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:
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 \= commandsinto 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.
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.
Unused commands are in gray.
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…
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 16th 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:
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.
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:
Invalidate any map tiles covered by entities
Redraw invalidated tiles
Decrement the Y coordinate at the top of VRAM according to the
scroll speed
Update and render all game entities
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
If that happened, pretend it didn't by incrementing the value
calculated in #3 for all further frames and skipping to
#8.
Issue a GDC SCROLL command to reflect the line
calculated in #3 on the display
Wait for VSync
Flip VRAM pages
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.)
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.
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…
And then, the supposed boilerplate code revealed yet another confusing issue
that quickly forced me back to serial work, leading to no parallel progress
made with Shuusou Gyoku after all. 🥲 The list of functions I put together
for the first ½ of this push seemed so boring at first, and I was so sure
that there was almost nothing I could possibly talk about:
TH02's gaiji animations at the start and end of each stage, resembling
opening and closing window blind slats. ZUN should have maybe not defined
the regular whitespace gaiji as what's technically the last frame of the
closing animation, but that's a minor nitpick. Nothing special there
otherwise.
The remaining spawn functions for TH04's and TH05's gather circles. The
only dumb antic there is the way ZUN initializes the template for bullets
fired at the end of the animation, featuring ASM instructions that are
equivalent to what Turbo C++ 4.0J generates for the __memcpy__
intrinsic, but show up in a different order. Which means that they must have
been handwritten. I already figured that out in 2022
though, so this was just more of the same.
EX-Alice's override for the game's main 16×16 sprite sheet, loaded
during her dialog script. More of a naming and consistency challenge, if
anything.
The rendering function for TH04's Stage 4 midboss, which seems to
feature the same premature clipping quirk we've seen for
📝 TH05's Stage 5 midboss, 7 months ago?
The rendering function for the big 48×48 explosion sprite, which also
features the same clipping quirk?
That's three instances of ZUN removing sprites way earlier than you'd want
to, intentionally deciding against those sprites flying smoothly in and out
of the playfield. Clearly, there has to be a system and a reason behind it.
Turns out that it can be almost completely blamed on master.lib. None of the
super_*() sprite blitting functions can clip the rendered
sprite to the edges of VRAM, and much less to the custom playfield rectangle
we would actually want here. This is exactly the wrong choice to make for a
game engine: Not only is the game developer now stuck with either rendering
the sprite in full or not at all, but they're also left with the burden of
manually calculating when not to display a sprite.
However, strictly limiting the top-left screen-space coordinate to
(0, 0) and the bottom-right one to (640, 400) would actually
stop rendering some of the sprites much earlier than the clipping conditions
we encounter in these games. So what's going on there?
The answer is a combination of playfield borders, hardware scrolling, and
master.lib needing to provide at least some help to support the
latter. Hardware scrolling on PC-98 works by dividing VRAM into two vertical
partitions along the Y-axis and telling the GDC to display one of them at
the top of the screen and the other one below. The contents of VRAM remain
unmodified throughout, which raises the interesting question of how to deal
with sprites that reach the vertical edges of VRAM. If the top VRAM row that
starts at offset 0x0000 ends up being displayed below
the bottom row of VRAM that starts at offset 0x7CB0 for 399 of
the 400 possible scrolling positions, wouldn't we then need to vertically
wrap most of the rendered sprites?
For this reason, master.lib provides the super_roll_*()
functions, which unconditionally perform exactly this vertical wrapping. But
this creates a new problem: If these functions still can't clip, and don't
even know which VRAM rows currently correspond to the top and bottom row of
the screen (since master.lib's graph_scrollup() function
doesn't retain this information), won't we also see sprites wrapping around
the actual edges of the screen? That's something we certainly
wouldn't want in a vertically scrolling game…
The answer is yes, and master.lib offers no solution for this issue. But
this is where the playfield borders come in, and helpfully cover 16 pixels
at the top and 16 pixels at the bottom of the screen. As a result, they can
hide up to 32 rows of potentially wrapped sprite pixels below them:
And that's how the lowest possible top Y coordinate for sprites blitted
using the master.lib super_roll_*() functions during the
scrolling portions of TH02, TH04, and TH05 is not 0, but -16. Any lower, and
you would actually see some of the sprite's upper pixels at the
bottom of the playfield, as there are no more opaque black text cells to
cover them. Theoretically, you could lower this number for
some animation frames that start with multiple rows of transparent
pixels, but I thankfully haven't found any instance of ZUN using such a
hack. So far, at least…
Visualized like that, it all looks quite simple and logical, but for days, I
did not realize that these sprites were rendered to a scrolling VRAM.
This led to a much more complicated initial explanation involving the
invisible extra space of VRAM between offsets 0x7D00 and
0x7FFF that effectively grant a hidden additional 9.6 lines
below the playfield. Or even above, since PC-98 hardware ignores the highest
bit of any offset into a VRAM bitplane segment
(& 0x7FFF), which prevents blitting operations from
accidentally reaching into a different bitplane. Together with the
aforementioned rows of transparent pixels at the top of these midboss
sprites, the math would have almost worked out exactly.
The need for manual clipping also applies to the X-axis. Due to the lack of
scrolling in this dimension, the boundaries there are much more
straightforward though. The minimum left coordinate of a sprite can't fall
below 0 because any smaller coordinate would wrap around into the
📝 tile source area and overwrite some of the
pixels there, which we obviously don't want to re-blit every frame.
Similarly, the right coordinate must not extend into the HUD, which starts
at 448 pixels.
The last part might be surprising if you aren't familiar with the PC-98 text
chip. Contrary to the CGA and VGA text modes of IBM-compatibles, PC-98 text
cells can only use a single color for either their foreground or
background, with the other pixels being transparent and always revealing the
pixels in VRAM below. If you look closely at the HUD in the images above,
you can see how the background of cells with gaiji glyphs is slightly
brighter (◼ #100) than the opaque black
cells (◼ #000) surrounding them. This
rather custom color clearly implies that those pixels must have been
rendered by the graphics GDC. If any other sprite was rendered below the
HUD, you would equally see it below the glyphs.
So in the end, I did find the clear and logical system I was looking for,
and managed to reduce the new clipping conditions down to a
set of basic rules for each edge. Unfortunately, we also need a second
macro for each edge to differentiate between sprites that are smaller or
larger than the playfield border, which is treated as either 32×32 (for
super_roll_*()) or 32×16 (for non-"rolling"
super_*() functions). Since smaller sprites can be fully
contained within this border, the games can stop rendering them as soon as
their bottom-right coordinate is no longer seen within the playfield, by
comparing against the clipping boundaries with <= and
>=. For example, a 16×16 sprite would be completely
invisible once it reaches (16, 0), so it would still be rendered at
(17, 1). A larger sprite during the scrolling part of a stage, like,
say, the 64×64 midbosses, would still be rendered if their top-left
coordinate was (0, -16), so ZUN used < and
> comparisons to at least get an additional pixel before
having to stop rendering such a sprite. Turbo C++ 4.0J sadly can't
constant-fold away such a difference in comparison operators.
