only one with collision detection…
• …but comes with a gigantic 30×30 pixel hitbox, reduced to 30×20 while Reimu is sliding. For comparison: Reimu's regular sprite is 32×32 pixels, including transparent areas. This time, there is a clearly defined hitbox around Reimu's center pixel that the single top-left pixel can collide with. No imagination necessary, which people apparently 📝 still prefer over actually understanding an algorithm… Then again, this hitbox is still not intuitive at all, because…

  

  … the exact collision pixel, marked in red, is part of the diamond sprite's transparent background

This was followed by really weird aiming code for the "sprayed pellets from cup" pattern… which can only possibly have been done on purpose, but is sort of mitigated by the spraying motion anyway.
After a bunch of long if(…) {…} else if(…) {…} else if(…) {…} chains, which remain quite popular in certain corners of the game dev scene to this day, we've got the three sword slash patterns as the final notable ones. At first, it seemed as if ZUN just improvised those raw number constants involved in the pellet spawner's movement calculations to describe some sort of path that vaguely resembles the sword slash. But once I tried to express these numbers in terms of the slash animation's keyframes, it all worked out perfectly, and resulted in this:

Yup, the spawner always takes an exact path along this triangle. Sometimes, I wonder whether I should just rush this project and don't bother about naming these repeated number literals. Then I gain insights like these, and it's all worth it.

Finally, we've got Konngara's main function, which coordinates the entire fight. Third-longest function in both TH01 and all of PC-98 Touhou, only behind some player-related stuff and YuugenMagan's gigantic main function… and it's even more of a copy-pasta, making it feel not nearly as long as it is. Key insights there:

• The fight consists of 7 phases, with the entire defeat sequence being part of the if(boss_phase == 7) {…} branch.
• The three even-numbered phases, however, only light up the Siddhaṃ seed syllables and then progress to the next phase.
• Odd-numbered phases are completed after passing an HP threshold or after seeing a predetermined number of patterns, whatever happens first. No possibility of skipping anything there.
• Patterns are chosen randomly, but the available pool of patterns is limited to 3 specific "easier" patterns in phases 1 and 5, and 4 patterns in phase 3. Once Phase 7 is reached at 9 HP remaining, all 12 patterns can potentially appear. Fittingly, that's also the point where the red section of the HP bar starts.
  • Every time a pattern is chosen, the code only makes a maximum of two attempts at picking a pattern that's different from the one that Konngara just completed. Therefore, it seems entirely possible to see the same pattern twice. Calculating an actual seed to prove that is out of the scope of this project, though.
  • Due to what looks like a copy-paste mistake, the pool for the second RNG attempt in phases 5 and 7 is reduced to only the first two patterns of the respective phases? That's already quite some bias right there, and we haven't even analyzed the RNG in detail yet… (For anyone interested, it's a LCG, using the Borland C/C++ parameters as shown here.)
• The difficulty level only affects the speed and firing intervals (and thus, number) of pellets, as well as the number of lasers in the one pattern that uses them.
• After the 📝 kuji-in defeat sequence, the fight ends in an attempted double-free of Konngara's image data. Thankfully, the format-specific _free() functions defend against such a thing.

Seriously, 📝 line drawing was much harder to decompile.

And that's it for Konngara! First boss with not a single piece of ASM left, 30 more to go! 🎉 But wait, what about the cause behind the temporary green discoloration after leaving the Pause menu? I expected to find something on that as well, but nope, it's nothing in Konngara's code segment. We'll probably only get to figure that out near the very end of TH01's decompilation, once we get to the one function that directly calls all of the boss-specific main functions in a switch statement.
Edit (2022-07-17): 📝 Only took until Mima.

So, Sariel next? With half of a push left, I did cover Sariel's first few initialization functions, but all the sprite unblitting and HUD manipulation will need some extra attention first. The first one of these functions is related to the HUD, the stage timer, and the HARRY UP mode, whose pellet pattern I've also decompiled now.

All of this brings us past 75% PI in all games, and TH01 to under 30,000 remaining ASM instructions, leaving TH03 as the now most expensive game to be completely decompiled. Looking forward to how much more TH01's code will fall apart if you just tap it lightly… Next up: The aforementioned helper functions related to HARRY UP, drawing the HUD, and unblitting the other bosses whose sprites are a bit more animated.

📝 Posted:

2021-07-31 19:19 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0149, P0150, P0151, P0152

⌨ Commits:

e1a26bb...05e4c4a, 05e4c4a...768251d, 768251d...4d24ca5, 4d24ca5...81fc861

💰 Funded by:

Blue Bolt, Ember2528, -Tom-, [Anonymous]

🏷 Tags:

th04

+

th05

+

rec98

+

gameplay

+

bullet

+

animation

+

score

+

glitch

+

jank

+

waste

-

micro-optimization

+

tcc

+

uth05win

+

…or maybe not that soon, as it would have only wasted time to untangle the bullet update commits from the rest of the progress. So, here's all the bullet spawning code in TH04 and TH05 instead. I hope you're ready for this, there's a lot to talk about!

(For the sake of readability, "bullets" in this blog post refers to the white 8×8 pellets and all 16×16 bullets loaded from MIKO16.BFT, nothing else.)

But first, what was going on 📝 in 2020? Spent 4 pushes on the basic types and constants back then, still ended up confusing a couple of things, and even getting some wrong. Like how TH05's "bullet slowdown" flag actually always prevents slowdown and fires bullets at a constant speed instead. Or how "random spread" is not the best term to describe that unused bullet group type in TH04.
Or that there are two distinct ways of clearing all bullets on screen, which deserve different names:

Bullets are zapped at the end of most midboss and boss phases, and cleared everywhere else – most notably, during bombs, when losing a life, or as rewards for extends or a maximized Dream bonus. The Bonus!! points awarded for zapping bullets are calculated iteratively, so it's not trivial to give an exact formula for these. For a small number 𝑛 of bullets, it would exactly be 5𝑛³ - 10𝑛² + 15𝑛 points – or, using uth05win's (correct) recursive definition, Bonus(𝑛) = Bonus(𝑛-1) + 15𝑛² - 5𝑛 + 10. However, one of the internal step variables is capped at a different number of points for each difficulty (and game), after which the points only increase linearly. Hence, "semi-exponential".

On to TH04's bullet spawn code then, because that one can at least be decompiled. And immediately, we have to deal with a pointless distinction between regular bullets, with either a decelerating or constant velocity, and special bullets, with preset velocity changes during their lifetime. That preset has to be set somewhere, so why have separate functions? In TH04, this separation continues even down to the lowest level of functions, where values are written into the global bullet array. TH05 merges those two functions into one, but then goes too far and uses self-modifying code to save a grand total of two local variables… Luckily, the rest of its actual code is identical to TH04.

Most of the complexity in bullet spawning comes from the (thankfully shared) helper function that calculates the velocities of the individual bullets within a group. Both games handle each group type via a large switch statement, which is where TH04 shows off another Turbo C++ 4.0 optimization: If the range of case values is too sparse to be meaningfully expressed in a jump table, it usually generates a linear search through a second value table. But with the -G command-line option, it instead generates branching code for a binary search through the set of cases. 𝑂(log 𝑛) as the worst case for a switch statement in a C++ compiler from 1994… that's so cool. But still, why are the values in TH04's group type enum all over the place to begin with?
Unfortunately, this optimization is pretty rare in PC-98 Touhou. It only shows up here and in a few places in TH02, compared to at least 50 switch value tables.

In all of its micro-optimized pointlessness, TH05's undecompilable version at least fixes some of TH04's redundancy. While it's still not even optimal, it's at least a decently written piece of ASM… if you take the time to understand what's going on there, because it certainly took quite a bit of that to verify that all of the things which looked like bugs or quirks were in fact correct. And that's how the code for this function ended up with 35% comments and blank lines before I could confidently call it "reverse-engineered"…
Oh well, at least it finally fixes a correctness issue from TH01 and TH04, where an invalid bullet group type would fill all remaining slots in the bullet array with identical versions of the first bullet.

