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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:
P0160, P0161
Commits:
e491cd7...42ba4a5, 42ba4a5...81dd96e
💰 Funded by:
Yanga, [Anonymous]
🏷 Tags:

Nothing really noteworthy in TH01's stage timer code, just yet another HUD element that is needlessly drawn into VRAM. Sure, ZUN applies his custom boldfacing effect on top of the glyphs retrieved from font ROM, but he could have easily installed those modified glyphs as gaiji.
Well, OK, halfwidth gaiji aren't exactly well documented, and sometimes not even correctly emulated 📝 due to the same PC-98 hardware oddity I was researching last month. I've reserved two of the pending anonymous "anything" pushes for the conclusion of this research, just in case you were wondering why the outstanding workload is now lower after the two delivered here.

And since it doesn't seem to be clearly documented elsewhere: Every 2 ticks on the stage timer correspond to 4 frames.


So, TH01 rank pellet speed. The resident pellet speed value is a factor ranging from a minimum of -0.375 up to a maximum of 0.5 (pixels per frame), multiplied with the difficulty-adjusted base speed for each pellet and added on top of that same speed. This multiplier is modified

Apparently, ZUN noted that these deltas couldn't be losslessly stored in an IEEE 754 floating-point variable, and therefore didn't store the pellet speed factor exactly in a way that would correspond to its gameplay effect. Instead, it's stored similar to Q12.4 subpixels: as a simple integer, pre-multiplied by 40. This results in a raw range of -15 to 20, which is what the undecompiled ASM calls still use. When spawning a new pellet, its base speed is first multiplied by that factor, and then divided by 40 again. This is actually quite smart: The calculation doesn't need to be aware of either Q12.4 or the 40× format, as ((Q12.4 * factor×40) / factor×40) still comes out as a Q12.4 subpixel even if all numbers are integers. The only limiting issue here would be the potential overflow of the 16-bit multiplication at unadjusted base speeds of more than 50 pixels per frame, but that'd be seriously unplayable.
So yeah, pellet speed modifications are indeed gradual, and don't just fall into the coarse three "high, normal, and low" categories.


That's ⅝ of P0160 done, and the continue and pause menus would make good candidates to fill up the remaining ⅜… except that it seemed impossible to figure out the correct compiler options for this code?
The issues centered around the two effects of Turbo C++ 4.0J's -O switch:

  1. Optimizing jump instructions: merging duplicate successive jumps into a single one, and merging duplicated instructions at the end of conditional branches into a single place under a single branch, which the other branches then jump to
  2. Compressing ADD SP and POP CX stack-clearing instructions after multiple successive CALLs to __cdecl functions into a single ADD SP with the combined parameter stack size of all function calls

But how can the ASM for these functions exhibit #1 but not #2? How can it be seemingly optimized and unoptimized at the same time? The only option that gets somewhat close would be -O- -y, which emits line number information into the .OBJ files for debugging. This combination provides its own kind of #1, but these functions clearly need the real deal.

The research into this issue ended up consuming a full push on its own. In the end, this solution turned out to be completely unrelated to compiler options, and instead came from the effects of a compiler bug in a totally different place. Initializing a local structure instance or array like

const uint4_t flash_colors[3] = { 3, 4, 5 };

always emits the { 3, 4, 5 } array into the program's data segment, and then generates a call to the internal SCOPY@ function which copies this data array to the local variable on the stack. And as soon as this SCOPY@ call is emitted, the -O optimization #1 is disabled for the entire rest of the translation unit?!
So, any code segment with an SCOPY@ call followed by __cdecl functions must strictly be decompiled from top to bottom, mirroring the original layout of translation units. That means no TH01 continue and pause menus before we haven't decompiled the bomb animation, which contains such an SCOPY@ call. 😕
Luckily, TH01 is the only game where this bug leads to significant restrictions in decompilation order, as later games predominantly use the pascal calling convention, in which each function itself clears its stack as part of its RET instruction.


What now, then? With 51% of REIIDEN.EXE decompiled, we're slowly running out of small features that can be decompiled within ⅜ of a push. Good that I haven't been looking a lot into OP.EXE and FUUIN.EXE, which pretty much only got easy pieces of code left to do. Maybe I'll end up finishing their decompilations entirely within these smaller gaps?
I still ended up finding one more small piece in REIIDEN.EXE though: The particle system, seen in the Mima fight.

I like how everything about this animation is contained within a single function that is called once per frame, but ZUN could have really consolidated the spawning code for new particles a bit. In Mima's fight, particles are only spawned from the top and right edges of the screen, but the function in fact contains unused code for all other 7 possible directions, written in quite a bloated manner. This wouldn't feel quite as unused if ZUN had used an angle parameter instead… :thonk: Also, why unnecessarily waste another 40 bytes of the BSS segment?

But wait, what's going on with the very first spawned particle that just stops near the bottom edge of the screen in the video above? Well, even in such a simple and self-contained function, ZUN managed to include an off-by-one error. This one then results in an out-of-bounds array access on the 80th frame, where the code attempts to spawn a 41st particle. If the first particle was unlucky to be both slow enough and spawned away far enough from the bottom and right edges, the spawning code will then kill it off before its unblitting code gets to run, leaving its pixel on the screen until something else overlaps it and causes it to be unblitted.
Which, during regular gameplay, will quickly happen with the Orb, all the pellets flying around, and your own player movement. Also, the RNG can easily spawn this particle at a position and velocity that causes it to leave the screen more quickly. Kind of impressive how ZUN laid out the structure of arrays in a way that ensured practically no effect of this bug on the game; this glitch could have easily happened every 80 frames instead. He almost got close to all bugs canceling out each other here! :godzun:

Next up: The player control functions, including the second-biggest function in all of PC-98 Touhou.