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.)
So that's the - admittedly rather weird - solution to the problem that has
been plaguing this project ever since the beginning of the reduction step.
Without any 32-bit dummy segments in the compiled object files, more linkers
will be able to build this project, one of them being JWlink
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/jwlink/).
Still can't rename dseg to _DATA though, as TASM stupidly refuses to accept
any ALIGN directives above a segment's alignment attribute value. TH01's
floating-point data slices already require larger alignments, and we're very
likely to have even more of those in the future.
Also, we're finally defining the Borland C++ model symbols directly in the
code, rather than in my unpublished build batch files. :)
Mostly moving spurious null bytes, which are actually supposed to denote
alignment, into their associated slices, but also prettying up some of the
very first slices.
Well, we have to start reducing this mess somewhere. The actual reduced
initialization code I've been preparing still fails to compile, and the data
is shared with a number of other components anyway, so...
Which challenges a lot about what we thought to know about Amusement Makers'
modifications to master.lib, due to the fact that TH02 contains the modified
version of this function, but the original of draw_trapezoid...
And I haven't even begun to research how this removal of conditional branches
could have a positive effect on the game, especially since it's only called
before exiting anyway.
Well, great. Why did the trapezoid variables have to be included in this
object file? 10 of the executables don't use them, and there's no way to
locate that one needle in the haystack of uninitialized data now.
Wow. I just had to miss smem_release() once to find myself with a total of 4
missed functions (+ smem_wget(), bfnt_entry_pat() and
bfnt_extend_header_analysis()) a day later. Blasted tiny model.
Heh, all the references to this function are still expressed in db opcode
form, because IDA couldn't process the self-modifying code in
bfnt_entry_pat(). That's almost practical in our case!