Something that both games also share in these functions is an over-reliance on globals for return values or other local state. The most ridiculous example here: Tuning the speed of a bullet based on rank actually mutates the global bullet template… which ZUN then works around by adding a wrapper function around both regular and special bullet spawning, which saves the base speed before executing that function, and restores it afterward. Add another set of wrappers to bypass that exact tuning, and you've expanded your nice 1-function interface to 4 functions. Oh, and did I mention that TH04 pointlessly duplicates the first set of wrapper functions for 3 of the 4 difficulties, which can't even be explained with "debugging reasons"? That's 10 functions then… and probably explains why I've procrastinated this feature for so long.

At this point, I also finally stopped decompiling ZUN's original ASM just for the sake of it. All these small TH05 functions would look horribly unidiomatic, are identical to their decompiled TH04 counterparts anyway, except for some unique constant… and, in the case of TH05's rank-based speed tuning function, actually become undecompilable as soon as we want to return a C++ class to preserve the semantic meaning of the return value. Mainly, this is because Turbo C++ does not allow register pseudo-variables like _AX or _AL to be cast into class types, even if their size matches. Decompiling that function would have therefore lowered the quality of the rest of the decompiled code, in exchange for the additional maintenance and compile-time cost of another translation unit. Not worth it – and for a TH05 port, you'd already have to decompile all the rest of the bullet spawning code anyway!

The only thing in there that was still somewhat worth being decompiled was the pre-spawn clipping and collision detection function. Due to what's probably a micro-optimization mistake, the TH05 version continues to spawn a bullet even if it was spawned on top of the player. This might sound like it has a different effect on gameplay… until you realize that the player got hit in this case and will either lose a life or deathbomb, both of which will cause all on-screen bullets to be cleared anyway. So it's at most a visual glitch.

But while we're at it, can we please stop talking about hitboxes? At least in the context of TH04 and TH05 bullets. The actual collision detection is described way better as a kill delta of 8×8 pixels between the center points of the player and a bullet. You can distribute these pixels to any combination of bullet and player "hitboxes" that make up 8×8. 4×4 around both the player and bullets? 1×1 for bullets, and 8×8 for the player? All equally valid… or perhaps none of them, once you keep in mind that other entity types might have different kill deltas. With that in mind, the concept of a "hitbox" turns into just a confusing abstraction.

The same is true for the 36×44 graze box delta. For some reason, this one is not exactly around the center of a bullet, but shifted to the right by 2 pixels. So, a bullet can be grazed up to 20 pixels right of the player, but only up to 16 pixels left of the player. uth05win also spotted this… and rotated the deltas clockwise by 90°?!

Which brings us to the bullet updates… for which I still had to research a decompilation workaround, because 📝 P0148 turned out to not help at all? Instead, the solution was to lie to the compiler about the true segment distance of the popup function and declare its signature far rather than near. This allowed ZUN to save that ridiculous overhead of 1 additional far function call/return per frame, and those precious 2 bytes in the BSS segment that he didn't have to spend on a segment value. 📝 Another function that didn't have just a single declaration in a common header file… really, 📝 how were these games even built???

The function itself is among the longer ones in both games. It especially stands out in the indentation department, with 7 levels at its most indented point – and that's the minimum of what's possible without goto. Only two more notable discoveries there:

1. Bullets are the only entity affected by Slow Mode. If the number of bullets on screen is ≥ (24 + (difficulty * 8) + rank) in TH04, or (42 + (difficulty * 8)) in TH05, Slow Mode reduces the frame rate by 33%, by waiting for one additional VSync event every two frames.
   The code also reveals a second tier, with 50% slowdown for a slightly higher number of bullets, but that conditional branch can never be executed
2. Bullets must have been grazed in a previous frame before they can be collided with. (Note how this does not apply to bullets that spawned on top of the player, as explained earlier!)

Whew… When did ReC98 turn into a full-on code review?! 😅 And after all this, we're still not done with TH04 and TH05 bullets, with all the special movement types still missing. That should be less than one push though, once we get to it. Next up: Back to TH01 and Konngara! Now have fun rewriting the Touhou Wiki Gameplay pages 😛

📝 Posted:

2021-06-21 13:49 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0147

⌨ Commits:

456b621...c940059

💰 Funded by:

Ember2528, -Tom-

🏷 Tags:

th04

+

th05

+

rec98

+

file-format

+

pc98

+

player

+

bomb

+

boss

+

shinki

+

ex-alice

+

animation

+

waste

-

Didn't quite get to cover background rendering for TH05's Stage 1-5 bosses in this one, as I had to reverse-engineer two more fundamental parts involved in boss background rendering before.

First, we got the those blocky transitions from stage tiles to bomb and boss backgrounds, loaded from BB*.BB and ST*.BB, respectively. These files store 16 frames of animation, with every bit corresponding to a 16×16 tile on the playfield. With 384×368 pixels to be covered, that would require 69 bytes per frame. But since that's a very odd number to work with in micro-optimized ASM, ZUN instead stores 512×512 pixels worth of bits, ending up with a frame size of 128 bytes, and a per-frame waste of 59 bytes. At least it was possible to decompile the core blitting function as __fastcall for once.
But wait, TH05 comes with, and loads, a bomb .BB file for every character, not just for the Reimu and Yuuka bomb transitions you see in-game… 🤔 Restoring those unused stage tile → bomb image transition animations for Mima and Marisa isn't that trivial without having decompiled their actual bomb animation functions before, so stay tuned!

Interestingly though, the code leaves out what would look like the most obvious optimization: All stage tiles are unconditionally redrawn each frame before they're erased again with the 16×16 blocks, no matter if they weren't covered by such a block in the previous frame, or are going to be covered by such a block in this frame. The same is true for the static bomb and boss background images, where ZUN simply didn't write a .CDG blitting function that takes the dirty tile array into account. If VRAM writes on PC-98 really were as slow as the games' README.TXT files claim them to be, shouldn't all the optimization work have gone towards minimizing them? Oh well, it's not like I have any idea what I'm talking about here. I'd better stop talking about anything relating to VRAM performance on PC-98…

Second, it finally was time to solve the long-standing confusion about all those callbacks that are supposed to render the playfield background. Given the aforementioned static bomb background images, ZUN chose to make this needlessly complicated. And so, we have two callback function pointers: One during bomb animations, one outside of bomb animations, and each boss update function is responsible for keeping the former in sync with the latter.

Other than that, this was one of the smoothest pushes we've had in a while; the hardest parts of boss background rendering all were part of 📝 the last push. Once you figured out that ZUN does indeed dynamically change hardware color #0 based on the current boss phase, the remaining one function for Shinki, and all of EX-Alice's background rendering becomes very straightforward and understandable.

Meanwhile, -Tom- told me about his plans to publicly release 📝 his TH05 scripting toolkit once TH05's MAIN.EXE would hit around 50% RE! That pretty much defines what the next bunch of generic TH05 pushes will go towards: bullets, shared boss code, and one full, concrete boss script to demonstrate how it's all combined. Next up, therefore: TH04's bullet firing code…? Yes, TH04's. I want to see what I'm doing before I tackle the undecompilable mess that is TH05's bullet firing code, and you all probably want readable code for that feature as well. Turns out it's also the perfect place for Blue Bolt's pending contributions.

📝 Posted:

2021-06-10 20:56 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0146

⌨ Commits:

08bc188...456b621

💰 Funded by:

Ember2528, -Tom-

🏷 Tags:

th05

+

rec98

+

tcc

+

animation

+

boss

+

shinki

+

micro-optimization

+

waste

-

uth05win

+

Y'know, I kinda prefer the pending crowdfunded workload to stay more near the middle of the cap, rather than being sold out all the time. So to reach this point more quickly, let's do the most relaxing thing that can be easily done in TH05 right now: The boss backgrounds, starting with Shinki's, 📝 now that we've got the time to look at it in detail.