And for the most part, ZUN did follow this system consistently. Except for,
of course, the typical mistakes you make when faced with such manual
decisions, like how he treated TH04's Stage 4 midboss as a "small" sprite
below 32×32 pixels (it's 64×64), losing that precious one extra pixel. Or
how the entire rendering code for the 48×48 boss explosion sprite pretends
that it's actually 64×64 pixels large, which causes even the initial
transformation into screen space to be misaligned from the get-go.
But these are additional bugs on top of the single
one that led to all this research.
Because that's what this is, a bug. 🐞 Every resulting pixel boundary is a
systematic result of master.lib's unfortunate lack of clipping. It's as much
of a bug as TH01's byte-aligned rendering of entities whose internal
position is not byte-aligned. In both cases, the entities are alive,
simulated, and partake in collision detection, but their rendered appearance
doesn't accurately reflect their internal position.
Initially, I classified
📝 the sudden pop-in of TH05's Stage 5 midboss
as a quirk because we had no conclusive evidence that this wasn't
intentional, but now we do. There have been multiple explanations for why
ZUN put borders around the playfield, but master.lib's lack of sprite
clipping might be the biggest reason.
And just like byte-aligned rendering, the clipping conditions can easily be
removed when porting the game away from PC-98 hardware. That's also what
uth05win chose to do: By using OpenGL and not having to rely on hardware
scrolling, it can simply place every sprite as a textured quad at its exact
position in screen space, and then draw the black playfield borders on top
in the end to clip everything in a single draw call. This way, the Stage 5
midboss can smoothly fly into the playfield, just as defined by its movement
code:
Meanwhile, I designed the interface of the 📝 generic blitter used in the TH01 Anniversary Edition entirely around
clipping the blitted sprite at any explicit combination of VRAM edges. This
was nothing I tacked on in the end, but a core aspect that informed the
architecture of the code from the very beginning. You really want to
have one and only one place where sprite clipping is done right – and
only once per sprite, regardless of how many bitplanes you want to write to.
Which brings us to the goal that the final ¼ of this push went toward. I
thought I was going to start cleaning up the
📝 player movement and rendering code, but
that turned out too complicated for that amount of time – especially if you
want to start with just cleanup, preserving all original bugs for the
time being.
Fixing and smoothening player and Orb movement would be the next big task in
Anniversary Edition development, needing about 3 pushes. It would start with
more performance research into runtime-shifting of larger sprites, followed
by extending my generic blitter according to the results, writing new
optimized loaders for the original image formats, and finally rewriting all
rendering code accordingly. With that code in place, we can then start
cleaning up and fixing the unique code for each boss, one by one.
Until that's funded, the code still contains a few smaller and easier pieces
of code that are equally related to rendering bugs, but could be dealt with
in a more incremental way. Line rendering is one of those, and first needs
some refactoring of every call site, including
📝 the rotating squares around Mima and
📝 YuugenMagan's pentagram. So far, I managed
to remove another 1,360 bytes from the binary within this final ¼ of a push,
but there's still quite a bit to do in that regard.
This is the perfect kind of feature for smaller (micro-)transactions. Which
means that we've now got meaningful TH01 code cleanup and Anniversary
Edition subtasks at every price range, no matter whether you want to invest
a lot or just a little into this goal.
If you can, because Ember2528 revealed the plan behind
his Shuusou Gyoku contributions: A full-on Linux port of the game, which
will be receiving all the funding it needs to happen. 🐧 Next up, therefore:
Turning this into my main project within ReC98 for the next couple of
months, and getting started by shipping the long-awaited first step towards
that goal.
I've raised the cap to avoid the potential of rounding errors, which might
prevent the last needed Shuusou Gyoku push from being correctly funded. I
already had to pick the larger one of the two pending TH02 transactions for
this push, because we would have mathematically ended up
1/25500 short of a full push with the smaller
transaction. And if I'm already at it, I might
as well free up enough capacity to potentially ship the complete OpenGL
backend in a single delivery, which is currently estimated to cost 7 pushes
in total.
More than three months without any reverse-engineering progress! It's been
way too long. Coincidentally, we're at least back with a surprising 1.25% of
overall RE, achieved within just 3 pushes. The ending script system is not
only more or less the same in TH04 and TH05, but actually originated in
TH03, where it's also used for the cutscenes before stages 8 and 9. This
means that it was one of the final pieces of code shared between three of
the four remaining games, which I got to decompile at roughly 3× the usual
speed, or ⅓ of the price.
The only other bargains of this nature remain in OP.EXE. The
Music Room is largely equivalent in all three remaining games as well, and
the sound device selection, ZUN Soft logo screens, and main/option menus are
the same in TH04 and TH05. A lot of that code is in the "technically RE'd
but not yet decompiled" ASM form though, so it would shift Finalized% more
significantly than RE%. Therefore, make sure to order the new
Finalization option rather than Reverse-engineering if you
want to make number go up.
So, cutscenes. On the surface, the .TXT files look simple enough: You
directly write the text that should appear on the screen into the file
without any special markup, and add commands to define visuals, music, and
other effects at any place within the script. Let's start with the basics of
how text is rendered, which are the same in all three games:
First off, the text area has a size of 480×64 pixels. This means that it
does not correspond to the tiled area painted into TH05's
EDBK?.PI images:
Since the font weight can be customized, all text is rendered to VRAM.
This also includes gaiji, despite them ignoring the font weight
setting.
The system supports automatic line breaks on a per-glyph basis, which
move the text cursor to the beginning of the red text area. This might seem like a piece of long-forgotten
ancient wisdom at first, considering the absence of automatic line breaks in
Windows Touhou. However, ZUN probably implemented it more out of pure
necessity: Text in VRAM needs to be unblitted when starting a new box, which
is way more straightforward and performant if you only need to worry
about a fixed area.
The system also automatically starts a new (key press-separated) text
box after the end of the 4th line. However, the text cursor is
also unconditionally moved to the top-left corner of the yellow name
area when this happens, which is almost certainly not what you expect, given
that automatic line breaks stay within the red area. A script author might
as well add the necessary text box change commands manually, if you're
forced to anticipate the automatic ones anyway…
Due to ZUN forgetting an unblitting call during the TH05 refactoring of the
box background buffer, this feature is even completely broken in that game,
as any new text will simply be blitted on top of the old one:
Overall, the system is geared toward exclusively full-width text. As
exemplified by the 2014 static English patches and the screenshots in this
blog post, half-width text is possible, but comes with a lot of
asterisks attached:
Each loop of the script interpreter starts by looking at the next
byte to distinguish commands from text. However, this step also skips
over every ASCII space and control character, i.e., every byte
≤ 32. If you only intend to display full-width glyphs anyway, this
sort of makes sense: You gain complete freedom when it comes to the
physical layout of these script files, and it especially allows commands
to be freely separated with spaces and line breaks for improved
readability. Still, enforcing commands to be separated exclusively by
line breaks might have been even better for readability, and would have
freed up ASCII spaces for regular text…
Non-command text is blindly processed and rendered two bytes at a
time. The rendering function interprets these bytes as a Shift-JIS
string, so you can use half-width characters here. While the
second byte can even be an ASCII 0x20 space due to the
parser's blindness, all half-width characters must still occur in pairs
that can't be interrupted by commands:
As a workaround for at least the ASCII space issue, you can replace
them with any of the unassigned
Shift-JIS lead bytes – 0x80, 0xA0, or
anything between 0xF0 and 0xFF inclusive.
