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📝 Posted:
🚚 Summary of:
P0214 TH01 decompilation (Orb and Game Over animations + Pause, continue, and debug menus)
P0215 TH01 decompilation (REIIDEN.EXE main() function / 100%)
💰 Funded by:
Ember2528, Yanga
🏷️ Tags:

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:

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:

The original version unblits a 32×32 rectangle around Reimu that only grows on the X axis… for the first 5 frames. The unblitting call is only run if the corresponding sprite wasn't clipped at the edges of the playfield in the frame before, and ZUN uses the animation's frame number rather than the sprite loop variable to index the per-sprite clip flag array. The resulting out-of-bounds access then reads the sprite coordinates instead, which are never 0, thus interpreting all 5 sprites as clipped.
This variant would interpret the declared 5 effect coordinates as distinct sprites and unblit them correctly every frame. The end result is rather wimpy though… hardly appropriate for a Game Over, especially with the original animation in mind.
This variant would not unblit anything, and is probably closest to what the final animation should have been.

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? :zunpet: 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":

TH01's stage -1
Stage -1
TH01's stage -2
Stage -2
TH01's stage -3
Stage -3
TH01's stage -4
Stage -4
TH01's stage -5
Stage -5

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… :tannedcirno:
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…)

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📝 Posted:
🚚 Summary of:
P0203 TH01 decompilation (Card-flipping stages, part 3/4: Bumpers and turrets)
P0204 TH01 decompilation (Card-flipping stages, part 4/4: Portals + Bomb animation)
💰 Funded by:
GhostRiderCog, [Anonymous], Yanga
🏷️ Tags:

Let's start right with the milestones:

So, how did this card-flipping stage obstacle delivery get so horribly delayed? With all the different layouts showcased in the 28 card-flipping stages, you'd expect this to be among the more stable and bug-free parts of the codebase. Heck, with all stage objects being placed on a 32×32-pixel grid, this is the first TH01-related blog post this year that doesn't have to describe an alignment-related unblitting glitch!

That alone doesn't mean that this code is free from quirky behavior though, and we have to look no further than the first few lines of the collision handling for round bumpers to already find a whole lot of that. Simplified, they do the following: 

pixel_t delta_y_between_orb_and_bumper = (orb.top - bumper.top);
if(delta_y_between_orb_and_bumper <= 0) {
	orb.top = (bumper.top - 24);
} else {
	orb.top = (bumper.top + 24);
}

Immediately, you wonder why these assignments only exist for the Y coordinate. Sure, hitting a bumper from the left or right side should happen less often, but it's definitely possible. Is it really a good idea to warp the Orb to the top or bottom edge of a bumper regardless?
What's more important though: The fact that these immediate assignments exist at all. The game's regular Orb physics work by producing a Y velocity from the single force acting on the Orb and a gravity factor, and are completely independent of its current Y position. A bumper collision does also apply a new force onto the Orb further down in the code, but these assignments still bypass the physics system and are bound to have some knock-on effect on the Orb's movement.

To observe that effect, we just have to enter Stage 18 on the 地獄/Jigoku route, where it's particularly trivial to reproduce. At a 📝 horizontal velocity of ±4, these assignments are exactly what can cause the Orb to endlessly bounce between two bumpers. As rudimentary as the Orb's physics may be, just letting them do their work would have entirely prevented these loops:

One of at least three infinite bumper loop constellations within just this 10×5-tile section of TH01's Stage 18 on the 地獄/Jigoku route. With an effective 56 horizontal pixels between both hitboxes, the Orb would have to travel an absolute Y distance of at least 16 vertical pixels within (56 / 4) = 14 frames to escape the other bumper's hitbox. If the initial bounce reduces the Orb's Y velocity far enough for it to not manage that distance the first time, it will never reach the necessary speed again. In this loop, the bounce-off force even stabilizes, though this doesn't have to happen. The blue areas indicate the pixel-perfect* hitboxes of each bumper.
TH01 bumper collision handling without ZUN's manual assignment of the Y coordinate. The Orb still bounces back and forth between two bumpers for a while, but its top position always follows naturally from its Y velocity and the force applied to it, and gravity wins out in the end. The blue areas indicate the pixel-perfect* hitboxes of each bumper.

