AKA "the source of the infamous STOP message".
This is pretty much irreducible assembly code, so it may very well be that we
don't even touch this file ever again, but at least it completes our build.
This executable is embedded into all 4 versions of ZUN.COM. It was written by
KAJA, not ZUN, so we don't care about anything in there - not that it would
matter for porting anyway. We only need that binary to be able to create
bit-perfect rebuilds of ZUN.COM in the future.
Once again, TH05 demonstrates that it's not a mere copy of TH04 by introducing
another set of code changes. This time, the configuration structure is
initialized with the default values in this executable, not in OP.EXE.
The code doesn't give away the original filename in this game, so I'll follow
the pattern of naming these after the ID of the game's resident configuration
structure.
TH03 doesn't prepare the initial high score list (instead leaving that to
MAINL.EXE), and the config file creation is identical to the one in TH02.
2 functions, surrounded by 88.8% of library code. Way to go.
From what I can tell, this program does exactly three things:
• preparing the initial high score list
• writing default settings to HUUMA.CFG
• and allocating the game's resident configuration structure and writing its
segment address to bytes 6-7 of HUUMA.CFG
All that results in a COM file of 6.84 KiB, 83% of which is library code.
That's why C was once seen as a bloated high-level language as well.
Yep, we'll be needing some of those smaller executables embedded into ZUN.COM
after all in order to fully understand what's going on with things like that
persistent configuration structure used in each game, for example.
For now, I'll be keeping every one of these executables separately, for a
number of reasons:
• I can't get IDA to segment the code in a way that would reconstruct the
layout of the individual executables, since it unfortunately requires
segments to be aligned on paragraph boundaries...
• This, in turn, means that IDA can't apply FLIRT signatures, making
identification of the Borland C++ functions a bit harder. Probably not that
big of a deal at this point anymore, but still.
• There are bound to be multiple copies of Borland C++ and master.lib
functions in these. We are still using the "slice model", meaning that *all*
functions in an executable are part of the same namespace. Creating copies of
some source files just to allow a second instance of that function is not
too pretty.
• Lastly, we don't actually need to reproduce all executables. For example,
TH02's version of ZUNSOFT.COM is bit-identical to TH01's.
Hence, adding a separate build step to wrap these smaller executables back
into a bit-perfect version of ZUN.COM at a later point is a much better
option. (And it would be even better if we could track down the program used
to wrap those in the first place!)
Note how it's only one *mode* in TH02/TH03, but two *modes* in TH04/TH05,
since you can't select between FM and Beep sound effect modes in TH02/TH03 (or
even disable sounds altogether). Might be a bit confusing, but it seemed
appropriate enough to distinguish the two functions.
Well, the naming.
Even though only TH02 actually uses MIDI (and thus, the MMD driver), every
game since then contains interrupt instructions for both functions. We could
just name it "pmd", since it seems like that's what came first - the AH
numbers of the 6 functions that make up MMD's interrupt API are identical to
those of the equivalent functions in PMD, even including gaps in the numbering
for PMD functions that don't have an equivalent in MIDI. However, except for
the FM sound effect handling and the key display in TH05's Music Room, these 6
functions are all the games actually use. Also, we already distinguish between
PMD and MMD in the driver check functions, and it might be confusing to only
imply PMD from now on?
So, "kaja" it is, collectively referring to the shared aspects of both
drivers.
Thanks to the LOCALS directive, we do need to break compatibility to TASM at
one point after all. This is the rest we can reasonably change to get at least
through JWasm's first pass without errors while maintaining compatibility to
TASM.
Includes:
* the OPTION syntax to switch in and out of floating-point emulation mode
* REP CMPSB → REPE CMPSB
* Hacks for two 80-byte short jumps
* lack of support for floating-point stupidity ♥
as well as other issues that I covered in previous commits and overlooked in
some files.
From the TASM manual:
"NEAR labels defined with the colon directive (:) are considered block-scoped
if they are located inside a procedure, and you've selected a language
interfacing convention with the MODEL statement. However, these symbols are
not truly block-scoped; they can't be defined as anything other than a near
label elsewhere in the program."
MASM's own local label syntax - declaring labels using @@ and then jumping to
the next and previous @@ using @F and @B - is obviously too limiting for any
longer function, and is not even supported by TASM unless we switch it to MASM
mode completely.
While this is indeed ugly, it only affected 16 files, which is way less than
what we would get in a TASM build without LOCALS. In comparison to having a
modern, cross-platform assembler, that really is a small price to pay.
Really, Borland? You considered it necessary to add directives for object-
oriented programming (in Assembly!) and convenience features like bitfield
records or PUSHSTATE/POPSTATE, yet you never came up with the actually
*helpful* idea of just adding a simple basic pointer data type that depends
on the current memory model's data size?
Like, something like DP... oh wait, that's already taken, as an alias for
DF, the 48-bit 80386 far pointer type.
And this, exactly, is the problem with assemblers. The language itself is
undefined beyond the instructions themselves, but it's obviously very
uncomfortable to program anything with just that, so your assembler needs to
add custom directives on top of that, and of course everyone has different
ideas of the features and use cases that should (and should not) be covered by
syntax. (I'm looking especially at you, NASM.)
And then one of those developers sells their compiler division to a different
company, which then subsequently discontinues all products without ever
releasing the source code, trapping their nice extensions in a single
executable for a single platform that is not even legally available anymore.
tl;dr: http://xkcd.com/927/
For 32-bit immediate values, PUSH by itself is enough. For everything else,
PUSHD works in both TASM and JWasm.
Also, could it be...? Could we actually move to JWasm without breaking the
build in TASM at all?
... and then I end up copying modified versions into the individual game
subdirectories after all, because the changes between games were simply too
drastic. (That's also why I'm counting pfopen() itself twice.)
Only one slice left now, and then we're done with reduction!
Yup, packfiles finally proved that we really have a different set of changes
to master.lib in every game. Also, there are bound to be more of these game-
specific small changes to otherwise identical code in ZUN's own code.
And hey, no need to define that value in the build scripts anymore.
(I've also considered just copying modified versions into the individual game
subdirectories, but it's not too nice to expect people to diff them in order
to actually understand why these copies exist and where the changes actually
are.)
> introduce a new macro to halve the lines of a far function pointer
assignment, hoping that this commit will end up deleting more lines than it
adds, because TH03 has lots of those
> oh wait, these games mainly use near function pointers
> unearth even more new functions in the process
Seriously, how many more functions are still hidden in this codebase? And all
that just because IDA was not smart enough to begin with.
(Damn, the other commit prepared for today is not getting done, why does IDA
have to be so terrible...!)
Anyway, here's a small consistency edit instead.
nmlgc