That's what you see in all screenshots of this post that display
half-width spaces.
Finally, did you know that you can hold ESC to fast-forward
through these cutscenes, which skips most frame delays and reduces the rest?
Due to the blocking nature of all commands, the ESC key state is
only updated between commands or 2-byte text groups though, so it can't
interrupt an ongoing delay.
Superficially, the list of game-specific differences doesn't look too long,
and can be summarized in a rather short table:
It's when you get into the implementation that the combined three systems
reveal themselves as a giant mess, with more like 56 differences between the
games. Every single new weird line of code opened up
another can of worms, which ultimately made all of this end up with 24
pieces of bloat and 14 bugs. The worst of these should be quite interesting
for the general PC-98 homebrew developers among my audience:
The final official 0.23 release of master.lib has a bug in
graph_gaiji_put*(). To calculate the JIS X 0208 code point for
a gaiji, it is enough to ADD 5680h onto the gaiji ID. However,
these functions accidentally use ADC instead, which incorrectly
adds the x86 carry flag on top, causing weird off-by-one errors based on the
previous program state. ZUN did fix this bug directly inside master.lib for
TH04 and TH05, but still needed to work around it in TH03 by subtracting 1
from the intended gaiji ID. Anyone up for maintaining a bug-fixed master.lib
repository?
The worst piece of bloat comes from TH03 and TH04 needlessly
switching the visibility of VRAM pages while blitting a new 320×200 picture.
This makes it much harder to understand the code, as the mere existence of
these page switches is enough to suggest a more complex interplay between
the two VRAM pages which doesn't actually exist. Outside this visibility
switch, page 0 is always supposed to be shown, and page 1 is always used
for temporarily storing pixels that are later crossfaded onto page 0. This
is also the only reason why TH03 has to render text and gaiji onto both VRAM
pages to begin with… and because TH04 doesn't, changing the picture in the
middle of a string of text is technically bugged in that game, even though
you only get to temporarily see the new text on very underclocked PC-98
systems.
These performance implications made me wonder why cutscenes even bother with
writing to the second VRAM page anyway, before copying each crossfade step
to the visible one.
📝 We learned in June how costly EGC-"accelerated" inter-page copies are;
shouldn't it be faster to just blit the image once rather than twice?
Well, master.lib decodes .PI images into a packed-pixel format, and
unpacking such a representation into bitplanes on the fly is just about the
worst way of blitting you could possibly imagine on a PC-98. EGC inter-page
copies are already fairly disappointing at 42 cycles for every 16 pixels, if
we look at the i486 and ignore VRAM latencies. But under the same
conditions, packed-pixel unpacking comes in at 81 cycles for every 8
pixels, or almost 4× slower. On lower-end systems, that can easily sum up to
more than one frame for a 320×200 image. While I'd argue that the resulting
tearing could have been an acceptable part of the transition between two
images, it's understandable why you'd want to avoid it in favor of the
pure effect on a slower framerate.
Really makes me wonder why master.lib didn't just directly decode .PI images
into bitplanes. The performance impact on load times should have been
negligible? It's such a good format for
the often dithered 16-color artwork you typically see on PC-98, and
deserves better than master.lib's implementation which is both slow to
decode and slow to blit.
That brings us to the individual script commands… and yes, I'm going to
document every single one of them. Some of their interactions and edge cases
are not clear at all from just looking at the code.
Almost all commands are preceded by… well, a 0x5C lead byte.
Which raises the question of whether we should
document it as an ASCII-encoded \ backslash, or a Shift-JIS-encoded
¥ yen sign. From a gaijin perspective, it seems obvious that it's a
backslash, as it's consistently displayed as one in most of the editors you
would actually use nowadays. But interestingly, iconv
-f shift-jis -t utf-8 does convert any 0x5C
lead bytes to actual ¥ U+00A5 YEN SIGN code points
.
Ultimately, the distinction comes down to the font. There are fonts
that still render 0x5C as ¥, but mainly do so out
of an obvious concern about backward compatibility to JIS X 0201, where this
mapping originated. Unsurprisingly, this group includes MS Gothic/Mincho,
the old Japanese fonts from Windows 3.1, but even Meiryo and Yu
Gothic/Mincho, Microsoft's modern Japanese fonts. Meanwhile, pretty much
every other modern font, and freely licensed ones in particular, render this
code point as \, even if you set your editor to Shift-JIS. And
while ZUN most definitely saw it as a ¥, documenting this code
point as \ is less ambiguous in the long run. It can only
possibly correspond to one specific code point in either Shift-JIS or UTF-8,
and will remain correct even if we later mod the cutscene system to support
full-blown Unicode.
Now we've only got to clarify the parameter syntax, and then we can look at
the big table of commands:
Numeric parameters are read as sequences of up to 3 ASCII digits. This
limits them to a range from 0 to 999 inclusive, with 000 and
0 being equivalent. Because there's no further sentinel
character, any further digit from the 4th one onwards is
interpreted as regular text.
Filename parameters must be terminated with a space or newline and are
limited to 12 characters, which translates to 8.3 basenames without any
directory component. Any further characters are ignored and displayed as
text as well.
Each .PI image can contain up to four 320×200 pictures ("quarters") for
the cutscene picture area. In the script commands, they are numbered like
this:
0
1
2
3
\@
Clears both VRAM pages by filling them with VRAM color 0. 🐞
In TH03 and TH04, this command does not update the internal text area
background used for unblitting. This bug effectively restricts usage of
this command to either the beginning of a script (before the first
background image is shown) or its end (after no more new text boxes are
started). See the image below for an
example of using it anywhere else.
\b2
Sets the font weight to a value between 0 (raw font ROM glyphs) to 3
(very thicc). Specifying any other value has no effect.
🐞 In TH04 and TH05, \b3 leads to glitched pixels when
rendering half-width glyphs due to a bug in the newly micro-optimized
ASM version of
📝 graph_putsa_fx(); see the image below for an example.
In these games, the parameter also directly corresponds to the
graph_putsa_fx() effect function, removing the sanity check
that was present in TH03. In exchange, you can also access the four
dissolve masks for the bold font (\b2) by specifying a
parameter between 4 (fewest pixels) to 7 (most
pixels). Demo video below.
\c15
Changes the text color to VRAM color 15.
\c=字,15
Adds a color map entry: If 字 is the first code point
inside the name area on a new line, the text color is automatically set
to 15. Up to 8 such entries can be registered
before overflowing the statically allocated buffer.