… Oh come on, more things that are borderline undecompilable, and require new workarounds to be developed? Yup, Borland C++ always optimizes any comparison of a register with a literal 0 to OR reg, reg, no matter how many calculations and inlined function calls you replace the 0 with. Shinki's background particle rendering function contains a CMP AX, 0 instruction though… so yeah, 📝 yet another piece of custom ASM that's worse than what Turbo C++ 4.0J would have generated if ZUN had just written readable C. This was probably motivated by ZUN insisting that his modified master.lib function for blitting particles takes its X and Y parameters as registers. If he had just used the __fastcall convention, he also would have got the sprite ID passed as a register. 🤷
So, we really don't want to be forced into inline assembly just because of the third comparison in the otherwise perfectly decompilable four-comparison if() expression that prevents invisible particles from being drawn. The workaround: Comparing to a pointer instead, which only the linker gets to resolve to the actual value of 0. This way, the compiler has to make room for any 16-bit literal, and can't optimize anything.

And then we go straight from micro-optimization to waste, with all the duplication in the code that animates all those particles together with the zooming and spinning lines. This push decompiled 1.31% of all code in TH05, and thanks to alignment, we're still missing Shinki's high-level background rendering function that calls all the subfunctions I decompiled here.
With all the manipulated state involved here, it's not at all trivial to see how this code produces what you see in-game. Like:

1. If all lines have the same Y velocity, how do the other three lines in background type B get pushed down into this vertical formation while the top one stays still? (Answer: This velocity is only applied to the top line, the other lines are only pushed based on some delta.)
2. How can this delta be calculated based on the distance of the top line with its supposed target point around Shinki's wings? (Answer: The velocity is never set to 0, so the top line overshoots this target point in every frame. After calculating the delta, the top line itself is pushed down as well, canceling out the movement. )
3. Why don't they get pushed down infinitely, but stop eventually? (Answer: We only see four lines out of 20, at indices #0, #6, #12, and #18. In each frame, lines [0..17] are copied to lines [1..18], before anything gets moved. The invisible lines are pushed down based on the delta as well, which defines a distance between the visible lines of (velocity * array gap). And since the velocity is capped at -14 pixels per frame, this also means a maximum distance of 84 pixels between the midpoints of each line.)
4. And why are the lines moving back up when switching to background type C, before moving down? (Answer: Because type C increases the velocity rather than decreasing it. Therefore, it relies on the previous velocity state from type B to show a gapless animation.)

So yeah, it's a nice-looking effect, just very hard to understand. 😵

With the amount of effort I'm putting into this project, I typically gravitate towards more descriptive function names. Here, however, uth05win's simple and seemingly tiny-brained "background type A/B/C/D" was quite a smart choice. It clearly defines the sequence in which these animations are intended to be shown, and as we've seen with point 4 from the list above, that does indeed matter.

Next up: At least EX-Alice's background animations, and probably also the high-level parts of the background rendering for all the other TH05 bosses.

📝 Posted:

2021-04-23 00:46 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0138

⌨ Commits:

8d953dc...864e864

💰 Funded by:

[Anonymous], Blue Bolt

🏷 Tags:

th01

+

th02

+

th03

+

th04

+

rec98

+

micro-optimization

+

file-format

+

waste

-

Technical debt, part 9… and as it turns out, it's highly impractical to repay 100% of it at this point in development. 😕

The reason: graph_putsa_fx(), ZUN's function for rendering optionally boldfaced text to VRAM using the font ROM glyphs, in its ridiculously micro-optimized TH04 and TH05 version. This one sets the "callback function" for applying the boldface effect by self-modifying the target of two CALL rel16 instructions… because there really wasn't any free register left for an indirect CALL, eh? The necessary distance, from the call site to the function itself, has to be calculated at assembly time, by subtracting the target function label from the call site label.
This usually wouldn't be a problem… if ZUN didn't store the resulting lookup tables in the .DATA segment. With code segments, we can easily split them at pretty much any point between functions because there are multiple of them. But there's only a single .DATA segment, with all ZUN and master.lib data sandwiched between Borland C++'s crt0 at the top, and Borland C++'s library functions at the bottom of the segment. Adding another split point would require all data after that point to be moved to its own translation unit, which in turn requires EXTERN references in the big .ASM file to all that moved data… in short, it would turn the codebase into an even greater mess.
Declaring the labels as EXTERN wouldn't work either, since the linker can't do fancy arithmetic and is limited to simply replacing address placeholders with one single address. So, we're now stuck with this function at the bottom of the SHARED segment, for the foreseeable future.

We can still continue to separate functions off the top of that segment, though. Pretty much the only thing noteworthy there, so far: TH04's code for loading stage tile images from .MPN files, which we hadn't reverse-engineered so far, and which nicely fit into one of Blue Bolt's pending ⅓ RE contributions. Yup, we finally moved the RE% bars again! If only for a tiny bit.
Both TH02 and TH05 simply store one pointer to one dynamically allocated memory block for all tile images, as well as the number of images, in the data segment. TH04, on the other hand, reserves memory for 8 .MPN slots, complete with their color palettes, even though it only ever uses the first one of these. There goes another 458 bytes of conventional RAM… I should start summing up all the waste we've seen so far. Let's put the next website contribution towards a tagging system for these blog posts.

At 86% of technical debt in the SHARED segment repaid, we aren't quite done yet, but the rest is mostly just TH04 needing to catch up with functions we've already separated. Next up: Getting to that practical 98.5% point. Since this is very likely to not require a full push, I'll also decompile some more actual TH04 and TH05 game code I previously reverse-engineered – and after that, reopen the store!

📝 Posted:

2020-11-30 23:48 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0128, P0129

⌨ Commits:

dc65b59...dde36f7, dde36f7...f4c2e45

💰 Funded by:

Yanga

🏷 Tags:

th01

+

rec98

+

file-format

+

gameplay

+

card-flipping

+

waste

-

debug

+

hidden-content

+

bug

+

So, only one card-flipping function missing, and then we can start decompiling TH01's two final bosses? Unfortunately, that had to be the one big function that initializes and renders all gameplay objects. #17 on the list of longest functions in all of PC-98 Touhou, requiring two pushes to fully understand what's going on there… and then it immediately returns for all "boss" stages whose number is divisible by 5, yet is still called during Sariel's and Konngara's initialization 🤦

Oh well. This also involved the final file format we hadn't looked at yet – the STAGE?.DAT files that describe the layout for all stages within a single 5-stage scene. Which, for a change is a very well-designed form– no, of course it's completely weird, what did you expect? Development must have looked somewhat like this:

• Weirdness #1: "Hm, the stage format should include the file names for the background graphics and music… or should it?" And so, the 22-byte header still references some music and background files that aren't part of the final game. The game doesn't use anything from there, and instead derives those file names from the scene ID.
  That's probably nothing new to anyone who has ever looked at TH01's data files. In a slightly more interesting discovery though, seeing the 📝 .GRF extension, in some of the file names that are short enough to not cut it off, confirms that .GRF was initially used for background images. Probably before ZUN learned about .PI, and how it achieves better compression than his own per-bitplane RLE approach?

• Weirdness #2: "Hm, I might want to put obstacles on top of cards?" You'd probably expect this format to contain one single array for every stage, describing which object to place on every 32×32 tile, if any. Well, the real format uses two arrays: One for the cards, and a combined one for all "obstacles" – bumpers, bumper bars, turrets, and portals. However, none of the card-flipping stages in the final game come with any such overlaps. That's quite unfortunate, as it would have made for some quite interesting level designs:

  

  As you can see, the final version of the blitting code was not written with such overlaps in mind either, blitting the cards on top of all the obstacles, and not the other way round.

• Weirdness #3: "In contrast to obstacles, of which there are multiple types, cards only really need 1 bit. Time for some bit twiddling!" Not the worst idea, given that the 640×336 playfield can fit 20×10 cards, which would fit exactly into 25 bytes if you use a single bit to indicate card or no card. But for whatever reason, ZUN only stored 4 card bits per byte, leaving the other 4 bits unused, and needlessly blowing up that array to 50 bytes. 🤷

  Oh, and did I mention that the contents of the STAGE?.DAT files are loaded into the main data segment, even though the game immediately parses them into something more conveniently accessible? That's another 1250 bytes of memory wasted for no reason…

• Weirdness #4: "Hm, how about requiring the player to flip some of the cards multiple times? But I've already written all this bit twiddling code to store 4 cards in 1 byte. And if cards should need anywhere from 1 to 4 flips, that would need at least 2 more bits, which won't fit into the unused 4 bits either…" This feature must have come later, because the final game uses 3 "obstacle" type IDs to act as a flip count modifier for a card at the same relative array position. Complete with lookup code to find the actual card index these modifiers belong to, and ridiculous switch statements to not include those non-obstacles in the game's internal obstacle array.