Now, you might be thinking that these Y assignments were just an attempt to prevent the Orb from colliding with the same bumper again on the next frame. After all, those 24 pixels exactly correspond to ⅓ of the height of a bumper's hitbox with an additional pixel added on top. However, the game already perfectly prevents repeated collisions by turning off collision testing with the same bumper for the next 7 frames after a collision. Thus, we can conclude that ZUN either explicitly coded bumper collision handling to facilitate these loops, or just didn't take out that code after inevitably discovering what it did. This is not janky code, it's not a glitch, it's not sarcasm from my end, and it's not the game's physics being bad.

But wait. Couldn't these assignments just be a remnant from a time in development before ZUN decided on the 7-frame delay on further collisions? Well, even that explanation stops holding water after the next few lines of code. Simplified, again: 

pixel_t delta_x_between_orb_and_bumper = (orb.left - bumper.left);
if((orb.velocity.x == +4) && (delta_x_between_orb_and_bumper < 0)) {
	orb.velocity.x = -4;
} else if((orb.velocity.x == -4) && (delta_x_between_orb_and_bumper > 0)) {
	orb.velocity.x = +4;
}

What's important here is the part that's not in the code – namely, anything that handles X velocities of -8 or +8. In those cases, the Orb simply continues in the same horizontal direction. The manual Y assignment is the only part of the code that actually prevents a collision there, as the newly applied force is not guaranteed to be enough:

An infinite loop across three bumpers, made possible by the edge of the playfield and bumper bars on opposite sides, an unchanged horizontal direction, and the Y assignments neatly placing the Orb on either the top or bottom side of a bumper. The alternating sign of the force further ensures that the Orb will travel upwards half the time, canceling out gravity during the short time between two hitboxes.
With the unchanged horizontal direction and the Y assignments removed, nothing keeps an Orb at ±8 pixels per frame from flying into/over a bumper. The collision force pushes the Orb slightly, but not enough to truly matter. The final force sends the Orb on a significant downward trajectory beyond the next bumper's hitbox, breaking the original loop.

Forgetting to handle ⅖ of your discrete X velocity cases is simply not something you do by accident. So we might as well say that ZUN deliberately designed the game to behave exactly as it does in this regard.

Bumpers also come in vertical or horizontal bar shapes. Their collision handling also turns off further collision testing for the next 7 frames, and doesn't do any manual coordinate assignment. That's definitely a step up in cleanliness from round bumpers, but it doesn't seem to keep in mind that the player can fire a new shot every 4 frames when standing still. That makes it immediately obvious why this works:

The green numbers show the amount of frames since the last detected collision with the respective bumper bar, and indicate that collision testing with the bar below is currently disabled.

That's the most well-known case of reducing the Orb's horizontal velocity to 0 by exactly hitting it with shots in its center and then button-mashing it through a horizontal bar. This also works with vertical bars and yields even more interesting results there, but if we want to have any chance of understanding what happens there, we have to first go over some basics:

However, if that were everything the game did, kicking the Orb into a column of vertical bumper bars would lead them to behave more like a rope that the Orb can climb, as the initial collision with two hitboxes cancels out the intended sign change that reflects the Orb away from the bars:

This footage was recorded without the workaround I am about to describe. It does not reflect the behavior of the original game. You cannot do this in the original game.
While the visualization reveals small sections where three hitboxes overlap, the Orb can never actually collide with three of them at the same time, as those 3-hitbox regions are 2 pixels smaller than they would need to be to fit the Orb. That's exactly the difference between using < rather than <= in these hitbox comparisons.

While that would have been a fun gameplay mechanic on its own, it immediately breaks apart once you place two vertical bumper bars next to each other. Due to how these bumper bar hitboxes extend past their sprites, any two adjacent vertical bars will end up with the exact same hitbox in absolute screen coordinates. Stage 17 on the 魔界/Makai route contains exactly such a layout:

The collision handlers of adjacent vertical bars always activate in the same frame, independently invert the Orb's X velocity, and therefore fully cancel out their intended effect on the Orb… if the game did not have the workaround I am about to describe. This cannot happen in the original game.