🐞 The comma is assumed to be present even if the color parameter is omitted.
\e0
Plays the sound effect with the given ID.
\f
(no-op)
\fi1
\fo1
Calls master.lib's palette_black_in() or
palette_black_out() to play a hardware palette fade
animation from or to black, spending roughly 1 frame on each of the 16 fade steps.
\fm1
Fades out BGM volume via PMD's AH=02h interrupt call,
in a non-blocking way. The fade speed can range from 1 (slowest) to 127 (fastest).
Values from 128 to 255 technically correspond to
AH=02h's fade-in feature, which can't be used from cutscene
scripts because it requires BGM volume to first be lowered via
AH=19h, and there is no command to do that.
\g8
Plays a blocking 8-frame screen shake
animation.
\ga0
Shows the gaiji with the given ID from 0 to 255
at the current cursor position. Even in TH03, gaiji always ignore the
text delay interval configured with \v.
@3
TH05's replacement for the \ga command from TH03 and
TH04. The default ID of 3 corresponds to the
gaiji. Not to be confused with \@, which starts with a backslash,
unlike this command.
@h
Shows the gaiji.
@t
Shows the gaiji.
@!
Shows the gaiji.
@?
Shows the gaiji.
@!!
Shows the gaiji.
@!?
Shows the gaiji.
\k0
Waits 0 frames (0 = forever) for an advance key to be pressed before
continuing script execution. Before waiting, TH05 crossfades in any new
text that was previously rendered to the invisible VRAM page…
🐞 …but TH04 doesn't, leaving the text invisible during the wait time.
As a workaround, \vp1 can be
used before \k to immediately display that text without a
fade-in animation.
\m$
Stops the currently playing BGM.
\m*
Restarts playback of the currently loaded BGM from the
beginning.
\m,filename
Stops the currently playing BGM, loads a new one from the given
file, and starts playback.
\n
Starts a new line at the leftmost X coordinate of the box, i.e., the
start of the name area. This is how scripts can "change" the name of the
currently speaking character, or use the entire 480×64 pixels without
being restricted to the non-name area.
Note that automatic line breaks already move the cursor into a new line.
Using this command at the "end" of a line with the maximum number of 30
full-width glyphs would therefore start a second new line and leave the
previously started line empty.
If this command moved the cursor into the 5th line of a box,
\s is executed afterward, with
any of \n's parameters passed to \s.
\p
(no-op)
\p-
Deallocates the loaded .PI image.
\p,filename
Loads the .PI image with the given file into the single .PI slot
available to cutscenes. TH04 and TH05 automatically deallocate any
previous image, 🐞 TH03 would leak memory without a manual prior call to
\p-.
\pp
Sets the hardware palette to the one of the loaded .PI image.
\p@
Sets the loaded .PI image as the full-screen 640×400 background
image and overwrites both VRAM pages with its pixels, retaining the
current hardware palette.
\p=
Runs \pp followed by \p@.
\s0
\s-
Ends a text box and starts a new one. Fades in any text rendered to
the invisible VRAM page, then waits 0 frames
(0 = forever) for an advance key to be
pressed. Afterward, the new text box is started with the cursor moved to
the top-left corner of the name area. \s- skips the wait time and starts the new box
immediately.
\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.
Preceded by a 1-frame delay unless ESC is held.
\v1
Sets the number of frames to wait between every 2 bytes of rendered
text.
Sets the number of frames to spend on each of the 4 fade
steps when crossfading between old and new text. The game-specific
default value is also used before the first use of this command.
\v2
\vp0
Shows VRAM page 0. Completely useless in
TH03 (this game always synchronizes both VRAM pages at a command
boundary), only of dubious use in TH04 (for working around a bug in \k), and the games always return to
their intended shown page before every blitting operation anyway. A
debloated mod of this game would just remove this command, as it exposes
an implementation detail that script authors should not need to worry
about. None of the original scripts use it anyway.
\w64
\w and \wk wait for the given number
of frames
\wm and \wmk wait until PMD has played
back the current BGM for the total number of measures, including
loops, given in the first parameter, and fall back on calling
\w and \wk with the second parameter as
the frame number if BGM is disabled.
🐞 Neither PMD nor MMD reset the internal measure when stopping
playback. If no BGM is playing and the previous BGM hasn't been
played back for at least the given number of measures, this command
will deadlock.
Since both TH04 and TH05 fade in any new text from the invisible VRAM
page, these commands can be used to simulate TH03's typing effect in
those games. Demo video below.
Contrary to \k and \s, specifying 0 frames would
simply remove any frame delay instead of waiting forever.
The TH03-exclusive k variants allow the delay to be
interrupted if ⏎ Return or Shot are held down.
TH04 and TH05 recognize the k as well, but removed its
functionality.
All of these commands have no effect if ESC is held.
\wm64,64
\wk64
\wmk64,64
\wi1
\wo1
Calls master.lib's palette_white_in() or
palette_white_out() to play a hardware palette fade
animation from or to white, spending roughly 1 frame on each of the 16 fade steps.
\=4
Immediately displays the given quarter of the loaded .PI image in
the picture area, with no fade effect. Any value ≥ 4 resets the picture area to black.
\==4,1
Crossfades the picture area between its current content and quarter
#4 of the loaded .PI image, spending 1 frame on each of the 4 fade steps unless
ESC is held. Any value ≥ 4 is
replaced with quarter #0.
\$
Stops script execution. Must be called at the end of each file;
otherwise, execution continues into whatever lies after the script
buffer in memory.
TH05 automatically deallocates the loaded .PI image, TH03 and TH04
require a separate manual call to \p- to not leak its memory.
Bold values signify the default if the parameter
is omitted; \c is therefore
equivalent to \c15.
So yeah, that's the cutscene system. I'm dreading the moment I will have to
deal with the other command interpreter in these games, i.e., the
stage enemy system. Luckily, that one is completely disconnected from any
other system, so I won't have to deal with it until we're close to finishing
MAIN.EXE… that is, unless someone requests it before. And it
won't involve text encodings or unblitting…
The cutscene system got me thinking in greater detail about how I would
implement translations, being one of the main dependencies behind them. This
goal has been on the order form for a while and could soon be implemented
for these cutscenes, with 100% PI being right around the corner for the TH03
and TH04 cutscene executables.
Once we're there, the "Virgin" old-school way of static translation patching
for Latin-script languages could be implemented fairly quickly:
Establish basic UTF-8 parsing for less painful manual editing of the
source files
Procedurally generate glyphs for the few required additional letters
based on existing font ROM glyphs. For example, we'd generate ä
by painting two short lines on top of the font ROM's a glyph,
or generate ¿ by vertically flipping the question mark. This
way, the text retains a consistent look regardless of whether the translated
game is run with an NEC or EPSON font ROM, or the that Neko Project II auto-generates if you
don't provide either.