With all that, it's almost not worth mentioning how there are 12 turret types, which only differ in which hardcoded pellet group they fire at a hardcoded interval of either 100 or 200 frames, and that they're all explicitly spelled out in every single switch statement. Or how the layout of the internal card and obstacle SoA classes is quite disjointed. So here's the new ZUN bugs you've probably already been expecting!

Cards and obstacles are blitted to both VRAM pages. This way, any other entities moving on top of them can simply be unblitted by restoring pixels from VRAM page 1, without requiring the stationary objects to be redrawn from main memory. Obviously, the backgrounds behind the cards have to be stored somewhere, since the player can remove them. For faster transitions between stages of a scene, ZUN chose to store the backgrounds behind obstacles as well. This way, the background image really only needs to be blitted for the first stage in a scene.

All that memory for the object backgrounds adds up quite a bit though. ZUN actually made the correct choice here and picked a memory allocation function that can return more than the 64 KiB of a single x86 Real Mode segment. He then accesses the individual backgrounds via regular array subscripts… and that's where the bug lies, because he stores the returned address in a regular far pointer rather than a huge one. This way, the game still can only display a total of 102 objects (i. e., cards and obstacles combined) per stage, without any unblitting glitches.
What a shame, that limit could have been 127 if ZUN didn't needlessly allocate memory for alpha planes when backing up VRAM content.

And since array subscripts on far pointers wrap around after 64 KiB, trying to save the background of the 103rd object is guaranteed to corrupt the memory block header at the beginning of the returned segment. When TH01 runs in debug mode, it correctly reports a corrupted heap in this case.
After detecting such a corruption, the game loudly reports it by playing the "player hit" sound effect and locking up, freezing any further gameplay or rendering. The locking loop can be left by pressing ↵ Return, but the game will simply re-enter it if the corruption is still present during the next heapcheck(), in the next frame. And since heap corruptions don't tend to repair themselves, you'd have to constantly hold ↵ Return to resume gameplay. Doing that could actually get you safely to the next boss, since the game doesn't allocate or free any further heap memory during a 5-stage card-flipping scene, and just throws away its C heap when restarting the process for a boss. But then again, holding ↵ Return will also auto-flip all cards on the way there… 🤨

Finally, some unused content! Upon discovering TH01's stage selection debug feature, probably everyone tried to access Stage 21, just to see what happens, and indeed landed in an actual stage, with a black background and a weird color palette. Turns out that ZUN did ship an unused scene in SCENE7.DAT, which is exactly what's loaded there.
However, it's easy to believe that this is just garbage data (as I initially did): At the beginning of "Stage 22", the game seems to enter an infinite loop somewhere during the flip-in animation.

Well, we've had a heap overflow above, and the cause here is nothing but a stack buffer overflow – a perhaps more modern kind of classic C bug, given its prevalence in the Windows Touhou games. Explained in a few lines of code:

void stageobjs_init_and_render()
{
	int card_animation_frames[50]; // even though there can be up to 200?!
	int total_frames = 0;

	(code that would end up resetting total_frames if it ever tried to reset
	card_animation_frames[50]…)
}

The number of cards in "Stage 22"? 76. There you have it.

But of course, it's trivial to disable this animation and fix these stage transitions. So here they are, Stages 21 to 24, as shipped with the game in STAGE7.DAT:

Wow, what a mess. All that was just a bit too much to be covered in two pushes… Next up, assuming the current subscriptions: Taking a vacation with one smaller TH01 push, covering some smaller functions here and there to ensure some uninterrupted Konngara progress later on.

📝 Posted:

2020-11-03 01:44 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0124, P0125

⌨ Commits:

72dfa09...056b1c7, 056b1c7...f6a3246

💰 Funded by:

Blue Bolt, [Anonymous]

🏷 Tags:

th02

+

th04

+

rec98

+

pc98

+

menu

+

waste

-

master.lib

+

Turns out that TH04's player selection menu is exactly three times as complicated as TH05's. Two screens for character and shot type rather than one, and a way more intricate implementation for saving and restoring the background behind the raised top and left edges of a character picture when moving the cursor between Reimu and Marisa. TH04 decides to backup precisely only the two 256×8 (top) and 8×244 (left) strips behind the edges, indicated in red in the picture below.

These take up just 4 KB of heap memory… but require custom blitting functions, and expanding this explicitly hardcoded approach to TH05's 4 characters would have been pretty annoying. So, rather than, uh, not explicitly hardcoding it all, ZUN decided to just be lazy with the backup area in TH05, saving the entire 640×400 screen, and thus spending 128 KB of heap memory on this rather simple selection shadow effect.

So, this really wasn't something to quickly get done during the first half of a push, even after already having done TH05's equivalent of this menu. But since life is very busy right now, I also used the occasion to start addressing another code organization annoyance: master.lib's single master.h header file.

• Now that ReC98 is trying to develop (or at least mimic) a more type-safe C++ foundation to model the PC-98 hardware, a pure C header (with counter-productive C++ extensions) is becoming increasingly unidiomatic. By moving some of the original assumptions about function parameters into the type system, we can also reduce the reliance on its Japanese-only documentation without having to translate it
• It's far from complete with regards to providing compile-time PC-98 hardware constants and helpful types. In fact, we started to add these in our own header files a long time ago.
• It's quite bloated, with at least 2800 lines of code that currently are #included into the vast majority of files, not counting master.h's recursively included C standard library headers. PC-98 Touhou only makes direct use of a rather small fraction of its contents.
• And finally, all the DOS/V compatibility definitions are especially useless in the context of ReC98. As I've noted 📝 time and 📝 time again, porting PC-98 Touhou to IBM-compatible DOS won't be easy, and MASTER_DOSV won't be helping much. Therefore, my upstream version of ReC98 will never include all of master.lib. There's no point in lengthening compile times for everyone by default, and those will be getting quite noticeable after moving to a full 16-bit build process.
  (Actually, what retro system ports should rather be doing: Get rid of master.lib's original ASM code, replace it with readable, modern C++, and then simply convert the optimized assembly output of modern compilers to your ISA of choice. Improving the landscape of such assembly or object file converters would benefit everyone!)

So, time to start a new master.hpp header that would contain just the declarations from master.h that PC-98 Touhou actually needs, plus some semantic (yes, semantic) sugar. Comparing just the old master.h to just the new master.hpp after roughly 60% of the transition has been completed, we get median build times of 319 ms for master.h, and 144 ms for master.hpp on my (admittedly rather slow) DOSBox setup. Nice!
As of this push, ReC98 consists of 107 translation units that have to be compiled with Turbo C++ 4.0J. Fully rebuilding all of these currently takes roughly 37.5 seconds in DOSBox. After the transition to master.hpp is done, we could therefore shave some 10 to 15 seconds off this time, simply by switching header files. And that's just the beginning, as this will also pave the way for further #include optimizations. Life in this codebase will be great!

Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time to repay some of the actual technical debt I was looking forward to, after all of this. Oh well, at least we now also have nice identifiers for the three different boldface options that are used when rendering text to VRAM, after procrastinating that issue for almost 11 months. Next up, assuming the existing subscriptions: More ridiculous decompilations of things that definitely weren't originally written in C, and a big blocker in TH03's MAIN.EXE.

📝 Posted:

2020-10-13 21:46 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0123

⌨ Commits:

4406c3d...72dfa09

💰 Funded by:

Yanga

🏷 Tags:

th01

+

rec98

+

file-format

+

player

+

animation

+

blitting

+

waste

-

jank

+

Done with the .BOS format, at last! While there's still quite a bunch of undecompiled non-format blitting code left, this was in fact the final piece of graphics format loading code in TH01.

