- 📝 Posted:
- 🚚 Summary of:
- P0117
- ⌨ Commits:
03048c3...0bb5bc3- 💰 Funded by:
- [Anonymous]
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Wouldn't it be a bit disappointing to have TH05 completely
position-independent, but have it still require hex-editing of the
original ZUN.COM to mod its gaiji characters? As in, these
custom "text" glyphs, available to the PC-98 text RAM:
Especially since we now even have a sprite converter… the lack of which
was exactly 📝 what made rebuilding ZUN.COM not that worthwhile before.
So, before the big release, let's get all the remaining
ZUN.COM sub-binaries of TH04 and TH05 dumped into .ASM files,
and re-assembled and linked during the build process.
This is also the moment in which Egor's 2018
reimplementation of O. Morikawa's comcstm finally gets
to shine. Back then, I considered it too early to even bother with
ZUN.COM and reimplementing the .COM wrapper that ZUN
originally used to bundle multiple smaller executables into that single
binary. But now that the time is right, it is nice to have that
code, as it allowed me to get these rebuilds done in half a push.
Otherwise, it would have surely required one or two dedicated ones.
Since we like correctness here, newly dumped ZUN code means that it also
has to be included in the RE%
baseline calculation. This is why TH04's and TH05's overall RE% bars
have gone back a tiny bit… in case you remember how they previously looked
like 
After all, I would like to figure
out where all that memory allocated during TH04's and TH05's memory check
is freed, if at all.
Alright, one half of a push left… Y'know, getting rid of those last few PI
false positives is actually one of the most annoying chores in this
project, and quite stressful as well: I have to convince myself that the
remaining false positives are, in fact, not memory references, but with
way too little time for in-depth RE and to denote what they are
instead. In that situation, everyone (including myself!)
is anticipating that PI goal, and no one is really interested in RE.
(Well… that is, until they actually get to developing their mod. But more
on that tomorrow. ) Which means that it boils
down to quite some hasty, dumb, and superficial RE around those remaining
numbers.
So, in the hope of making it less annoying for the other 4 games in the
future, let's systematically cover the sources of those remaining false
positives in TH05, over all games. I/O port accesses with either the port
or the value in registers (and thus, no longer as an immediate argument to
the IN or OUT instructions, which the PI counter
can clearly ingore), palette color arithmetic, or heck, 0xFF constants that
obviously just mean "-1" and are not a reference to offset 0xFF in
the data segment. All of this, of course, once again had a way bigger
effect on everything but an almost position-independent TH05… but
hey, that's the sort of thing you reserve the "anything" pushes for. And
that's also how we get some of the single biggest PI% gains we have seen
so far, and will be seeing before the 100% PI mark. And yes, those will
continue in the next push.
Alright! Big release tomorrow…