Including the confirmation that both games have an 8-frame deathbomb
window.
The placement of the variables is all over the place though, what the
hell?
Part of P0034, funded by zorg.
Yes, if you collect more than 255 point items in one TH04 stage, the
counter will overflow to 0.
It's a 16-bit word in both TH02 and TH05.
Part of P0034, funded by zorg.
They are supposed to lag behind the player's movement by one frame, and
therefore have to be tracked separately.
I would have also included TH02, if it weren't for the weird sprite
indirection system (not storing X and Y positions directly in the
structure, but taking them from a buffer, with their addresses
always changing, WTF?!) that absolutely needs separate attention.
Part of P0034, funded by zorg.
So it's *_put(), inherited from master.lib, for everything just writing
to text RAM, and *_render() for everything more involved? But what
about master.lib's own graphics RAM functions like super_put()? Need to
fix that inconsistency some day.
Once again no decompilation, because…
Part of P0033, funded by zorg.
The TH02 version is a piece of cake…
… but TH04 starts turning it into this un-decompilable piece of
unnecessarily micro-optimized ZUN code. Couldn't have chosen anything
better for the first separate ASM translation unit.
Aside from now having to convert names of exported *variables* to
uppercase for visibility in ASM translation units, the most notable
lesson in this was the one about avoiding fixup overflows. From the
Borland C++ Version 4.0 User's Guide:
"In an assembly language program, a fixup overflow frequently
occurs if you have declared an external variable within a
segment definition, but this variable actually exists in a
different segment."
Can't be restated often enough.
Completes P0032, funded by zorg.
Rule of thumb going forward: Everything that emits data is .asm,
everything that doesn't is .inc.
(Let's hope that th01_reiiden_2.inc won't exist for that much longer!)
Part of P0032, funded by zorg.
So yes, we *can* technically decompile from anywhere, by splitting the
segment after the function we want, then .SEQuentially GROUPing the two
segments back together into one virtual segment matching the original
one. This gives us one more point where we can slot in new compilation
units that emit their code into the same segment, in the order given on
the link command line.
*But* since all ASM in ReC98 heavily relies on being assembled in MASM
mode, we then start to suffer from MASM's group addressing quirk,
described in the "Accessing data in a segment belonging to a group"
section in the Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide.
Which then forces us to manually prefix every single function call
• from inside the group
• to anywhere else within the newly created segment
with the group name. It's stupidly boring busywork, because of all the
function calls you *mustn't* prefix. Special tooling might make this
easier, but I don't have it, and I'm not getting crowdfunded for it.
And while this is faster than porting the entire codebase to Ideal
mode, I'll only do this on rare occasions.
Like the upcoming, particularly awful piece of reverse-engineering.
Completes P0031, funded by zorg.
"Yeah, let's do this real quick, how can this possibly be hard, it's
just MOVs and a few function calls"…
…except that these MOVs access quite a lot of data, which we now all
have to declare in the C world, hooray.
Once it came to midbosses and bosses, I just turned them into C structs
after all. Despite what I said in 260edd8… after all, the ASM world
doesn't care about the representation in the C world, so they don't
necessarily have to be the same.
Since these structs can't contain everything related to midbosses and
bosses (really, why did all those variables have to be spread out like
this, ZUN?), it also made for a nice occasion to continue the "stuff"
naming scheme, describing "an obviously incomplete collection of
variables related to a thing", first seen in 160d4eb.
Also, PROCDESC apparently is the only syntactically correct option to
declare an extern near proc?
Also, that `boss_phase_timed_out` variable only needs to be here
already because TCC enforces word alignment for the .data segment…
yeah, it's technically not related to this commit, but why waste time
working around it if we can just include that one variable.
Completes P0030, funded by zorg.
I've had the idea to hide this implementation detail and improve code
readability for some time now, but it obviously must still all inline,
to be indistinguishable from a direct assignment of the correct value…
… which, amazingly, it does! Even the static_cast from float to int.
The latter allows us to exclusively implement this for float, since we
do have to express the occasional value smaller than 16.
Who needs macros anyway. Yay, C++ in TH04 and TH05 after all!
Part of P0030, funded by zorg.
No leading underscore for functions with Pascal calling convention, but
we do have one for all variables, because it's not worth it to put
keywords in front of everything for no reason.
Seemed to have forgotten this rule in 2017?
Part of P0030, funded by zorg.
Going with the classic pointer-in-typedef approach here, because the
syntax you'd otherwise have to use is terribly inconsistent. It'd be
farfunc_t *near near_ptr_to_far_func;
but
nearfunc_t near *near_ptr_to_near_func;
And that'd hopefully be the last change to ReC98.h for a long time!
Those glacial compile times if every .c file is affected… Really
stands out if your build system is otherwise perfect.
Part of P0030, funded by zorg.
Slightly different in TH04 and TH05, and the TH05 version will be
decompiled in the next push… yeah, not going to worry all too much
about this one right now.
Part of P0029, funded by zorg.
These are used from quite a few places, so it seems best to just name
them after the rect on the playfield they leave out, which is then
typically where the background picture goes.
…*except* that in doing this, we quickly run up against the symbol
length limit of 32 characters. TASM can expand it via the /mv option,
but TCC only lets you *reduce* it to even less. (Why?)
So, my initial idea of `playfield_fill_around_(x)_(y)_(w)_(h)` wouldn't
have worked. But those coordinates are kinda important, I'd say…
Well then, let's just go with `fillm` instead of `fill_around` then.
"Fill with mask at the given coordinates"… yeah, that would work.
Part of P0029, funded by zorg.
… yeah, I don't really like these ambiguous "mode" and "mode change"
variable names either, but what's the alternative? Something something
"sub-phase", to distinguish them from regular phases? Feels way too
early to decide on something more specific. And pretty much nothing I
could come up with right now would have made their inconsistent use any
clearer.
But I need to decide on *something* before moving on, so… eh, let's
just go with what uth05win chose.
Also, yeah, dealing with those 0xFE and 0xFD boss_phase constants some
other time 😛
Also, today in "Weird TASM crashes": Trailing commas at the end of
`public` lines…
Completes P0028, funded by zorg.
Turning these into a struct will be very painful with all the
collisions. Not going to do that until we decompiled every single
reference to those.
Part of P0028, funded by zorg.
As in, "HiScore Entry!!", "Extend!!", "Full PowerUp!!", etc.
Class CFloatingText in uth05win… but I decided against naming it like
that because of some stage/BGM title-related variables in the middle.
Funded by -Tom-.
Many thanks to http://bytepointer.com/tasm/index.htm for providing a
better searchable resource for TASM's default `LEA imm16` → `MOV imm16`
optimization, which we initially had to hack around here.
Funded by -Tom-.
In which ZUN uses little-endian BCD as the exclusive internal storage
for both the current and the high score. Which are then updated using,
once again, ridiculously micro-optimized ASM code that uses the
venerable x86 BCD instructions.
Funded by -Tom-.
So apparently, this way of distorting a circle into an ellipse (?) by
adding a value to the angle for one of the two coordinates isn't
actually widely known in math and doesn't have a name. Fair enough.
Funded by -Tom-.
Sure, I like me some global variables too. If you have to temporarily
replace them for a single function call though, it's pretty much the
textbook example of where *not* to use them.
Funded by -Tom-.
Yup, nothing interesting in here.
Except for maybe the confirmation that LS00.BB is used for the curved
bullets used by Shinki and EX-Alice?
Funded by -Tom-.
nmlgc