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Nope, RL has given me plenty of things to do from home after all, so the current cap still remains an accurate representation of my free time. 😕

For now though, we've got one more TH01 file format push, covering the core functions for loading and displaying the 32×32 and 16×16 sprites from the .PTN files, as announced – and probably one of the last ones for quite a while to yield both RE and PI progress way above average. But what is this, error return values in a ZUN game?! And actually good code for deriving the alpha channel from the 16th color in the hardware palette?! Sure, the rest of the code could still be improved a lot, but that was quite a surprise, especially after the spaghetti code of 📝 the last push. That makes up for two of the .PTN structure fields (one of them always 0, and one of them always 1) remaining unused, and therefore unknown.

ZUN also uses the .PTN image slots to store the background of frequently updated VRAM sections, in order to be able to repeatedly draw on top of them – like for example the HUD area where the score and time numbers are drawn. Future games would simply use the text RAM and gaiji for those numbers. This would have worked just fine for TH01 too – especially since all the functions decompiled so far align the VRAM X coordinate to the 8-pixel byte grid, which is the simplest way of accessing VRAM given the PC-98's planar memory layout. Looks as if ZUN simply wasn't aware of gaiji during the development of TH01.

This won't be the last time I cover the .PTN format, since all the blitting functions that actually use alpha are exclusive to REIIDEN.EXE, and currently out of decompilation reach. But after some more long overdue cleaning work, TH01 has now passed both TH02 and even TH04 to become the second-most reverse-engineered game in all of ReC98, in terms of absolute numbers! 🎉

Also, PI for TH01's OP.EXE is imminent. Next up though, we've first got the probably final double-speed push for TH01, covering the last set of duplicated functions between the three binaries – quite fitting for the currently last fully funded, outstanding TH01 RE push. Then, we also might get FUUIN.EXE PI within the same push afterwards? After that, TH01 progress will be slowing down, since I'd then have to cover either the main menu or in-game code or the cutscenes, depending on what the backers request. (By default, it's going to be in-game code, of course.)