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📝 Posted:
🚚 Summary of:
P0165, P0166, P0167
Commits:
7a0e5d8...f2bca01, f2bca01...e697907, e697907...c2de6ab
💰 Funded by:
Ember2528
🏷 Tags:

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:

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

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


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

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

TH01 Mima's 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. :thonk: 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… :tannedcirno:

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. :zunpet: 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:

Demonstration of palette changes in TH01's route selection

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:

📝 Posted:
🚚 Summary of:
P0099, P0100, P0101, P0102
Commits:
1799d67...1b25830, 1b25830...ceb81db, ceb81db...c11a956, c11a956...b60f38d
💰 Funded by:
Ember2528, Yanga
🏷 Tags:

Well, make that three days. Trying to figure out all the details behind the sprite flickering was absolutely dreadful…
It started out easy enough, though. Unsurprisingly, TH01 had a quite limited pellet system compared to TH04 and TH05:

As expected from TH01, the code comes with its fair share of smaller, insignificant ZUN bugs and oversights. As you would also expect though, the sprite flickering points to the biggest and most consequential flaw in all of this.


Apparently, it started with ZUN getting the impression that it's only possible to use the PC-98 EGC for fast blitting of all 4 bitplanes in one CPU instruction if you blit 16 horizontal pixels (= 2 bytes) at a time. Consequently, he only wrote one function for EGC-accelerated sprite unblitting, which can only operate on a "grid" of 16×1 tiles in VRAM. But wait, pellets are not only just 8×8, but can also be placed at any unaligned X position…

… yet the game still insists on using this 16-dot-aligned function to unblit pellets, forcing itself into using a super sloppy 16×8 rectangle for the job. 🤦 ZUN then tried to mitigate the resulting flickering in two hilarious ways that just make it worse:

  1. An… "interlaced rendering" mode? This one's activated for all Stage 15 and 20 fights, and separates pellets into two halves that are rendered on alternating frames. Collision detection with the Yin-Yang Orb and the player is only done for the visible half, but collision detection with player shots is still done for all pellets every frame, as are motion updates – so that pellets don't end up moving half as fast as they should.
    So yeah, your eyes weren't deceiving you. The game does effectively drop its perceived frame rate in the Elis, Kikuri, Sariel, and Konngara fights, and it does so deliberately.
  2. 📝 Just like player shots, pellets are also unblitted, moved, and rendered in a single function. Thanks to the 16×8 rectangle, there's now the (completely unnecessary) possibility of accidentally unblitting parts of a sprite that was previously drawn into the 8 pixels right of a pellet. And this is where ZUN went full :tannedcirno: and went "oh, I know, let's test the entire 16 pixels, and in case we got an entity there, we simply make the pellet invisible for this frame! Then we don't even have to unblit it later!" :zunpet:

    Except that this is only done for the first 3 elements of the player shot array…?! Which don't even necessarily have to contain the 3 shots fired last. It's not done for the player sprite, the Orb, or, heck, other pellets that come earlier in the pellet array. (At least we avoided going 𝑂(𝑛²) there?)

    Actually, and I'm only realizing this now as I type this blog post: This test is done even if the shots at those array elements aren't active. So, pellets tend to be made invisible based on comparisons with garbage data. :onricdennat:

    And then you notice that the player shot unblit​/​move​/​render function is actually only ever called from the pellet unblit​/​move​/​render function on the one global instance of the player shot manager class, after pellets were unblitted. So, we end up with a sequence of

    Pellet unblit → Pellet move → Shot unblit → Shot move → Shot render → Pellet render

    which means that we can't ever unblit a previously rendered shot with a pellet. Sure, as terrible as this one function call is from a software architecture perspective, it was enough to fix this issue. Yet we don't even get the intended positive effect, and walk away with pellets that are made temporarily invisible for no reason at all. So, uh, maybe it all just was an attempt at increasing the ramerate on lower spec PC-98 models?

Yup, that's it, we've found the most stupid piece of code in this game, period. It'll be hard to top this.


I'm confident that it's possible to turn TH01 into a well-written, fluid PC-98 game, with no flickering, and no perceived lag, once it's position-independent. With some more in-depth knowledge and documentation on the EGC (remember, there's still 📝 this one TH03 push waiting to be funded), you might even be able to continue using that piece of blitter hardware. And no, you certainly won't need ASM micro-optimizations – just a bit of knowledge about which optimizations Turbo C++ does on its own, and what you'd have to improve in your own code. It'd be very hard to write worse code than what you find in TH01 itself.

(Godbolt for Turbo C++ 4.0J when? Seriously though, that would 📝 also be a great project for outside contributors!)


Oh well. In contrast to TH04 and TH05, where 4 pushes only covered all the involved data types, they were enough to completely cover all of the pellet code in TH01. Everything's already decompiled, and we never have to look at it again. 😌 And with that, TH01 has also gone from by far the least RE'd to the most RE'd game within ReC98, in just half a year! 🎉
Still, that was enough TH01 game logic for a while. :tannedcirno: Next up: Making up for the delay with some more relaxing and easy pieces of TH01 code, that hopefully make just a bit more sense than all this garbage. More image formats, mainly.