(Optional) Change automatic line breaks to work on a per-word
basis, rather than per-glyph
That's it – script editing and distribution would be handled by your local
translation group. It might seem as if this would also work for Greek and
Cyrillic scripts due to their presence in the PC-98 font ROM, but I'm not
sure if I want to attempt procedurally shrinking these glyphs from 16×16 to
8×16… For any more thorough solution, we'd need to go for a more "Chad" kind
of full-blown translation support:
Implement text subdivisions at a sensible granularity while retaining
automatic line and box breaks
Compile translatable text into a Japanese→target language dictionary
(I'm too old to develop any further translation systems that would overwrite
modded source text with translations of the original text)
Implement a custom Unicode font system (glyphs would be taken from GNU
Unifont unless translators provide a different 8×16 font for their
language)
Combine the text compiler with the font compiler to only store needed
glyphs as part of the translation's font file (dealing with a multi-MB font
file would be rather ugly in a Real Mode game)
Write a simple install/update/patch stacking tool that supports both
.HDI and raw-file DOSBox-X scenarios (it's different enough from thcrap to
warrant a separate tool – each patch stack would be statically compiled into
a single package file in the game's directory)
Add a nice language selection option to the main menu
(Optional) Support proportional fonts
Which sounds more like a separate project to be commissioned from
Touhou Patch Center's Open Collective funds, separate from the ReC98 cap.
This way, we can make sure that the feature is completely implemented, and I
can talk with every interested translator to make sure that their language
works.
It's still cheaper overall to do this on PC-98 than to first port the games
to a modern system and then translate them. On the other hand, most
of the tasks in the Chad variant (3, 4, 5, and half of 2) purely deal with
the difficulty of getting arbitrary Unicode characters to work natively in a
PC-98 DOS game at all, and would be either unnecessary or trivial if we had
already ported the game. Depending on where the patrons' interests lie, it
may not be worth it. So let's see what all of you think about which
way we should go, or whether it's worth doing at all. (Edit
(2022-12-01): With Splashman's
order towards the stage dialogue system, we've pretty much confirmed that it
is.) Maybe we want to meet in the middle – using e.g. procedural glyph
generation for dynamic translations to keep text rendering consistent with
the rest of the PC-98 system, and just not support non-Latin-script
languages in the beginning? In any case, I've added both options to the
order form. Edit (2023-07-28):Touhou Patch Center has agreed to fund
a basic feature set somewhere between the Virgin and Chad level. Check the
📝 dedicated announcement blog post for more
details and ideas, and to find out how you can support this goal!
Surprisingly, there was still a bit of RE work left in the third push after
all of this, which I filled with some small rendering boilerplate. Since I
also wanted to include TH02's playfield overlay functions,
1/15 of that last push went towards getting a
TH02-exclusive function out of the way, which also ended up including that
game in this delivery.
The other small function pointed out how TH05's Stage 5 midboss pops into
the playfield quite suddenly, since its clipping test thinks it's only 32
pixels tall rather than 64:
Next up: Staying with TH05 and looking at more of the pattern code of its
boss fights. Given the remaining TH05 budget, it makes the most sense to
continue in in-game order, with Sara and the Stage 2 midboss. If more money
comes in towards this goal, I could alternatively go for the Mai & Yuki
fight and immediately develop a pretty fix for the cheeto storage
glitch. Also, there's a rather intricate
pull request for direct ZMBV decoding on the website that I've still got
to review…
Last blog post before the 100% completion of TH01! The final parts of
REIIDEN.EXE would feel rather out of place in a celebratory
blog post, after all. They provided quite a neat summary of the typical
technical details that are wrong with this game, and that I now get to
mention for one final time:
The Orb's animation cycle is maybe two frames shorter than it should
have been, showing its last sprite for just 1 frame rather than 3:
The text in the Pause and Continue menus is not quite correctly
centered.
The memory info screen hides quite a bit of information about the .PTN
buffers, and obscures even the info that it does show behind
misleading labels. The most vital information would have been that ZUN could
have easily saved 20% of the memory by using a structure without the
unneeded alpha plane… Oh, and the REWIRTE option
mapped to the ⬇️ down arrow key simply redraws the info screen. Might be
useful after a NODE CHEAK, which replaces the output
with its own, but stays within the same input loop.
But hey, there's an error message if you start REIIDEN.EXE
without a resident MDRV2 or a correctly prepared resident structure! And
even a good, user-friendly one, asking the user to launch the batch file
instead. For some reason, this convenience went out of fashion in the later
games.
The Game Over animation (how fitting) gives us TH01's final piece of weird
sprite blitting code, which seriously manages to include 2 bugs and 3 quirks
in under 50 lines of code. In test mode (game t or game
d), you can trigger this effect by pressing the ⬇️ down arrow key,
which certainly explains why I encountered seemingly random Game Over events
during all the tests I did with this game…
The animation appears to have changed quite a bit during development, to the
point that probably even ZUN himself didn't know what he wanted it to look
like in the end:
Finally, we get to the big main() function, serving as the duct
tape that holds this game together. It may read rather disorganized with all
the (actually necessary) assignments and function calls, but the only
actual minor issue I've seen there is that you're robbed of any
pellet destroy bonus collected on the final frame of the final boss. There
is a certain charm in directly nesting the infinite main gameplay loop
within the infinite per-life loop within the infinite stage loop. But come
on, why is there no fourth scene loop? Instead, the
game just starts a new REIIDEN.EXE process before and after a
boss fight. With all the wildly mutated global state, that was probably a
much saner choice.
The final secrets can be found in the debug stage selection. ZUN
implemented the prompts using the C standard library's scanf()
function, which is the natural choice for quick-and-dirty testing features
like this one. However, the C standard library is also complete and utter
trash, and so it's not surprising that both of the scanf()
calls do… well, probably not what ZUN intended. The guaranteed out-of-bounds
memory access in the select_flag route prompt thankfully has no
real effect on the game, but it gets really interesting with the 面数 stage prompt.
Back in 2020, I already wrote about
📝 stages 21-24, and how they're loaded from actual data that ZUN shipped with the game.
As it now turns out, the code that maps stage IDs to STAGE?.DAT
scene numbers contains an explicit branch that maps any (1-based) stage
number ≥21 to scene 7. Does this mean that an Extra Stage was indeed planned
at some point? That branch seems way too specific to just be meant as a
fallback. Maybe
Asprey was on to something after all…
However, since ZUN passed the stage ID as a signed integer to
scanf(), you can also enter negative numbers. The only place
that kind of accidentally checks for them is the aforementioned stage
ID → scene mapping, which ensures that (1-based) stages < 5 use
the shrine's background image and BGM. With no checks anywhere else, we get
a new set of "glitch stages":
The scene loading function takes the entered 0-based stage ID value modulo
5, so these 4 are the only ones that "exist", and lower stage numbers will
simply loop around to them. When loading these stages, the function accesses
the data in REIIDEN.EXE that lies before the statically
allocated 5-element stages-of-scene array, which happens to encompass
Borland C++'s locale and exception handling data, as well as a small bit of
ZUN's global variables. In particular, the obstacle/card HP on the tile I
highlighted in green corresponds to the
lowest byte of the 32-bit RNG seed. If it weren't for that and the fact that
the obstacles/card HP on the few tiles before are similarly controlled by
the x86 segment values of certain initialization function addresses, these
glitch stages would be completely deterministic across PC-98 systems, and
technically canon…
Stage -4 is the only playable one here as it's the only stage to end up
below the
📝 heap corruption limit of 102 stage objects.
