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Technical debt, part 10… in which two of the PMD-related functions came with such complex ramifications that they required one full push after all, leaving no room for the additional decompilations I wanted to do. At least, this did end up being the final one, completing all SHARED segments for the time being.


The first one of these functions determines the BGM and sound effect modes, combining the resident type of the PMD driver with the Option menu setting. The TH04 and TH05 version is apparently coded quite smartly, as PC-98 Touhou only needs to distinguish "OPN- / PC-9801-26K-compatible sound sources handled by PMD.COM" from "everything else", since all other PMD varieties are OPNA- / PC-9801-86-compatible.
Therefore, I only documented those two results returned from PMD's AH=09h function. I'll leave a comprehensive, fully documented enum to interested contributors, since that would involve research into basically the entire history of the PC-9800 series, and even the clearly out-of-scope PC-88VA. After all, distinguishing between more versions of the PMD driver in the Option menu (and adding new sprites for them!) is strictly mod territory.


The honor of being the final decompiled function in any SHARED segment went to TH04's snd_load(). TH04 contains by far the sanest version of this function: Readable C code, no new ZUN bugs (and still missing file I/O error handling, of course)… but wait, what about that actual file read syscall, using the INT 21h, AH=3Fh DOS file read API? Reading up to a hardcoded number of bytes into PMD's or MMD's song or sound effect buffer, 20 KiB in TH02-TH04, 64 KiB in TH05… that's kind of weird. About time we looked closer into this. :thonk:

Turns out that no, KAJA's driver doesn't give you the full 64 KiB of one memory segment for these, as especially TH05's code might suggest to anyone unfamiliar with these drivers. :zunpet: Instead, you can customize the size of these buffers on its command line. In GAME.BAT, ZUN allocates 8 KiB for FM songs, 2 KiB for sound effects, and 12 KiB for MMD files in TH02… which means that the hardcoded sizes in snd_load() are completely wrong, no matter how you look at them. :onricdennat: Consequently, this read syscall will overflow PMD's or MMD's song or sound effect buffer if the given file is larger than the respective buffer size.
Now, ZUN could have simply hardcoded the sizes from GAME.BAT instead, and it would have been fine. As it also turns out though, PMD has an API function (AH=22h) to retrieve the actual buffer sizes, provided for exactly that purpose. There is little excuse not to use it, as it also gives you PMD's default sizes if you don't specify any yourself.
(Unless your build process enumerates all PMD files that are part of the game, and bakes the largest size into both snd_load() and GAME.BAT. That would even work with MMD, which doesn't have an equivalent for AH=22h.)

What'd be the consequence of loading a larger file then? Well, since we don't get a full segment, let's look at the theoretical limit first.
PMD prefers to keep both its driver code and the data buffers in a single memory segment. As a result, the limit for the combined size of the song, instrument, and sound effect buffer is determined by the amount of code in the driver itself. In PMD86 version 4.8o (bundled with TH04 and TH05) for example, the remaining size for these buffers is exactly 45,555 bytes. Being an actually good programmer who doesn't blindly trust user input, KAJA thankfully validates the sizes given via the /M, /V, and /E command-line options before letting the driver reside in memory, and shuts down with an error message if they exceed 40 KiB. Would have been even better if he calculated the exact size – even in the current PMD version 4.8s from January 2020, it's still a hardcoded value (see line 8581).
Either way: If the file is larger than this maximum, the concrete effect is down to the INT 21h, AH=3Fh implementation in the underlying DOS version. DOS 3.3 treats the destination address as linear and reads past the end of the segment, DOS 5.0 and DOSBox-X truncate the number of bytes to not exceed the remaining space in the segment, and maybe there's even a DOS that wraps around and ends up overwriting the PMD driver code. In any case: You will overwrite what's after the driver in memory – typically, the game .EXE and its master.lib functions.

It almost feels like a happy accident that this doesn't cause issues in the original games. The largest PMD file in any of the 4 games, the -86 version of 幽夢 ~ Inanimate Dream, takes up 8,099 bytes, just under the 8,192 byte limit for BGM. For modders, I'd really recommend implementing this properly, with PMD's AH=22h function and error handling, once position independence has been reached.

Whew, didn't think I'd be doing more research into KAJA's drivers during regular ReC98 development! That's probably been the final time though, as all involved functions are now decompiled, and I'm unlikely to iterate over them again.


And that's it! Repaid the biggest chunk of technical debt, time for some actual progress again. Next up: Reopening the store tomorrow, and waiting for new priorities. If we got nothing by Sunday, I'm going to put the pending [Anonymous] pushes towards some work on the website.