Yet another set of questionable C reimplementations of master.lib functions to
waste my time. And half of them, including z_text_(v)putsa, aren't even called
anywhere.
This function raises one of those essential questions about the eventual ports
we'd like to do. I'll explain everything more thoroughly here, since people
who might complain about the ports not being faithful enough need to
understand this.
----
The original plan was aim for "100% frame-perfect" ports and advertise them as
such. However, the PC-98 is not a console with fixed specs. As the name
implies, it's a computer architecture, and a plethora of different, more and
more powerful PC-98 models were released during its lifespan. Even if we only
consider the subset of products that fulfills the minimum requirements to run
the PC-98 Touhou games, that's still a sizable number of systems.
Therefore, the only true definition of a *frame* can be "everything that is
drawn between two Vsync wait calls". Such a *frame* may contain certain
expensive function calls, and certain systems may run these functions slower
than the developer expected, thus effectively leading to more *frames* than
the developer explicitly specified.
This is one of those functions.
Here, we have a scaling function that appears to be written deliberately to
run very slow, which ends up creating the rolling effect you see in the route
selection and the high score and continue screens of TH01. However, that
doesn't change the fact that the function is still CPU-bound, and neither
waits for Vsync nor is iteratively called by something that does. The faster
your CPU, the faster the rolling effect gets… until ultimately, it's faster
than one frame and therefore vanishes altogether. Mind you, this is true on
both emulators and real hardware. The final PC-98 model, the Ra43, had a CPU
clocked at 433 Mhz, and it may have even been instant there.
If you use more optimized algorithm, it also runs faster on the same CPU (I
tried this, and it worked beautifully)… you get the idea.
Still, it may very well be that this algorithm was not a deliberate choice and
simply resulted from a lack of experience, especially since this was ZUN's
first game.
That leaves us with two approaches to porting functions like these:
1) Look at the recommended system requirements ZUN specified, configure the
PC-98 emulator accordingly, measure how much of the work is done in each
frame, then rewrite the function to be bound to that specific frame rate…
2) …or just continue using a CPU-bound algorithm, which will pretty much
complete instantly on any modern system.
I'd argue that 2) is actually the more "faithful" approach. It will run faster
than the typical clock speeds people emulate the games at, and maybe draw a
bit of criticism because of that, but it seems a lot more rational than the
approximation provided by 1). Not to mention that it's undeniably easier to
implement, and hey, a faster game feels a lot better than a slower one, right?
… Oh well, maybe we'll still encounter some kind of CPU-bound animation that
is so essential to the experience that we do want to lock it to a certain
frame rate…
The same function appears unused in TH02's MAINE.EXE. Separate commit because
this was painful enough and we can link the C version into FUUIN.EXE right
now.
Well, duh, of course, we *can* do this in order to allow decompilation to be
started at the end (not the beginning) of any segment. In fact, if we hadn't
done this, we would have had to start by moving _TEXT out to libraries....
This took long enough, so we're not covering the COM files right now. Like, I
can't even tell how you're supposed to work around the forced word alignment
for the _TEXT segment. Guess we'll just have to decompile all of these in one
go, just like we did with ZUNSOFT.COM.
Also, it really seems as if we're merely trading one ugly workaround for
another in our quest for identical binaries.
I've looked at every openly available piece of PC-98 documentation, and there
don't seem to be any official names for the individual planes. The closest
thing I could find was the description at
http://island.geocities.jp/cklouch/column/pc98bas/pc98disphw2.htm
explaining that they represent the blue, red, green, and brightness component
when using the default PC-98 palette. However, these planes correspond to
nothing else but the 4 individual bits of the final index into the color
palette, and you can assign any color to every single palette slot. Therefore,
it's merely a convention that your own palettes don't have to follow (and in
Touhou, they don't).
Nevertheless, there doesn't seem to be an alternative, and the Neko Project II
source code uses the same B/R/G/E convention, so I'll go with that as well.
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.
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?
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.
> randomly google "PC-98 ライブラリ"
> 3rd hit: http://www.vector.co.jp/soft/dos/prog/se037608.html
> Oh look, it's the mystery code at the beginning of the TH01 executables!
This library also has dedicated support for transparency, which is used in the
Konngara fight (BOSS8_D*.GRP) and which we couldn't edit during the
development of the static English patches.
But of course, ZUN just had to change the format magic in order to make it
seem unique.
I guess this marks the final demystification of how segment declarations work
and how they are compiled. However, it only really makes sense for anything
outside the TEXT segment, like these floating-point functions. As long as the
slices aren't immediately next to each other, it would still be annoying to
have segment declarations inside of them, since we'd have to copy-paste these
declarations around every INCLUDE directive...
Finally - and there was indeed no way around switching to JWlink, as ALINK
v1.6 refuses to link the TH01 executables with a nondescript "Undefined base
seg" message once nec_fpinit.asm is included.
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...
nmlgc