📝 Continuing the trend from three pushes ago, we've got yet another class, this time for the 48×48 and 48×32 sprites used in Reimu's gohei, slide, and kick animations. The only reason these had to use the .BOS format at all is simply because Reimu's regular sprites are 32×32, and are therefore loaded from 📝 .PTN files.
Yes, this makes no sense, because why would you split animations for the same character across two file formats and two APIs, just because of a sprite size difference? This necessity for switching blitting APIs might also explain why Reimu vanishes for a few frames at the beginning and the end of the gohei swing animation, but more on that once we get to the high-level rendering code.

Now that we've decompiled all the .BOS implementations in TH01, here's an overview of all of them, together with .PTN to show that there really was no reason for not using the .BOS API for all of Reimu's sprites:

And even that last property could simply be handled by branching based on the sprite width, and wouldn't be a reason for switching formats. But well, it just wouldn't be TH01 without all that redundant bloat though, would it?

The basic loading, freeing, and blitting code was yet another variation on the other .BOS code we've seen before. So this should have caused just as little trouble as the CBossAnim code… except that CPlayerAnim did add one slightly difficult function to the mix, which led to it requiring almost a full push after all. Similar to 📝 the unblitting code for moving lasers we've seen in the last push, ZUN tries to minimize the amount of VRAM writes when unblitting Reimu's slide animations. Technically, it's only necessary to restore the pixels that Reimu traveled by, plus the ones that wouldn't be redrawn by the new animation frame at the new X position.
The theoretically arbitrary distance between the two sprites is, of course, modeled by a fixed-size buffer on the stack , coming with the further assumption that the sprite surely hasn't moved by more than 1 horizontal VRAM byte compared to the last frame. Which, of course, results in glitches if that's not the case, leaving little Reimu parts in VRAM if the slide speed ever exceeded 8 pixels per frame. (Which it never does, being hardcoded to 6 pixels, but still.). As it also turns out, all those bit masking operations easily lead to incredibly sloppy C code. Which compiles into incredibly terrible ASM, which in turn might end up wasting way more CPU time than the final VRAM write optimization would have gained? Then again, in-depth profiling is way beyond the scope of this project at this point.

Next up: The TH04 main menu, and some more technical debt.

📝 Posted:

2020-10-06 14:30 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0122

⌨ Commits:

164591f...4406c3d

💰 Funded by:

Yanga

🏷 Tags:

th01

+

rec98

+

blitting

+

waste

-

jank

+

gameplay

+

laser

+

This time around, laser is 📝 actually not difficult, with TH01's shootout laser class being simple enough to nicely fit into a single push. All other stationary lasers (as used by YuugenMagan, for example) don't even use a class, and are simply treated as regular lines with collision detection.

But of course, the shootout lasers also come with the typical share of TH01 jank we've all come to expect by now. This time, it already starts with the hardcoded sprite data:

A shootout laser can have a width from 1 to 8 pixels, so ZUN stored a separate 16×1 sprite with a line for each possible width (left-to-right). Then, he shifted all of these sprites 1 pixel to the right for all of the 8 possible start positions within a planar VRAM byte (top-to-bottom). Because… doing that bit shift programmatically is way too expensive, so let's pre-shift at compile time, and use 16× the memory per sprite?

Since a bunch of other sprite sheets need to be pre-shifted as well (this is the 5th one we've found so far), our sprite converter has a feature to automatically generate those pre-shifted variations. This way, we can abstract away that implementation detail and leave modders with .BMP files that still only contain a single version of each sprite. But, uh…, wait, in this sprite sheet, the second row for 1-pixel lasers is accidentally shifted right by one more pixel that it should have been?! Which means that

1. we can't use the auto-preshift feature here, and have to store this weird-looking (and quite frankly, completely unnecessary) sprite sheet in its entirety
2. ZUN did, at least during TH01's development, not have a sprite converter, and directly hardcoded these dot patterns in the C++ code

The waste continues with the class itself. 69 bytes, with 22 bytes outright unused, and 11 not really necessary. As for actual innovations though, we've got 📝 another 32-bit fixed-point type, this time actually using 8 bits for the fractional part. Therefore, the ray position is tracked to the 1/256th of a pixel, using the full precision of master.lib's 8-bit sin() and cos() lookup tables.
Unblitting is also remarkably efficient: It's only done once the laser stopped extending and started moving, and only for the exact pixels at the start of the ray that the laser traveled by in a single frame. If only the ray part was also rendered as efficiently – it's fully blitted every frame, right next to the collision detection for each row of the ray.

With a public interface of two functions (spawn, and update / collide / unblit / render), that's superficially all there is to lasers in this game. There's another (apparently inlined) function though, to both reset and, uh, "fully unblit" all lasers at the end of every boss fight… except that it fails hilariously at doing the latter, and ends up effectively unblitting random 32-pixel line segments, due to ZUN confusing both the coordinates and the parameter types for the line unblitting function.
A while ago, I was asked about this crash that tends to happen when defeating Elis. And while you can clearly see the random unblitted line segments that are missing from the sprites, I don't quite think we've found the cause for the crash, since the 📝 line unblitting function used there does clip its coordinates to the VRAM range.

Next up: The final piece of image format code in TH01, covering Reimu's sprites!

📝 Posted:

2020-09-28 11:52 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0120, P0121

⌨ Commits:

453dd3c...3c008b6, 3c008b6...5c42fcd

💰 Funded by:

Yanga

🏷 Tags:

th01

+

rec98

+

pc98

+

blitting

+

waste

-

jank

+

boss

+

mima-th01

+

Back to TH01, and its boss sprite format… with a separate class for storing animations that only differs minutely from the 📝 regular boss entity class I covered last time? Decompiling this class was almost free, and the main reason why the first of these pushes ended up looking pretty huge.

Next up were the remaining shape drawing functions from the code segment that started with the .GRC functions. P0105 already started these with the (surprisingly sanely implemented) 8×8 diamond, star, and… uh, snowflake (?) sprites , prominently seen in the Konngara, Elis, and Sariel fights, respectively. Now, we've also got:

• ellipse arcs with a customizable angle distance between the individual dots – mostly just used for drawing full circles, though
• line loops – which are only used for the rotating white squares around Mima, meaning that the white star in the YuugenMagan fight got a completely redundant reimplementation
• and the surprisingly weirdest one, drawing the red invincibility sprites.

The weirdness becomes obvious with just a single screenshot:

First, we've got the obvious issue of the sprites not being clipped at the right edge of VRAM, with the rightmost pixels in each row of the sprite extending to the beginning of the next row. Well, that's just what you get if you insist on writing unique low-level blitting code for the majority of the individual sprites in the game… 🤷
More importantly though, the sprite sheet looks like this: So how do we even get these fully filled red diamonds?

Well, turns out that the sprites are never consistently unblitted during their 8 frames of animation. There is a function that looks like it unblits the sprite… except that it starts with by enabling the GRCG and… reading from the first bitplane on the background page? If this was the EGC, such a read would fill some internal registers with the contents of all 4 bitplanes, which can then subsequently be blitted to all 4 bitplanes of any VRAM page with a single memory write. But with the GRCG in RMW mode, reads do nothing special, and simply copy the memory contents of one bitplane to the read destination. Maybe ZUN thought that setting the RMW color to red also sets some internal 4-plane mask register to match that color?
Instead, the rather random pixels read from the first bitplane are then used as a mask for a second blit of the same red sprite. Effectively, this only really "unblits" the invincibility pixels that are drawn on top of Reimu's sprite. Since Reimu is drawn first, the invincibility sprites are overwritten anyway. But due to the palette color layout of Reimu's sprite, its pixels end up fully masking away any invincibility sprite pixels in that second blit, leaving VRAM untouched as a result. Anywhere else though, this animation quickly turns into the union of all animation frames.

Then again, if that 16-dot-aligned rectangular unblitting function is all you know about the EGC, and you can't be bothered to write a perfect unblitter for 8×8 sprites, it becomes obvious why you wouldn't want to use it:

Because Reimu would barely be visible under all that flicker. In comparison, those fully filled diamonds actually look pretty good.

