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📝 Posted:
🚚 Summary of:
P0115, P0116
Commits:
967bb8b...e5328a3, e5328a3...03048c3
💰 Funded by:
Lmocinemod, Blue Bolt, [Anonymous]
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Finally, after a long while, we've got two pushes with barely anything to talk about! Continuing the road towards 100% PI for TH05, these were exactly the two pushes that TH05 MAINE.EXE PI was estimated to additionally cost, relative to TH04's. Consequently, they mostly went to TH05's unique data structures in the ending cutscenes, the score name registration menu, and the staff roll.

A unique feature in there is TH05's support for automatic text color changes in its ending scripts, based on the first full-width Shift-JIS codepoint in a line. The \c=codepoint,color commands at the top of the _ED??.TXT set up exactly this codepoint→color mapping. As far as I can tell, TH05 is the only Touhou game with a feature like this – even the Windows Touhou games went back to manually spelling out each color change.

The orb particles in TH05's staff roll also try to be a bit unique by using 32-bit X and Y subpixel variables for their current position. With still just 4 fractional bits, I can't really tell yet whether the extended range was actually necessary. Maybe due to how the "camera scrolling" through "space" was implemented? All other entities were pretty much the usual fare, though.
12.4, 4.4, and now a 28.4 fixed-point format… yup, 📝 C++ templates were definitely the right choice.

At the end of its staff roll, TH05 not only displays the usual performance verdict, but then scrolls in the scores at the end of each stage before switching to the high score menu. The simplest way to smoothly scroll between two full screens on a PC-98 involves a separate bitmap… which is exactly what TH05 does here, reserving 28,160 bytes of its global data segment for just one overly large monochrome 320×704 bitmap where both the screens are rendered to. That's… one benefit of splitting your game into multiple executables, I guess? :tannedcirno:
Not sure if it's common knowledge that you can actually scroll back and forth between the two screens with the Up and Down keys before moving to the score menu. I surely didn't know that before. But it makes sense – might as well get the most out of that memory.


The necessary groundwork for all of this may have actually made TH04's (yes, TH04's) MAINE.EXE technically position-independent. Didn't quite reach the same goal for TH05's – but what we did reach is ⅔ of all PC-98 Touhou code now being position-independent! Next up: Celebrating even more milestones, as -Tom- is about to finish development on his TH05 MAIN.EXE PI demo…