Blog

📝 Posted:
🏷️ Tags:

TH01 pellets are coming up next, and for the first time, we'll have the chance to move hardcoded sprite data from ASM land to C land. As it would turn out, bad luck with the 2-byte alignment at the end of REIIDEN.EXE's data segment pretty much forces us to declare TH01's pellet sprites in C if we want to decompile the final few pellet functions without ugly workarounds for the float literals there. And while I could have just converted them into a C array and called it a day, it did raise the question of when we are going to do this The Right And Moddable Way, by auto-converting actual image files into ASM or C arrays during the build process. These arrays are even more annoying to edit in C, after all – unlike TASM, the old C++ we have to work with doesn't support binary number literals, only hexadecimal or, gasp, octal.
Without the explicit funding for such a converter, I reached out to GitHub, asking backers and outside contributors whether they'd be in favor of it. As something that requires no RE skills and collides with nothing else, it would be a perfect task for C/C++ coders who want to support ReC98 with something other than money.

And surprisingly, those still exist! Jonathan Campbell, of DOSBox-X fame, went ahead and implemented all the required functionality, within just a few days. Thanks again! The result is probably a lot more portable than it would have been if I had written it. Which is pretty relevant for future port authors – any additional tooling we write ourselves should not add to the list of problems they'll have to worry about.

Right now, all of the sprites are #included from the big ASM dump files, which means that they have to be converted before those files are assembled during the 32-bit build part. We could have introduced a third distinct build step there, perhaps even a 16-bit one so that we can use Turbo C++ 4.0J to also compile the converter… However, the more reasonable option was to do this at the beginning of the 32-bit build step, and add a 32-bit Windows C++ compiler to the list of tools required for ReC98's build process.
And the best choice for ReC98 is, in fact… 🥁… the 20-year-old Borland C++ 5.5 freeware release. See the README for a lengthy justification, as well as download links.

So yes, all sprites mentioned in the GitHub issue can now be modded by simply editing .BMP files, using an image editor of your choice. 🖌
And now that that's dealt with, it's finally time for more actual progress! TH01 pellets coming tomorrow.