ZUN's workaround: Setting a "vertical bumper bar block flag" after any collision with such a bar, which simply disables any collision with any vertical bar for the next 7 frames. This quick hack made all vertical bars work as intended, and avoided the need for involving the Orb's X velocity in any kind of physics system. :zunpet:

Edit (2022-07-12): This flag only works around glitches that would be caused by simultaneously colliding with more than one vertical bar. The actual response to a bumper bar collision still remains unaffected, and is very naive:

These conditions are only correct if the Orb comes in at an angle roughly between 45° and 135° on either side of a bar. If it's anywhere close to 0° or 180°, this response will be incorrect, and send the Orb straight through the bar. Since the large hitboxes make this easily possible, you can still get the Orb to climb a vertical column, or glide along a horizontal row:

Here's the hitbox overlay for 地獄/Jigoku Stage 19, and here's an updated version of the 📝 Orb physics debug mod that now also shows bumper bar collision frame numbers: 2022-07-10-TH01OrbPhysicsDebug.zip See the th01_orb_debug branch for the code. To use it, simply replace REIIDEN.EXE, and run the game in debug mode, via game d on the DOS prompt. If you encounter a gameplay situation that doesn't seem to be covered by this blog post, you can now verify it for yourself. Thanks to touhou-memories for bringing these issues to my attention! That definitely was a glaring omission from the initial version of this blog post.

With that clarified, we can now try mashing the Orb into these two vertical bars:

At first, that workaround doesn't seem to make a difference here. As we expect, the frame numbers now tell us that only one of the two bumper bars in a row activates, but we couldn't have told otherwise as the number of bars has no effect on newly applied Y velocity forces. On a closer look, the Orb's rise to the top of the playfield is in fact caused by that workaround though, combined with the unchanged top-to-bottom order of collision testing. As soon as any bumper bar completed its 7 collision delay frames, it resets the aforementioned flag, which already reactivates collision handling for any remaining vertical bumper bars during the same frame. Look out for frames with both a 7 and a 1, like the one marked in the video above: The 7 will always appear before the 1 in the row-major order. Whenever this happens, the current oscillation period is cut down from 7 to 6 frames – and because collision testing runs from top to bottom, this will always happen during the falling part. Depending on the Y velocity, the rising part may also be cut down to 6 frames from time to time, but that one at least has a chance to last for the full 7 frames. This difference adds those crucial extra frames of upward movement, which add up to send the Orb to the top. Without the flag, you'd always see the Orb oscillating between a fixed range of the bar column.
Finally, it's the "top of playfield" force that gradually slows down the Orb and makes sure it ultimately only moves at sub-pixel velocities, which have no visible effect. Because 📝 the regular effect of gravity is reset with each newly applied force, it's completely negated during most of the climb. This even holds true once the Orb reached the top: Since the Orb requires a negative force to repeatedly arrive up there and be bounced back, this force will stay active for the first 5 of the 7 collision frames and not move the Orb at all. Once gravity kicks in at the 5th frame and adds 1 to the Y velocity, it's already too late: The new velocity can't be larger than 0.5, and the Orb only has 1 or 2 frames before the flag reset causes it to be bounced back up to the top again.

Portals, on the other hand, turn out to be much simpler than the old description that ended up on Touhou Wiki in October 2005 might suggest. Everything about their teleportations is random: The destination portal, the exit force (as an integer between -9 and +9), as well as the exit X velocity, with each of the 📝 5 distinct horizontal velocities having an equal chance of being chosen. Of course, if the destination portal is next to the left or right edge of the playfield and it chooses to fire the Orb towards that edge, it immediately bounces off into the opposite direction, whereas the 0 velocity is always selected with a constant 20% probability.

The selection process for the destination portal involves a bit more than a single rand() call. The game bundles all obstacles in a single structure of dynamically allocated arrays, and only knows how many obstacles there are in total, not per type. Now, that alone wouldn't have much of an impact on random portal selection, as you could simply roll a random obstacle ID and try again if it's not a portal. But just to be extra cute, ZUN instead iterates over all obstacles, selects any non-entered portal with a chance of ¼, and just gives up if that dice roll wasn't successful after 16 loops over the whole array, defaulting to the entered portal in that case.
In all its silliness though, this works perfectly fine, and results in a chance of 0.7516(𝑛 - 1) for the Orb exiting out of the same portal it entered, with 𝑛 being the total number of portals in a stage. That's 1% for two portals, and 0.01% for three. Pretty decent for a random result you don't want to happen, but that hurts nobody if it does.

The one tiny ZUN bug with portals is technically not even part of the newly decompiled code here. If Reimu gets hit while the Orb is being sent through a portal, the Orb is immediately kicked out of the portal it entered, no matter whether it already shows up inside the sprite of the destination portal. Neither of the two portal sprites is reset when this happens, leading to "two Orbs" being visible simultaneously. :tannedcirno::onricdennat:
This makes very little sense no matter how you look at it. The Orb doesn't receive a new velocity or force when this happens, so it will simply re-enter the same portal once the gameplay resumes on Reimu's next life:

And that's it! At least the turrets don't have anything notable to say about them 📝 that I haven't said before.