Completing it loads Stage -3, which crashes with a Divide Error
just like it does if it's directly selected. Unsurprisingly, this happens
because all 50 card bytes at that memory location are 0, so one division (or
in this case, modulo operation) by the number of cards is enough to crash
the game.
Stage -5 is modulo'd to 0 and thus loads the first regular stage. The only
apparent broken element there is the timer, which is handled by a completely
different function that still operates with a (0-based) stage ID value of
-5. Completing the stage loads Stage -4, which also crashes, but only
because its 61 cards naturally cause the
📝 stack overflow in the flip-in animation for any stage with more than 50 cards.
And that's REIIDEN.EXE, the biggest and most bloated PC-98
Touhou executable, fully decompiled! Next up: Finishing this game with the
main menu, and hoping I'll actually pull it off within 24 hours. (If I do,
we might all have to thank 32th
System, who independently decompiled half of the remaining 14
functions…)
It only took a record-breaking 1½ pushes to get SinGyoku done!
No 📝 entity synchronization code after
all! Since all of SinGyoku's sprites are 96×96 pixels, ZUN made the rather
smart decision of just using the sphere entity's position to render the
📝 flash and person entities – and their only
appearance is encapsulated in a single sphere→person→sphere transformation
function.
Just like Kikuri, SinGyoku's code as a whole is not a complete
disaster.
The negative:
It's still exactly as buggy as Kikuri, with both of the ZUN bugs being
rendering glitches in a single function once again.
It also happens to come with a weird hitbox, …
… and some minor questionable and weird pieces of code.
The overview:
SinGyoku's fight consists of 2 phases, with the first one corresponding
to the white part from 8 to 6 HP, and the second one to the rest of the HP
bar. The distinction between the red-white and red parts is purely visual,
and doesn't reflect anything about the boss script.
Both phases cycle between a pellet pattern and SinGyoku's sphere form
slamming itself into the player, followed by it slightly overshooting its
intended base Y position on its way back up.
Phase 1 only consists of the sphere form's half-circle spray pattern.
Technically, the phase can only end during that pattern, but adding
that one additional condition to allow it to end during the slam+return
"pattern" wouldn't have made a difference anyway. The code doesn't rule out
negative HP during the slam (have fun in test or debug mode), but the sum of
invincibility frames alone makes it impossible to hit SinGyoku 7 times
during a single slam in regular gameplay.
Phase 2 features two patterns for both the female and male forms
respectively, which are selected randomly.
This time, we're back to the Orb hitbox being a logical 49×49 pixels in
SinGyoku's center, and the shot hitbox being the weird one. What happens if
you want the shot hitbox to be both offset to the left a bit
and stretch the entire width of SinGyoku's sprite? You get a hitbox
that ends in mid-air, far away from the right edge of the sprite:
Due to VRAM byte alignment, all player shots fired between
gx = 376 and gx = 383 inclusive
appear at the same visual X position, but are internally already partly
outside the hitbox and therefore won't hit SinGyoku – compare the
marked shot at gx = 376 to the one at gx =
380. So much for precisely visualizing hitboxes in this game…
Since the female and male forms also use the sphere entity's coordinates,
they share the same hitbox.
Onto the rendering glitches then, which can – you guessed it – all be found
in the sphere form's slam movement:
ZUN unblits the delta area between the sphere's previous and current
position on every frame, but reblits the sphere itself on… only every second
frame?
For negative X velocities, ZUN made a typo and subtracted the Y velocity
from the right edge of the area to be unblitted, rather than adding the X
velocity. On a cursory look, this shouldn't affect the game all too
much due to the unblitting function's word alignment. Except when it does:
If the Y velocity is much smaller than the X one, the left edge of the
unblitted area can, on certain frames, easily align to a word address past
the previous right edge of the sphere. As a result, not a single sphere
pixel will actually be unblitted, and a small stripe of the sphere will be
left in VRAM for one frame, until the alignment has caught up with the
sphere's movement in the next one.
By having the sphere move from the right edge of the playfield to the
left, this video demonstrates both the lazy reblitting and broken
unblitting at the right edge for negative X velocities. Also, isn't it
funny how Reimu can partly disappear from all the sloppy
SinGyoku-related unblitting going on after her sprite was blitted?
Due to the low contrast of the sphere against the background, you typically
don't notice these glitches, but the white invincibility flashing after a
hit really does draw attention to them. This time, all of these glitches
aren't even directly caused by ZUN having never learned about the
EGC's bit length register – if he just wrote correct code for SinGyoku, none
of this would have been an issue. Sigh… I wonder how many more glitches will
be caused by improper use of this one function in the last 18% of
REIIDEN.EXE.
There's even another bug here, with ZUN hardcoding a horizontal delta of 8
pixels rather than just passing the actual X velocity. Luckily, the maximum
movement speed is 6 pixels on Lunatic, and this would have only turned into
an additional observable glitch if the X velocity were to exceed 24 pixels.
But that just means it's the kind of bug that still drains RE attention to
prove that you can't actually observe it in-game under some
circumstances.
The 5 pellet patterns are all pretty straightforward, with nothing to talk
about. The code architecture during phase 2 does hint towards ZUN having had
more creative patterns in mind – especially for the male form, which uses
the transformation function's three pattern callback slots for three
repetitions of the same pellet group.
There is one more oddity to be found at the very end of the fight:
Right before the defeat white-out animation, the sphere form is explicitly
reblitted for no reason, on top of the form that was blitted to VRAM in the
previous frame, and regardless of which form is currently active. If
SinGyoku was meant to immediately transform back to the sphere form before
being defeated, why isn't the person form unblitted before then? Therefore,
the visibility of both forms is undeniably canon, and there is some
lore meaning to be found here…
In any case, that's SinGyoku done! 6th PC-98 Touhou boss fully
decompiled, 25 remaining.
No FUUIN.EXE code rounding out the last push for a change, as
the 📝 remaining missile code has been
waiting in front of SinGyoku for a while. It already looked bad in November,
but the angle-based sprite selection function definitely takes the cake when
it comes to unnecessary and decadent floating-point abuse in this game.
The algorithm itself is very trivial: Even with
📝 .PTN requiring an additional quarter parameter to access 16×16 sprites,
it's essentially just one bit shift, one addition, and one binary
AND. For whatever reason though, ZUN casts the 8-bit missile
angle into a 64-bit double, which turns the following explicit
comparisons (!) against all possible 4 + 16 boundary angles (!!)
into FPU operations. Even with naive and readable
division and modulo operations, and the whole existence of this function not
playing well with Turbo C++ 4.0J's terrible code generation at all, this
could have been 3 lines of code and 35 un-inlined constant-time
instructions. Instead, we've got this 207-instruction monster… but hey, at
least it works. 🤷
The remaining time then went to YuugenMagan's initialization code, which
allowed me to immediately remove more declarations from ASM land, but more
on that once we get to the rest of that boss fight.
