And of course, TH05 ruins the consistency once again. Sure, the added
file error handling is nice, but we also have changes in the playful
messages (lol), and now need a third distinct optimization barrier
(🤦)… But as it turns out, inlined calls to empty functions work as
well. They also seem closer to what ZUN might have actually written
there, given that their function body could have been removed by the
preprocessor, similar to the logging functions in the Windows Touhou
games. (With the difference that the latter infamously *aren't*
inlined…)
Part of P0077, funded by Splashman and -Tom-.
Huh, C++ wants its `char`s to be unsigned in order to *not* sign-extend
them to 16 bits for comparison against ASCII literals?!
Anyway, that completes TH03's ZUN.COM, with bascially no new C code.
Part of P0077, funded by Splashman and -Tom-.
Which was actually found out by @m1yur1 last year, who thankfully
tweeted this in reference to ReC98:
https://twitter.com/m1yur1/status/1018855232371998720
Thanks a lot! But what makes this more than a piece of trivia is the
fact that the StormySpace release actually *was* bundled with
documentation. Shoutout to the Neo Kobe PC-98 collection for preserving
the original release! This should now greatly simplify any RE efforts
related to TH03's INT 42h calls. (Not *trivialize*, because there's
still all this EGC hardware to be understood…)
And sure, you *were* allowed to use this driver in your own game, but
replacing the copyright with your own isn't exactly the nicest thing to
do… That now makes three library programmers that ZUN didn't credit.
Makes me wonder what makes M. Kajihara so special. Probably the fact
that Touhou has always been about the music for ZUN, first and
foremost.
Part of P0056, funded by rosenrose and [Anonymous].
This, hands down, has been the single worst stretch of decompilation so far.
Three extremely difficult functions that each still required inline assembly.
And no, this didn't even work out with any of the optimization features in
Borland C++ that aren't included in Turbo C++.
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.
So yeah, that'll be our build environment - just plain batch files calling the
Borland command-line assembler, linker, and eventually C compiler. These are
the exact tools that ZUN used as well. There certainly are other assemblers,
compilers and linkers that could compile this code into 16-bit DOS
executables; Open Watcom is the only free one I know, and the master.lib
manual also mentions C compilers by Microsoft and Symantec. However, I favor
having one clear build path for a single toolchain that will, with the correct
command-line switches for each game, create builds that are bit-perfect to
ZUN's original ones over the possibility of cross-platform builds and the
maintenance nightmare they add.
So, Borland-only it is.
(Also, no Makefile, due to our messy build setup. I think I still prefer this
solution though, as we can have these really nice error messages that double
as build instructions without any dependencies on installed software.)
nmlgc