That left another ½ of a push over at the end. Way too much time to finish FUUIN.exe, way too little time to start with Mima… but the bomb animation fit perfectly in there. No secrets or bugs there, just a bunch of sprite animation code wasting at least another 82 bytes in the data segment. The special effect after the kuji-in sprites uses the same single-bitplane 32×32 square inversion effect seen at the end of Kikuri's and Sariel's entrance animation, except that it's a 3-stack of 16-rings moving at 6, 7, and 8 pixels per frame respectively. At these comparatively slow speeds, the byte alignment of each square adds some further noise to the discoloration pattern… if you even notice it below all the shaking and seizure-inducing hardware palette manipulation.
And yes, due to the very destructive nature of the effect, the game does in fact rely on it only being applied to VRAM page 0. While that will cause every moving sprite to tear holes into the inverted squares along its trajectory, keeping a clean playfield on VRAM page 1 is what allows all that pixel damage to be easily undone at the end of this 89-frame animation.

Next up: Mima! Let's hope that stage obstacles already were the most complex part remaining in TH01…

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📝 Posted:
🚚 Summary of:
P0158 TH01 decompilation (Items, part 1/2)
P0159 TH01 decompilation (Items, part 2/2 + Cards)
💰 Funded by:
Yanga
🏷️ Tags:

Of course, Sariel's potentially bloated and copy-pasted code is blocked by even more definitely bloated and copy-pasted code. It's TH01, what did you expect? :tannedcirno:

But even then, TH01's item code is on a new level of software architecture ridiculousness. First, ZUN uses distinct arrays for both types of items, with their own caps of 4 for bomb items, and 10 for point items. Since that obviously makes any type-related switch statement redundant, he also used distinct functions for both types, with copy-pasted boilerplate code. The main per-item update and render function is shared though… and takes every single accessed member of the item structure as its own reference parameter. Like, why, you have a structure, right there?! That's one way to really practice the C++ language concept of passing arbitrary structure fields by mutable reference… :zunpet:
To complete the unwarranted grand generic design of this function, it calls back into per-type collision detection, drop, and collect functions with another three reference parameters. Yeah, why use C++ virtual methods when you can also implement the effectively same polymorphism functionality by hand? Oh, and the coordinate clamping code in one of these callbacks could only possibly have come from nested min() and max() preprocessor macros. And that's how you extend such dead-simple functionality to 1¼ pushes…

Amidst all this jank, we've at least got a sensible item↔player hitbox this time, with 24 pixels around Reimu's center point to the left and right, and extending from 24 pixels above Reimu down to the bottom of the playfield. It absolutely didn't look like that from the initial naive decompilation though. Changing entity coordinates from left/top to center was one of the better lessons from TH01 that ZUN implemented in later games, it really makes collision detection code much more intuitive to grasp.

The card flip code is where we find out some slightly more interesting aspects about item drops in this game, and how they're controlled by a hidden cycle variable:

Then again, score players largely ignore point items anyway, as card combos simply have a much bigger effect on the score. With this, I should have RE'd all information necessary to construct a tool-assisted score run, though?
Edit: Turns out that 1) point items are becoming increasingly important in score runs, and 2) Pearl already did a TAS some months ago. Thanks to spaztron64 for the info!

The Orb↔card hitbox also makes perfect sense, with 24 pixels around the center point of a card in every direction.

The rest of the code confirms the card flip score formula documented on Touhou Wiki, as well as the way cards are flipped by bombs: During every of the 90 "damaging" frames of the 140-frame bomb animation, there is a 75% chance to flip the card at the [bomb_frame % total_card_count_in_stage] array index. Since stages can only have up to 50 cards 📝 thanks to a bug, even a 75% chance is high enough to typically flip most cards during a bomb. Each of these flips still only removes a single card HP, just like after a regular collision with the Orb.
Also, why are the card score popups rendered before the cards themselves? That's two needless frames of flicker during that 25-frame animation. Not all too noticeable, but still.

And that's over 50% of REIIDEN.EXE decompiled as well! Next up: More HUD update and rendering code… with a direct dependency on rank pellet speed modifications?

