We've got to move all of Konngara's escape sequences to C land right
now, to get them out of the way of the filenames, so we might as well
look at all of them, in the entire binary.
But, uh… "graph mode"? That one is severely underdocumented, seemingly
even in Japanese. Turns out that it's a way to disable Shift-JIS
decoding, which makes it possible to access the half-width glyphs in
the PC-98 font ROM at the 0x81-0x9F and 0xE0-0xFF codepoints.
(In regular "kanji mode", these are interpreted as Shift-JIS lead
bytes.)
So, I did a deep dive into NEC's IO.SYS to hunt down all places where
this distinction has an effect, and then implemented it into DOSBox-X,
which was still missing everything related to it:
https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x/pull/2547
If P0140 looks a bit empty as a result, that's why – most of the
feature work went into DOSBox-X, not ReC98. That's the beauty of
"anything" pushes. :tannedcirno:
So, after switching to graph mode, TH01 does… one of the slowest
possible memset()s over all of text RAM (one printf(" ") call for every
single one of its 80×25 half-width cells), before switching back to
kanji mode. What a waste of RE time…? Oh well, at least we've now got
plenty of documentation to prove to future port authors that these
weird escape sequences *actually* do nothing.
Completes P0140, funded by [Anonymous].
Functions with 12 parameters are hard to describe, y'know. Looking
forward to decompiling these giant expressions for the actual
boss↔orb collision parameter passed to this function…
Oh well, at least we're now totally ready for some boss code next
year. 😌
Completes P0131, funded by Yanga.
And we're right back to things not being nice. Because yeah, why
shouldn't these three distinct rendering functions be part of a single
function, selected by magic numbers?
Or why shouldn't the 16×16 wrapper around a 32×32 set of graphics
functions be used to handle backgrounds for 16×8 sprites, resulting in
needlessly complex parameter calculations that lead to sloppy code?
Part of P0131, funded by Yanga.
And with that, TH01 is pushed over the 50% completion mark! 🎉
This time, it's only YuugenMagan who gets no own copy. Giant RE% gains
from all these calls, but let's hope I don't regret already decompiling
this one for all bosses. It's not quite at the beginning of SinGyoku's,
Mima's, and Elis' code segment, after all…
Part of P0130, funded by Yanga.
nmlgc