After all that, the remaining time wouldn't have been enough for the next few essential classes, so I closed out the push with three more VRAM effects instead:

• Single-bitplane pixel inversion inside a 32×32 square – the main effect behind the discoloration seen in the bomb animation, as well as the expanding squares at the end of Kikuri's and Sariel's entrance animation
• EGC-accelerated VRAM row copies – the second half of smooth and fully hardware-accelerated scrolling for backgrounds that are twice the size of VRAM
• And finally, the VRAM page content transition function using meshed 8×8 squares, used for the blocky transition to Sariel's first and second phases. Which is quite ridiculous in just how needlessly bloated it is. I'm positive that this sort of thing could have also been accelerated using the PC-98's EGC… although simply writing better C would have already gone a long way. The function also comes with three unused mesh patterns.

And with that, ReC98, as a whole, is not only ⅓ done, but I've also fully caught up with the feature backlog for the first time in the history of this crowdfunding! Time to go into maintenance mode then, while we wait for the next pushes to be funded. Got a huge backlog of tiny maintenance issues to address at a leisurely pace, and of course there's also the 📝 16-bit build system waiting to be finished.

📝 Posted:

2020-08-12 16:09 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0105, P0106, P0107, P0108

⌨ Commits:

3622eb6...11b776b, 11b776b...1f1829d, 1f1829d...1650241, 1650241...dcf4e2c

💰 Funded by:

Yanga

🏷 Tags:

th01

+

rec98

+

meta

+

file-format

+

animation

+

blitting

+

boss

+

singyoku

+

yuugenmagan

+

elis

+

kikuri

+

konngara

+

waste

-

And indeed, I got to end my vacation with a lot of image format and blitting code, covering the final two formats, .GRC and .BOS. .GRC was nothing noteworthy – one function for loading, one function for byte-aligned blitting, and one function for freeing memory. That's it – not even a unblitting function for this one. .BOS, on the other hand…

…has no generic (read: single/sane) implementation, and is only implemented as methods of some boss entity class. And then again for Sariel's dress and wand animations, and then again for Reimu's animations, both of which weren't even part of these 4 pushes. Looking forward to decompiling essentially the same algorithms all over again… And that's how TH01 became the largest and most bloated PC-98 Touhou game. So yeah, still not done with image formats, even at 44% RE.

This means I also had to reverse-engineer that "boss entity" class… yeah, what else to call something a boss can have multiple of, that may or may not be part of a larger boss sprite, may or may not be animated, and that may or may not have an orb hitbox?
All bosses except for Kikuri share the same 5 global instances of this class. Since renaming all these variables in ASM land is tedious anyway, I went the extra mile and directly defined separate, meaningful names for the entities of all bosses. These also now document the natural order in which the bosses will ultimately be decompiled. So, unless a backer requests anything else, this order will be:

1. Konngara
2. Sariel
3. Elis
4. Kikuri
5. SinGyoku
6. (code for regular card-flipping stages)
7. Mima
8. YuugenMagan

As everyone kind of expects from TH01 by now, this class reveals yet another… um, unique and quirky piece of code architecture. In addition to the position and hitbox members you'd expect from a class like this, the game also stores the .BOS metadata – width, height, animation frame count, and 📝 bitplane pointer slot number – inside the same class. But if each of those still corresponds to one individual on-screen sprite, how can YuugenMagan have 5 eye sprites, or Kikuri have more than one soul and tear sprite? By duplicating that metadata, of course! And copying it from one entity to another
At this point, I feel like I even have to congratulate the game for not actually loading YuugenMagan's eye sprites 5 times. But then again, 53,760 bytes of waste would have definitely been noticeable in the DOS days. Makes much more sense to waste that amount of space on an unused C++ exception handler, and a bunch of redundant, unoptimized blitting functions

(Thinking about it, YuugenMagan fits this entire system perfectly. And together with its position in the game's code – last to be decompiled means first on the linker command line – we might speculate that YuugenMagan was the first boss to be programmed for TH01?)

So if a boss wants to use sprites with different sizes, there's no way around using another entity. And that's why Girl-Elis and Bat-Elis are two distinct entities internally, and have to manually sync their position. Except that there's also a third one for Attacking-Girl-Elis, because Girl-Elis has 9 frames of animation in total, and the global .BOS bitplane pointers are divided into 4 slots of only 8 images each.
Same for SinGyoku, who is split into a sphere entity, a person entity, and a… white flash entity for all three forms, all at the same resolution. Or Konngara's facial expressions, which also require two entities just for themselves.

And once you decompile all this code, you notice just how much of it the game didn't even use. 13 of the 50 bytes of the boss entity class are outright unused, and 10 bytes are used for a movement clamping and lock system that would have been nice if ZUN also used it outside of Kikuri's soul sprites. Instead, all other bosses ignore this system completely, and just party on the X/Y coordinates of the boss entities directly.

As for the rendering functions, 5 out of 10 are unused. And while those definitely make up less than half of the code, I still must have spent at least 1 of those 4 pushes on effectively unused functionality.
Only one of these functions lends itself to some speculation. For Elis' entrance animation, the class provides functions for wavy blitting and unblitting, which use a separate X coordinate for every line of the sprite. But there's also an unused and sort of broken one for unblitting two overlapping wavy sprites, located at the same Y coordinate. This might indicate that Elis could originally split herself into two sprites, similar to TH04 Stage 6 Yuuka? Or it might just have been some other kind of animation effect, who knows.

After over 3 months of TH01 progress though, it's finally time to look at other games, to cover the rest of the crowdfunding backlog. Next up: Going back to TH05, and getting rid of those last PI false positives. And since I can potentially spend the next 7 weeks on almost full-time ReC98 work, I've also re-opened the store until October!

📝 Posted:

2020-07-27 15:27 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0103, P0104

⌨ Commits:

b60f38d...05c0028, 05c0028...3622eb6

💰 Funded by:

Ember2528

🏷 Tags:

th01

+

rec98

+

hud

+

file-format

+

jank

+

waste

-

It's vacation time! Which, for ReC98, means "relaxing by looking at something boring and uninteresting that we'll ultimately have to cover anyway"… like the TH01 HUD.

📝 As noted earlier, all the score, card combo, stage, and time numbers are drawn into VRAM. Which turns TH01's HUD rendering from the trivial, gaiji-assisted text RAM writes we see in later games to something that, once again, requires blitting and unblitting steps. For some reason though, everything on there is blitted to both VRAM pages? And that's why the HUD chose to allocate a bunch of .PTN sprite slots to store the background behind all "animated" elements at the beginning of a 4-stage scene or boss battle… separately for every affected 16×16 area. (Looking forward to the completely unnecessary code in the Sariel fight that updates these slots after the backgrounds were animated!) And without any separation into helper functions, we end up with the same blitting calls separately copy-pasted for every single HUD element. That's why something as seemingly trivial as this isn't even done after 2 pushes, as we're still missing the stage timer.

Thankfully, the .PTN function signatures come with none of ZUN's little inconsistencies, so I was able to mostly reduce this copy-pasta to a bunch of small inline functions and macros. Those interfaces still remain a bit annoying, though. As a 32×32 format, .PTN merely supports 16×16 sprites with a separate bunch of functions that take an additional quarter parameter from 0 to 3, to select one of the 4 16×16 quarters in a such a sprite…

For life and bomb counts, there was no way around VRAM though, since ZUN wanted to use more than a single color for those. This is where we find at least somewhat of a mildly interesting quirk in all of this: Any life counts greater than the intended 6 will wrap into new rows, with the bombs in the second row overlapping those excess lives. With the way the rest of the HUD rendering works, that wrapping code code had to be explicitly written… which means that ZUN did in fact accomodate (his own?) cheating there.

Now, I promised image formats, and in the middle of this copy-pasta, we did get one… sort of. MASK.GRF, the red HUD background, is entirely handled with two small bespoke functions… and that's all the code we have for this format. Basically, it's a variation on the 📝 .GRZ format we've seen earlier. It uses the exact same RLE algorithm, but only has a single byte stream for both RLE commands and pixel data… as you would expect from an RLE format.