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📝 Posted:
🚚 Summary of:
P0128 TH01 decompilation (Card-flipping stages, part 1/4)
P0129 TH01 decompilation (Card-flipping stages, part 2/4)
💰 Funded by:
Yanga
🏷️ Tags:

So, only one card-flipping function missing, and then we can start decompiling TH01's two final bosses? Unfortunately, that had to be the one big function that initializes and renders all gameplay objects. #17 on the list of longest functions in all of PC-98 Touhou, requiring two pushes to fully understand what's going on there… and then it immediately returns for all "boss" stages whose number is divisible by 5, yet is still called during Sariel's and Konngara's initialization 🤦

Oh well. This also involved the final file format we hadn't looked at yet – the STAGE?.DAT files that describe the layout for all stages within a single 5-stage scene. Which, for a change is a very well-designed form– no, of course it's completely weird, what did you expect? Development must have looked somewhat like this:

With all that, it's almost not worth mentioning how there are 12 turret types, which only differ in which hardcoded pellet group they fire at a hardcoded interval of either 100 or 200 frames, and that they're all explicitly spelled out in every single switch statement. Or how the layout of the internal card and obstacle SoA classes is quite disjointed. So here's the new ZUN bugs you've probably already been expecting!

Cards and obstacles are blitted to both VRAM pages. This way, any other entities moving on top of them can simply be unblitted by restoring pixels from VRAM page 1, without requiring the stationary objects to be redrawn from main memory. Obviously, the backgrounds behind the cards have to be stored somewhere, since the player can remove them. For faster transitions between stages of a scene, ZUN chose to store the backgrounds behind obstacles as well. This way, the background image really only needs to be blitted for the first stage in a scene.

All that memory for the object backgrounds adds up quite a bit though. ZUN actually made the correct choice here and picked a memory allocation function that can return more than the 64 KiB of a single x86 Real Mode segment. He then accesses the individual backgrounds via regular array subscripts… and that's where the bug lies, because he stores the returned address in a regular far pointer rather than a huge one. This way, the game still can only display a total of 102 objects (i. e., cards and obstacles combined) per stage, without any unblitting glitches.
What a shame, that limit could have been 127 if ZUN didn't needlessly allocate memory for alpha planes when backing up VRAM content. :onricdennat:

And since array subscripts on far pointers wrap around after 64 KiB, trying to save the background of the 103rd object is guaranteed to corrupt the memory block header at the beginning of the returned segment. :zunpet: When TH01 runs in debug mode, it correctly reports a corrupted heap in this case.
After detecting such a corruption, the game loudly reports it by playing the "player hit" sound effect and locking up, freezing any further gameplay or rendering. The locking loop can be left by pressing ↵ Return, but the game will simply re-enter it if the corruption is still present during the next heapcheck(), in the next frame. And since heap corruptions don't tend to repair themselves, you'd have to constantly hold ↵ Return to resume gameplay. Doing that could actually get you safely to the next boss, since the game doesn't allocate or free any further heap memory during a 5-stage card-flipping scene, and just throws away its C heap when restarting the process for a boss. But then again, holding ↵ Return will also auto-flip all cards on the way there… 🤨

Finally, some unused content! Upon discovering TH01's stage selection debug feature, probably everyone tried to access Stage 21, just to see what happens, and indeed landed in an actual stage, with a black background and a weird color palette. Turns out that ZUN did ship an unused scene in SCENE7.DAT, which is exactly what's loaded there.
However, it's easy to believe that this is just garbage data (as I initially did): At the beginning of "Stage 22", the game seems to enter an infinite loop somewhere during the flip-in animation.

Well, we've had a heap overflow above, and the cause here is nothing but a stack buffer overflow – a perhaps more modern kind of classic C bug, given its prevalence in the Windows Touhou games. Explained in a few lines of code: 

void stageobjs_init_and_render()
{
	int card_animation_frames[50]; // even though there can be up to 200?!
	int total_frames = 0;

	(code that would end up resetting total_frames if it ever tried to reset
	card_animation_frames[50]…)
}

The number of cards in "Stage 22"? 76. There you have it.

But of course, it's trivial to disable this animation and fix these stage transitions. So here they are, Stages 21 to 24, as shipped with the game in STAGE7.DAT:

TH01 stage 21, loaded from <code>STAGE7.DAT</code>TH01 stage 22, loaded from <code>STAGE7.DAT</code>TH01 stage 23, loaded from <code>STAGE7.DAT</code>TH01 stage 24, loaded from <code>STAGE7.DAT</code>

Wow, what a mess. All that was just a bit too much to be covered in two pushes… Next up, assuming the current subscriptions: Taking a vacation with one smaller TH01 push, covering some smaller functions here and there to ensure some uninterrupted Konngara progress later on.

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