That leaves 76 functions until we're done with TH01! Next up: Card-flipping
stage obstacles.
Slight change of plans, because we got instructions for
reliably reproducing the TH04 Kurumi Divide Error crash! Major thanks to
Colin Douglas Howell. With those, it also made sense to immediately look at
the crash in the Stage 4 Marisa fight as well. This way, I could release
both of the obligatory bugfix mods at the same time.
Especially since it turned out that I was wrong: Both crashes are entirely
unrelated to the custom entity structure that would have required PI-centric
progress. They are completely specific to Kurumi's and Marisa's
danmaku-pattern code, and really are two separate bugs
with no connection to each other. All of the necessary research nicely fit
into Arandui's 0.5 pushes, with no further deep understanding
required here.
But why were there still three weeks between Colin's message and this blog
post? DMCA distractions aside: There are no easy fixes this time, unlike
📝 back when I looked at the Stage 5 Yuuka crash.
Just like how division by zero is undefined in mathematics, it's also,
literally, undefined what should happen instead of these two
Divide error crashes. This means that any possible "fix" can
only ever be a fanfiction interpretation of the intentions behind ZUN's
code. The gameplay community should be aware of this, and
might decide to handle these cases differently. And if we
have to go into fanfiction territory to work around crashes in the
canon games, we'd better document what exactly we're fixing here and how, as
comprehensible as possible.
With that out of the way, let's look at Kurumi's crash first, since it's way
easier to grasp. This one is known to primarily happen to new players, and
it's easy to see why:
In one of the patterns in her third phase, Kurumi fires a series of 3
aimed rings from both edges of the playfield. By default (that is, on Normal
and with regular rank), these are 6-way rings.
6 happens to be quite a peculiar number here, due to how rings are
(manually) tuned based on the current "rank" value (playperf)
before being fired. The code, abbreviated for clarity:
Let's look at the range of possible playperf values per
difficulty level:
Easy
Normal
Hard
Lunatic
Extra
playperf_min
4
11
20
22
16
playperf_max
16
24
32
34
20
Edit (2022-05-24): This blog post initially had
26 instead of 16 for playperf_min for the Extra Stage. Thanks
to Popfan for pointing out that typo!
Reducing rank to its minimum on Easy mode will therefore result in a
0-ring after tuning.
To calculate the individual angles of each bullet in a ring, ZUN divides
360° (or, more correctly,
📝 0x100) by the total number of
bullets…
Boom, division by zero.
The pattern that causes the crash in Kurumi's fight. Also
demonstrates how the number of bullets in a ring is always halved on
Easy Mode after the rank-based tuning, leading to just a 3-ring on
playperf = 16.
So, what should the workaround look like? Obviously, we want to modify
neither the default number of ring bullets nor the tuning algorithm – that
would change all other non-crashing variations of this pattern on other
difficulties and ranks, creating a fork of the original gameplay. Instead, I
came up with four possible workarounds that all seemed somewhat logical to
me:
Firing no bullet, i.e., interpreting 0-ring literally. This would
create the only constellation in which a call to the bullet group spawn
functions would not spawn at least one new bullet.
Firing a "1-ring", i.e., a single bullet. This would be consistent with
how the bullet spawn functions behave for "0-way" stack and spread
groups.
Firing a "∞-ring", i.e., 200 bullets, which is as much as the game's cap
on 16×16 bullets would allow. This would poke fun at the whole "division by
zero" idea… but given that we're still talking about Easy Mode (and
especially new players) here, it might be a tad too cruel. Certainly the
most trollish interpretation.
Triggering an immediate Game Over, exchanging the hard crash for a
softer and more controlled shutdown. Certainly the option that would be
closest to the behavior of the original games, and perhaps the only one to
be accepted in Serious, High-Level Play™.
As I was writing this post, it felt increasingly wrong for me to make this
decision. So I once again went to Twitter, where 56.3%
voted in favor of the 1-bullet option. Good that I asked! I myself was
more leaning towards the 0-bullet interpretation, which only got 28.7% of
the vote. Also interesting are the 2.3% in favor of the Game Over option but
I get it, low-rank Easy Mode isn't exactly the most competitive mode of
playing TH04.
There are reports of Kurumi crashing on higher difficulties as well, but I
could verify none of them. If they aren't fixed by this workaround, they're
caused by an entirely different bug that we have yet to discover.
Onto the Stage 4 Marisa crash then, which does in fact apply to all
difficulty levels. I was also wrong on this one – it's a hell of a lot more
intricate than being just a division by the number of on-screen bits.
Without having decompiled the entire fight, I can't give a completely
accurate picture of what happens there yet, but here's the rough idea:
Marisa uses different patterns, depending on whether at least one of her
bits is still alive, or all of them have been destroyed.
Destroying the last bit will immediately switch to the bit-less
counterpart of the current pattern.
The bits won't respawn before the pattern ended, which ensures that the
bit-less version is always shown in its entirety after being started or
switched into.
In two of the bit-less patterns, Marisa gradually moves to the point
reflection of her position at the start of the pattern across the playfield
coordinate of (192, 112), or (224, 128) on screen.
Reference points for Marisa's point-reflected movement. Cyan:
Marisa's position, green: (192, 112), yellow: the intended end
point.
The velocity of this movement is determined by both her distance to that
point and the total amount of frames that this instance of the bit-less
pattern will last.
Since this frame amount is directly tied to the frame the player
destroyed the last bit on, it becomes a user-controlled variable. I think
you can see where this is going…
The last 12 frames of this duration, however, are always reserved for a
"braking phase", where Marisa's velocity is halved on each frame.
This part of the code only runs every 4 frames though. This expands the
time window for this crash to 4 frames, rather than just the two frames you
would expect from looking at the division itself.
Both of the broken patterns run for a maximum of 160 frames. Therefore,
the crash will occur when Marisa's last bit is destroyed between frame 152
and 155 inclusive. On these frames, the
last_frame_with_bits_alive variable is set to 148, which is the
crucial 12 duration frames away from the maximum of 160.
Interestingly enough, the calculated velocity is also only
applied every 4 frames, with Marisa actually staying still for the 3 frames
inbetween. As a result, she either moves
too slowly to ever actually reach the yellow point if the last bit
was destroyed early in the pattern (see destruction frames 68 or
112),
or way too quickly, and almost in a jerky, teleporting way (see
destruction frames 144 or 148).
Finally, as you may have already gathered from the formula: Destroying
the last bit between frame 156 and 160 inclusive results in
duration values of 8 or 4. These actually push Marisa
away from the intended point, as the divisor becomes negative.