.GRF actually stores 4 separately encoded RLE streams, which suggests that it was intended for full 16-color images. Unfortunately, MASK.GRF only contains 4 copies of the same HUD background , so no unused beta data for us there. The only thing we could derive from 4 identical bitplanes would be that the background was originally meant to be drawn using color #15, rather than the red seen in the final game. Color #15 is a stage-specific background color that would have made the HUD blend in quite nicely – in the YuugenMagan fight, it's the changing color of the 邪 in the background, for example. But really, with no generic implementation of this format, that's all just speculation.

Oh, and in case you were looking for a rip of that image:

So yeah, more of the usual TH01 code, with the usual small quirks, but nothing all too horrible – as expected. Next up: The image formats that didn't make it into this push.

📝 Posted:

2020-05-25 14:05 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0092, P0093, P0094

⌨ Commits:

29c5a73...4403308, 4403308...0e73029, 0e73029...57a8487

💰 Funded by:

Yanga, Ember2528

🏷 Tags:

th01

+

rec98

+

file-format

+

menu

+

score

+

jank

+

waste

-

Three pushes to decompile the TH01 high score menu… because it's completely terrible, and needlessly complicated in pretty much every aspect:

• Another, final set of differences between the REIIDEN.EXE and FUUIN.EXE versions of the code. Which are so insignificant that it must mean that ZUN kept this code in two separate, manually and imperfectly synced files. The REIIDEN.EXE version, only shown when game-overing, automatically jumps to the enter/終 button after the 8th character was entered, and also has a completely invisible timeout that force-enters a high score name after 1000… key presses? Not frames? Why. Like, how do you even realistically such a number. (Best guess: It's a hidden easter egg to amuse players who place drinking glasses on cursor keys. Or beer bottles.)
  That's all the differences that are maybe visible if you squint hard enough. On top of that though, we got a bunch of further, minor code organization differences that serve no purpose other than to waste decompilation time, and certainly did their part in stretching this out to 3 pushes instead of 2.

• Entered names are restricted to a set of 16-bit, full-width Shift-JIS codepoints, yet are still accessed as 8-bit byte arrays everywhere. This bloats both the C++ and generated ASM code with needless byte splits, swaps, and bit shifts. Same for the route kanji. You have this 16-, heck, even 32-bit CPU, why not use it?! (Fun fact: FUUIN.EXE is explicitly compiled for a 80186, for the most part – unlike REIIDEN.EXE, which does use Turbo C++'s 80386 mode.)

• The sensible way of storing the current position of the alphabet cursor would simply be two variables, indicating the logical row and column inside the character map. When rendering, you'd then transform these into screen space. This can keep the on-screen position constants in a single place of code.
  TH01 does the opposite: The selected character is stored directly in terms of its on-screen position, which is then mapped back to a character index for every processed input and the subsequent screen update. There's no notion of a logical row or column anywhere, and consequently, the position constants are vomited all over the code.

• Which might not be as bad if the character map had a uniform grid structure, with no gaps. But the one in TH01 looks like this:

  

  And with no sense of abstraction anywhere, both input handling and rendering end up with a separate if branch for at least 4 of the 6 rows.

In the end, I just gave up with my usual redundancy reduction efforts for this one. Anyone wanting to change TH01's high score name entering code would be better off just rewriting the entire thing properly.

And that's all of the shared code in TH01! Both OP.EXE and FUUIN.EXE are now only missing the actual main menu and ending code, respectively. Next up, though: The long awaited TH01 PI push. Which will not only deliver 100% PI for OP.EXE and FUUIN.EXE, but also probably quite some gains in REIIDEN.EXE. With now over 30% of the game decompiled, it's about time we get to look at some gameplay code!

📝 Posted:

2020-04-03 15:46 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0085

⌨ Commits:

110d6dd...54ee99b

💰 Funded by:

-Tom-

🏷 Tags:

th02

+

th04

+

th05

+

rec98

+

blitting

+

animation

+

waste

-

good-code

+

Wait, PI for FUUIN.EXE is mainly blocked by the high score menu? That one should really be properly decompiled in a separate RE push, since it's also present in largely identical form in REIIDEN.EXE… but I currently lack the explicit funding to do that.

And as it turns out, I shouldn't really capture any of the existing generic RE contributions for it either. Back in 2018 when I ran the crowdfunding on the Touhou Patch Center Discord server, I said that generic RE contributions would never go towards TH01. No one was interested in that game back then, and as it's significantly different from all the other games, it made sense to only cover it if explicitly requested.
As Touhou Patch Center still remains one of the biggest supporters and advertisers for ReC98, someone recently believed that this rule was still in effect, despite not being mentioned anywhere on this website.

Fast forward to today, and TH01 has become the single most supported game lately, with plenty of incomplete pushes still open to be completed. Reverse-engineering it has proven to be quite efficient, yielding lots of completion percentage points per push. This, I suppose, is exactly what backers that don't give any specific priorities are mainly interested in. Therefore, I will allocate future partial contributions to TH01, whenever it makes sense.

So, instead of rushing TH01 PI, let's wait for Ember2528's April subscription, and get the 25% total RE milestone with some TH05 PI progress instead. This one primarily focused on the gather circles (spirals…?), the third-last missing entity type in TH05. These are rendered using the same 8×8 pellet sprite introduced in TH02… except that the actual pellets received a darkened bottom part in TH04 . Which, in turn, is actually rendered quite efficiently – the games first render the top white part of all pellets, followed by the bottom gray part of all pellets. The PC-98 GRCG is used throughout the process, doing its typical job of accelerating monochrome blitting, and by arranging the rendering like this, only two GRCG color changes are required to draw any number of pellets. I guess that makes it quite a worthwhile optimization? Don't ask me for specific performance numbers or even saved cycles, though

Next up, one more TH05 PI push!

📝 Posted:

2020-03-18 19:39 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0083

⌨ Commits:

f6cbff0...dfac2f2

💰 Funded by:

Yanga

🏷 Tags:

th01

+

rec98

+

file-format

+

waste

-

good-code

+

Nope, RL has given me plenty of things to do from home after all, so the current cap still remains an accurate representation of my free time. 😕

For now though, we've got one more TH01 file format push, covering the core functions for loading and displaying the 32×32 and 16×16 sprites from the .PTN files, as announced – and probably one of the last ones for quite a while to yield both RE and PI progress way above average. But what is this, error return values in a ZUN game?! And actually good code for deriving the alpha channel from the 16th color in the hardware palette?! Sure, the rest of the code could still be improved a lot, but that was quite a surprise, especially after the spaghetti code of 📝 the last push. That makes up for two of the .PTN structure fields (one of them always 0, and one of them always 1) remaining unused, and therefore unknown.

ZUN also uses the .PTN image slots to store the background of frequently updated VRAM sections, in order to be able to repeatedly draw on top of them – like for example the HUD area where the score and time numbers are drawn. Future games would simply use the text RAM and gaiji for those numbers. This would have worked just fine for TH01 too – especially since all the functions decompiled so far align the VRAM X coordinate to the 8-pixel byte grid, which is the simplest way of accessing VRAM given the PC-98's planar memory layout. Looks as if ZUN simply wasn't aware of gaiji during the development of TH01.

This won't be the last time I cover the .PTN format, since all the blitting functions that actually use alpha are exclusive to REIIDEN.EXE, and currently out of decompilation reach. But after some more long overdue cleaning work, TH01 has now passed both TH02 and even TH04 to become the second-most reverse-engineered game in all of ReC98, in terms of absolute numbers! 🎉

Also, PI for TH01's OP.EXE is imminent. Next up though, we've first got the probably final double-speed push for TH01, covering the last set of duplicated functions between the three binaries – quite fitting for the currently last fully funded, outstanding TH01 RE push. Then, we also might get FUUIN.EXE PI within the same push afterwards? After that, TH01 progress will be slowing down, since I'd then have to cover either the main menu or in-game code or the cutscenes, depending on what the backers request. (By default, it's going to be in-game code, of course.)

