Didn't quite get to cover background rendering for TH05's Stage 1-5
bosses in this one, as I had to reverse-engineer two more fundamental parts
involved in boss background rendering before.
First, we got the those blocky transitions from stage tiles to bomb and
boss backgrounds, loaded from BB*.BB and ST*.BB,
respectively. These files store 16 frames of animation, with every bit
corresponding to a 16×16 tile on the playfield. With 384×368 pixels to be
covered, that would require 69 bytes per frame. But since that's a very odd
number to work with in micro-optimized ASM, ZUN instead stores 512×512
pixels worth of bits, ending up with a frame size of 128 bytes, and a
per-frame waste of 59 bytes. At least it was
possible to decompile the core blitting function as __fastcall
for once.
But wait, TH05 comes with, and loads, a bomb .BB file for every character,
not just for the Reimu and Yuuka bomb transitions you see in-game… 🤔
Restoring those unused stage tile → bomb image transition
animations for Mima and Marisa isn't that trivial without having decompiled
their actual bomb animation functions before, so stay tuned!
Interestingly though, the code leaves out what would look like the most
obvious optimization: All stage tiles are unconditionally redrawn
each frame before they're erased again with the 16×16 blocks, no matter if
they weren't covered by such a block in the previous frame, or are
going to be covered by such a block in this frame. The same is true
for the static bomb and boss background images, where ZUN simply didn't
write a .CDG blitting function that takes the dirty tile array into
account. If VRAM writes on PC-98 really were as slow as the games'
README.TXT files claim them to be, shouldn't all the
optimization work have gone towards minimizing them?
Oh well, it's not like I have any idea what I'm talking about here. I'd
better stop talking about anything relating to VRAM performance on PC-98…
Second, it finally was time to solve the long-standing confusion about all
those callbacks that are supposed to render the playfield background. Given
the aforementioned static bomb background images, ZUN chose to make this
needlessly complicated. And so, we have two callback function
pointers: One during bomb animations, one outside of bomb
animations, and each boss update function is responsible for keeping the
former in sync with the latter.
Other than that, this was one of the smoothest pushes we've had in a while;
the hardest parts of boss background rendering all were part of
📝 the last push. Once you figured out that
ZUN does indeed dynamically change hardware color #0 based on the current
boss phase, the remaining one function for Shinki, and all of EX-Alice's
background rendering becomes very straightforward and understandable.
Meanwhile, -Tom- told me about his plans to publicly
release 📝 his TH05 scripting toolkit once
TH05's MAIN.EXE would hit around 50% RE! That pretty much
defines what the next bunch of generic TH05 pushes will go towards:
bullets, shared boss code, and one
full, concrete boss script to demonstrate how it's all combined. Next up,
therefore: TH04's bullet firing code…? Yes, TH04's. I want to see what I'm
doing before I tackle the undecompilable mess that is TH05's bullet firing
code, and you all probably want readable code for that feature as
well. Turns out it's also the perfect place for Blue Bolt's
pending contributions.
Back to TH01, and its high score menu… oh, wait, that one will eventually
involve keyboard input. And thanks to the generous TH01 funding situation,
there's really no reason not to cover that right now. After all,
TH01 is the last game where input still hadn't been RE'd.
But first, let's also cover that one unused blitting function, together
with REIIDEN.CFG loading and saving, which are in front of
the input function in OP.EXE… (By now, we all know about
the hidden start bomb configuration, right?)
Unsurprisingly, the earliest game also implements input in the messiest
way, with a different function for each of the three executables. "Because
they all react differently to keyboard inputs ",
apparently? OP.EXE even has two functions for it, one for the
START / CONTINUE / OPTION / QUIT main
menu, and one for both Option and Music Test menus, both of which directly
perform the ring arithmetic on the menu cursor variable. A consistent
separation of keyboard polling from input processing apparently wasn't all
too obvious of a thought, since it's only truly done from TH02 on.
This lack of proper architecture becomes actually hilarious once you
notice that it did in fact facilitate a recursion bug!
In case you've been living under a rock for the past 8 years, TH01 shipped
with debugging features, which you can enter by running the game via
game d from the DOS prompt. These features include a
memory info screen, shown when pressing PgUp, implemented as one blocking
function (test_mem()) called directly in response to the
pressed key inside the polling function. test_mem() only
returns once that screen is left by pressing PgDown. And in order to poll
input… it directly calls back into the same polling function that called
it in the first place, after a 3-frame delay.
Which means that this screen is actually re-entered for every 3 frames
that the PgUp key is being held. And yes, you can, of course, also
crash the system via a stack overflow this way by holding down PgUp for a
few seconds, if that's your thing. Edit (2020-09-17): Here's a video from
spaztron64, showing off this
exact stack overflow crash while running under the
VEM486
memory manager, which displays additional information about these
sorts of crashes:
What makes this even funnier is that the code actually tracks the last
state of every polled key, to prevent exactly that sort of bug. But the
copy-pasted assignment of the last input state is only done aftertest_mem() already returned, making it effectively pointless
for PgUp. It does work as intended for PgDown… and that's why you
have to actually press and release this key once for every call to
test_mem() in order to actually get back into the game. Even
though a single call to PgDown will already show the game screen
again.
In maybe more relevant news though, this function also came with what can
be considered the first piece of actual gameplay logic! Bombing via
double-tapping the Z and X keys is also handled here, and now we know that
both keys simply have to be tapped twice within a window of 20 frames.
They are tracked independently from each other, so you don't necessarily
have to press them simultaneously.
In debug mode, the bomb count tracks precisely this window of
time. That's why it only resets back to 0 when pressing Z or X if it's
≥20.
Sure, TH01's code is expectedly terrible and messy. But compared to the
micro-optimizations of TH04 and TH05, it's an absolute joy to work on, and
opening all these ZUN bug loot boxes is just the icing on the cake.
Looking forward to more of the high score menu in the next pushes!
At least it was
possible to decompile the core blitting function as 
Oh well, it's not like I have any idea what I'm talking about here. I'd
better stop talking about anything relating to VRAM performance on PC-98…