One of the two patterns in TH04's Stage 4 Marisa boss fight that feature
frame number-dependent point-reflected movement. The bits were hacked to
self-destruct on the respective frame.
tl;dr: "Game crashes if last bit destroyed within 4-frame window near end of
two patterns". For an informed decision on a new movement behavior for these
last 8 frames, we definitely need to know all the details behind the crash
though. Here's what I would interpret into the code:
Not moving at all, i.e., interpreting 0 as the middle ground between
positive and negative movement. This would also make sense because a
12-frame duration implies 100% of the movement to consist of
the braking phase – and Marisa wasn't moving before, after all.
Move at maximum speed, i.e., dividing by 1 rather than 0. Since the
movement duration is still 12 in this case, Marisa will immediately start
braking. In total, she will move exactly ¾ of the way from her initial
position to (192, 112) within the 8 frames before the pattern
ends.
Directly warping to (192, 112) on frame 0, and to the
point-reflected target on 4, respectively. This "emulates" the division by
zero by moving Marisa at infinite speed to the exact two points indicated by
the velocity formula. It also fits nicely into the 8 frames we have to fill
here. Sure, Marisa can't reach these points at any other duration, but why
shouldn't she be able to, with infinite speed? Then again, if Marisa
is far away enough from (192, 112), this workaround would warp her
across the entire playfield. Can Marisa teleport according to lore? I
have no idea…
Triggering an immediate Game O– hell no, this is the Stage 4 boss,
people already hate losing runs to this bug!
Asking Twitter worked great for the Kurumi workaround, so let's do it again!
Gotta attach a screenshot of an earlier draft of this blog post though,
since this stuff is impossible to explain in tweets…
…and it went
through the roof, becoming the most successful ReC98 tweet so far?!
Apparently, y'all really like to just look at descriptions of overly complex
bugs that I'd consider way beyond the typical attention span that can be
expected from Twitter. Unfortunately, all those tweet impressions didn't
quite translate into poll turnout. The results
were pretty evenly split between 1) and 2), with option 1) just coming out
slightly ahead at 49.1%, compared to 41.5% of option 2).
(And yes, I only noticed after creating the poll that warping to both the
green and yellow points made more sense than warping to just one of the two.
Let's hope that this additional variant wouldn't have shifted the results
too much. Both warp options only got 9.4% of the vote after all, and no one
else came up with the idea either. In the end,
you can always merge together your preferred combination of workarounds from
the Git branches linked below.)
So here you go: The new definitive version of TH04, containing not only the
community-chosen Kurumi and Stage 4 Marisa workaround variant, but also the
📝 No-EMS bugfix from last year.
Edit (2022-05-31): This package is outdated, 📝 the current version is here!2022-04-18-community-choice-fixes.zip
Oh, and let's also add spaztron64's TH03 GDC clock fix
from 2019 because why not. This binary was built from the community_choice_fixes
branch, and you can find the code for all the individual workarounds on
these branches:
Again, because it can't be stated often enough: These fixes are
fanfiction. The gameplay community should be aware of
this, and might decide to handle these cases differently.
With all of that taking way more time to evaluate and document, this
research really had to become part of a proper push, instead of just being
covered in the quick non-push blog post I initially intended. With ½ of a
push left at the end, TH05's Stage 1-5 boss background rendering functions
fit in perfectly there. If you wonder how these static backdrop images even
need any boss-specific code to begin with, you're right – it's basically the
same function copy-pasted 4 times, differing only in the backdrop image
coordinates and some other inconsequential details.
Only Sara receives a nice variation of the typical
📝 blocky entrance animation: The usually
opaque bitmap data from ST00.BB is instead used as a transition
mask from stage tiles to the backdrop image, by making clever use of the
tile invalidation system:
TH04 uses the same effect a bit more frequently, for its first three bosses.
Next up: Shinki, for real this time! I've already managed to decompile 10 of
her 11 danmaku patterns within a little more than one push – and yes,
that one is included in there. Looks like I've slightly
overestimated the amount of work required for TH04's and TH05's bosses…
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.
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.
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:
CBossEntity
CBossAnim
CPlayerAnim
ptn_* (32×32)
Format
.BOS
.BOS
.BOS
.PTN
Hitbox
✔
✘
✘
✘
Byte-aligned blitting
✔
✔
✔
✔
Byte-aligned unblitting
✔
✘
✔
✔
Unaligned blitting
Single-line and wave only
✘
✘
✘
Precise unblitting
✔
✘
✔
✔
Per-file sprite limit
8
8
32
64
Pixels blitted at once
16
16
8
32
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
CPlayerAnimdid 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.
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:
Konngara
Sariel
Elis
Kikuri
SinGyoku
(code for regular card-flipping stages)
Mima
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!
Alright, the score popup numbers shown when collecting items or defeating
(mid)bosses. The second-to-last remaining big entity type in TH05… with
quite some PI false positives in the memory range occupied by its data.
Good thing I still got some outstanding generic RE pushes that haven't
been claimed for anything more specific in over a month! These
conveniently allowed me to RE most of these functions right away, the
right way.
Most of the false positives were boss HP values, passed to a "boss phase
end" function which sets the HP value at which the next phase should end.
Stage 6 Yuuka, Mugetsu, and EX-Alice have their own copies of this
function, in which they also reset certain boss-specific global variables.
Since I always like to cover all varieties of such duplicated functions at
once, it made sense to reverse-engineer all the involved variables while I
was at it… and that's why this was exactly the right time to cover the
implementation details of Stage 6 Yuuka's parasol and vanishing animations
in TH04.
With still a bit of time left in that RE push afterwards, I could also
start looking into some of the smaller functions that didn't quite fit
into other pushes. The most notable one there was a simple function that
aims from any point to the current player position. Which actually only
became a separate function in TH05, probably since it's called 27 times in
total. That's 27 places no longer being blocked from further RE progress.
WindowsTiger already
did most of the work for the score popup numbers in January, which meant
that I only had to review it and bring it up to ReC98's current coding
styles and standards. This one turned out to be one of those rare features
whose TH05 implementation is significantly less insane than the
TH04 one. Both games lazily redraw only the tiles of the stage background
that were drawn over in the previous frame, and try their best to minimize
the amount of tiles to be redrawn in this way. For these popup numbers,
this involves calculating the on-screen width, based on the exact number
of digits in the point value. TH04 calculates this width every frame
during the rendering function, and even resorts to setting that field
through the digit iteration pointer via self-modifying code… yup. TH05, on
the other hand, simply calculates the width once when spawning a new popup
number, during the conversion of the point value to
binary-coded
decimal. The "×2" multiplier suffix being removed in TH05 certainly
also helped in simplifying that feature in this game.
And that's ⅓ of TH05 reverse-engineered! Next up, one more TH05 PI push,
in which the stage enemies hopefully finish all the big entity types.
Maybe it will also be accompanied by another RE push? In any case, that
will be the last piece of TH05 progress for quite some time. The next TH01
stretch will consist of 6 pushes at the very least, and I currently have
no idea of how much time I can spend on ReC98 a month from now…
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