📝 Posted:

2020-03-07 20:45 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0081

⌨ Commits:

0252da2...5ac9b30

💰 Funded by:

Ember2528

🏷 Tags:

th01

+

rec98

+

file-format

+

blitting

+

boss

+

konngara

+

waste

-

contribution-ideas

+

Sadly, we've already reached the end of fast triple-speed TH01 progress with 📝 the last push, which decompiled the last segment shared by all three of TH01's executables. There's still a bit of double-speed progress left though, with a small number of code segments that are shared between just two of the three executables.

At the end of the first one of these, we've got all the code for the .GRZ format – which is yet another run-length encoded image format, but this time storing up to 16 full 640×400 16-color images with an alpha bit. This one is exclusively used to wastefully store Konngara's sword slash and kuji-in kill animations. Due to… suboptimal code organization, the code for the format is also present in OP.EXE, despite not being used there. But hey, that brings TH01 to over 20% in RE!

Decoupling the RLE command stream from the pixel data sounds like a nice idea at first, allowing the format to efficiently encode a variety of animation frames displayed all over the screen… if ZUN actually made use of it. The RLE stream also has quite some ridiculous overhead, starting with 1 byte to store the 1-bit command (putting a single 8×1 pixel block, or entering a run of N such blocks). Run commands then store another 1-byte run length, which has to be followed by another command byte to identify the run as putting N blocks, or skipping N blocks. And the pixel data is just a sequence of these blocks for all 4 bitplanes, in uncompressed form…

Also, have some rips of all the images this format is used for:

To make these, I just wrote a small viewer, calling the same decompiled TH01 code: 2020-03-07-grzview.zip Obviously, this means that it not only must to be run on a PC-98, but also discards the alpha information. If any backers are really interested in having a proper converter to and from PNG, I can implement that in an upcoming push… although that would be the perfect thing for outside contributors to do.

Next up, we got some code for the PI format… oh, wait, the actual files are called "GRP" in TH01.

📝 Posted:

2020-01-05 20:04 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0066

⌨ Commits:

042b780...e55a48b

💰 Funded by:

Yanga, Splashman

🏷 Tags:

th01

+

rec98

+

palette

+

tcc

+

waste

-

So, the thing that made me so excited about TH01 were all those bulky C reimplementations of master.lib functions. Identical copies in all three executables, trivial to figure out and decompile, removing tons of instructions, and providing a foundation for large parts of the game later. The first set of functions near the end of that shared code segment deals with color palette handling, and master.lib's resident palette structure in particular. (No relation to the game's resident structure.) Which directly starts us out with pretty much all the decompilation difficulties imaginable:

• iteration over internal DOS structures via segment pointers – Turbo C++ doesn't support a lot of arithmetic on those, requiring tons of casts to make it work
• calls to a far function near the beginning of a segment from a function near the end of a segment – these are undecompilable until we've decompiled both functions (and thus, the majority of the segment), and need to be spelled out in ASM for the time being. And if the caller then stores some of the involved variables in registers, there's no way around the ugliest of workarounds, spelling out opcode bytes…
• surprising color format inconsistencies – apparently, GRB (rather than RGB) is some sort of wider standard in PC-98 inter-process communication, because it matches the order of the hardware's palette register ports? (0AAh = green, 0ACh = red, 0AEh = blue)? Yet the game's actual palette still uses RGB…

And as it turns out, the game doesn't even use the resident palette feature. Which adds yet another set of functions to the, uh, learning experience that ZUN must have chosen this game to be. I wouldn't be surprised if we manage to uncover actual scrapped beta game content later on, among all the unused code that's bound to still be in there.

At least decompilation should get easier for the next few TH01 pushes now… right?

📝 Posted:

2019-12-28 11:37 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0063

⌨ Commits:

034ae4b...8dbb450

💰 Funded by:

-Tom-

🏷 Tags:

th04

+

th05

+

rec98

+

file-format

+

score

+

waste

-

jank

+

Almost!

Just like most of the time, it was more sensible to cover GENSOU.SCR, the last structure missing in TH05's OP.EXE, everywhere it's used, rather than just rushing out OP.EXE position independence. I did have to look into all of the functions to fully RE it after all, and to find out whether the unused fields actually are unused. The only thing that kept this push from yielding even more above-average progress was the sheer inconsistency in how the games implemented the operations on this PC-98 equivalent of score*.dat:

• OP.EXE declares two structure instances, for simultaneous access to both Reimu and Marisa scores. TH05 with its 4 playable characters instead uses a single one, and overwrites it successively for each character when drawing the high score menu – meaning, you'd only see Yuuka's scores when looking at the structure inside the rendered high score menu. However, it still declares the TH04 "Marisa" structure as a leftover… and also decodes it and verifies its checksum, despite nothing being ever loaded into it
• MAIN.EXE uses a separate ASM implementation of the decoding and encoding functions
• TH05's MAIN.EXE also reimplements the basic loading functions in ASM – without the code to regenerate GENSOU.SCR with default data if the file is missing or corrupted. That actually makes sense, since any regeneration is already done in OP.EXE, which always has to load that file anyway to check how much has been cleared
• However, there is a regeneration function in TH05's MAINE.EXE… which actually generates different default data: OP.EXE consistently sets Extra Stage records to Stage 1, while MAINE.EXE uses the same place-based stage numbering that both versions use for the regular ranks

Technically though, TH05's OP.EXE is position-independent now, and the rest are (should be? ) merely false positives. However, TH04's is still missing another structure, in addition to its false positives. So, let's wait with the big announcement until the next push… which will also come with a demo video of what will be possible then.

📝 Posted:

2019-11-29 00:15 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0060

⌨ Commits:

29385dd...73f5ae7

💰 Funded by:

Touhou Patch Center

🏷 Tags:

th02

+

th03

+

th04

+

th05

+

rec98

+

blitting

+

micro-optimization

+

waste

-

So, where to start? Well, TH04 bullets are hard, so let's procrastinate start with TH03 instead The 📝 sprite display functions are the obvious blocker for any structure describing a sprite, and therefore most meaningful PI gains in that game… and I actually did manage to fit a decompilation of those three functions into exactly the amount of time that the Touhou Patch Center community votes alloted to TH03 reverse-engineering!

And a pretty amazing one at that. The original code was so obviously written in ASM and was just barely decompilable by exclusively using register pseudovariables and a bit of goto, but I was able to abstract most of that away, not least thanks to a few helpful optimization properties of Turbo C++… seriously, I can't stop marveling at this ancient compiler. The end result is both readable, clear, and dare I say portable?! To anyone interested in porting TH03, take a look. How painful would it be to port that away from 16-bit x86?

However, this push is also a typical example that the RE/PI priorities can only control what I look at, and the outcome can actually differ greatly. Even though the priorities were 65% RE and 35% PI, the progress outcome was +0.13% RE and +1.35% PI. But hey, we've got one more push with a focus on TH03 PI, so maybe that one will include more RE than PI, and then everything will end up just as ordered?

📝 Posted:

2019-02-28 16:58 UTC

🚚 Summary of:

P0047, P0048

⌨ Commits:

9a2c6f7...893bd46

💰 Funded by:

-Tom-

🏷 Tags:

th02

+

th04

+

th05

+

rec98

+

gameplay

+

player

+

shot

+

animation

+

waste

-

So, let's continue with player shots! …eh, or maybe not directly, since they involve two other structure types in TH05, which we'd have to cover first. One of them is a different sort of sprite, and since I like me some context in my reverse-engineering, let's disable every other sprite type first to figure out what it is.

One of those other sprite types were the little sparks flying away from killed stage enemies, midbosses, and grazed bullets; easy enough to also RE right now. Turns out they use the same 8 hardcoded 8×8 sprites in TH02, TH04, and TH05. Except that it's actually 64 16×8 sprites, because ZUN wanted to pre-shift them for all 8 possible start pixels within a planar VRAM byte (rather than, like, just writing a few instructions to shift them programmatically), leading to them taking up 1,024 bytes rather than just 64.
Oh, and the thing I wanted to RE *actually* was the decay animation whenever a shot hits something. Not too complex either, especially since it's exclusive to TH05.

And since there was some time left and I actually have to pick some of the next RE places strategically to best prepare for the upcoming 17 decompilation pushes, here's two more function pointers for good measure.