Yup. Even if funding improved again, vibecoders *will* set the standard for QoL features. So this can only go two ways: • Ignore them → community splits along a silly pro- vs. anti-AI divide • Work with them → ReC98 degenerates into playing catch-up Both are undesirable. bsky.app/profile/gens...

ReC98 will end after the next delivery. I don't have it in me to compete with vibecoders, especially when y'all cheer them on for instantly delivering what you've wanted all along. And if you aren't cheering yet, you soon will; they're only getting better and more numerous.

Many thanks to this month's subscribers! RL consumed lots of time this month. Regaining focus has been tough with the final steps being as difficult as ever. Wondering how ReC98 can possibly survive after all the forks (many of them vibe-coded) I've seen in this month alone.

140-175 ms for simulating the full 7 minutes of Shuusou Gyoku's Extra Stage on the command line. On an 8-year-old Core i5. Single-threaded. With MSVC's horrid codegen and several untapped optimization opportunities. And that's the heaviest case. Regular stages are much faster.

Finally, Shuusou Gyoku's game logic, isolated in a reusable, freestanding DLL. No global state. No Win32 API dependencies besides GetProcessHeap(), HeapAlloc(), and HeapFree(). No instructions newer than i586. Still simulates blazingly fast. (Have fun guessing how fast exactly!)

(Yes, I've heard the news and will go right back to work! Just let me finish this really cool thing for Shuusou Gyoku I've been working on for the past few months, and then I'm going to spend an extended amount of time with the main business. OK?)

sizeof(C_SSG) is 403,280 bytes on 32-bit systems, and 405,664 bytes on 64-bit systems.

Many thanks to this month's subscribers! The splitting process has escalated to not only cover Shuusou Gyoku's logic, but also my SDL-based engine, laying the groundwork for future modern-system builds. Only missing the CLI now, and of course the blog post. Mid-June, maybe?

Full list of seemingly decorative aspects in Shuusou Gyoku that are actually game logic and must always be simulated because they draw from and advance the single global RNG: • The hearts shown when losing a life • The sparks shown when grazing bullets or hitting an enemy

Point items in Shuusou Gyoku will award negative points if you collect them below the bottom edge of the playfield during the respawn animation. And nobody noticed because 1) the game's 5×7-digit font doesn't have a - sign, and 2) the total score can't decrease, only increase.

Hilarious Shuusou Gyoku pbg quirk dropping later today

What's this? A MinGW fork with GCC 15 that targets Windows 98? Small package, no bullshit? Tested and working fine for trivial programs? github.com/redpanda-cpp... Removing the KernelEx and SSE instruction requirements from Shuusou Gyoku's backport has just become a lot cheaper.

Many thanks to this month's subscribers! Very slow month, but I still managed to move enough code to push the headless Shuusou Gyoku subproject to over 100 commits. Very close to solving the hardest issues while juggling Windows 9x and FFI use cases. 4 pushes for sure, though.

Debug builds of Shuusou Gyoku had a menu option that turns off collision detection. Past tense because this forks gameplay, desyncs replays recorded with the opposite value, and is therefore very bad. I'll replace it with the alternative approach of just setting lives to 255.

Many thanks to this month's subscribers! Untangling Shuusou Gyoku's game logic into a library isn't the worst thing in the world, but still nontrivial. Will definitely end up closer to 2 pushes than to 1. Probably doing a bit of TH02 RE after that, given its recent funding.

github.com/nmlgc/rec98.... [💰] Confirm T0425 Ember2528 is also back with a smaller €50 subscription towards the better replay format for Shuusou Gyoku, followed by the previous long-term TH03 decompilation and porting roadmap! Thank you very much.

github.com/nmlgc/rec98.... [💰] Confirm T0424 Another €25 from iruleatgames towards reverse-engineering TH02 or getting it more position-independent, rounding up Yanga's earlier TH02 contributions to a full push. Thank you!

github.com/nmlgc/rec98.... [💰] Confirm T0423 €200 from iruleatgames towards reverse-engineering TH02, or getting it more position-independent! Thank you so much.

github.com/nmlgc/rec98.... [💰] Confirm T0422 €43.75 from Arandui towards Shuusou Gyoku's long overdue better replay feature, rounding us up to a full 3 pushes. Thank you very much!

🚚 TH03's enemy, fireball, explosion, chaining, and combo systems have been fully decompiled and researched! Hardest piece of game logic in all of PC-98 Touhou, by far. 1% of overall code, 6% of TH03 itself. 🐞 1 bug 💣 5 landmines 🎺 8 quirks 🪨 61 pieces of bloat

TH03 is about to get thoroughly analyzed and documented down to its core. ≥13,100 words. Heaviest blog post by HTML size so far. 2.36× more PC-98 Touhou reverse-engineering than the previously biggest RE post. Out in a few hours.

Almost done writing! Still need to spend some more coding time on the blog UX though, so that you can seamlessly switch between two layers of tabs and the 30 hitbox videos underneath. (Word count already above 10,000, by the way.)

Many thanks to this month's subscribers! Life priorities have shifted and I'll likely be even slower in the foreseeable future. Then again, what else is left in PC-98 Touhou that's as complex as TH03's enemies, fireballs, and explosions? Blog post should be out next week.

Bluesky confirmed for having the worst video processing pipeline in the entire social media landscape. Reducing *frame rates* is disgusting at a level that even Twitter wouldn't step down to.

Alright, TH03 formation code! I'm going to post all 18 scripts over the next few days. Structure/logic by ZUN, formation names by the gameplay community, function/parameter names by me, order as in ENEDAT.DAT. Videos recorded on Lunatic, where enemy speed equals script durations.

Imagine forking Nitter and running your own instance just to scrape your own alt text and polls because Twitter doesn't include either of them in its data archive. Oh well, Fediverse migration is complete. Please follow @[email protected] for the highest-quality images and videos.

Many thanks to this month's subscribers! TH03's enemy, fireball, and explosion code is in the very final stage of QA, but the blog post will still take a while. Life's been very slow lately. There'll be another exciting series of posts before then, though!

> Stumble over another MIDI sequencer that automatically decodes GS SysEx > OTAMA98 by MISO > Still works on Windows 11 > No bloat, no lengthy "analysis" phase, no hardware dongles, no bullshit > Even does XG! Though not as detailed… > …and GS support stops at SC-88, no Pro 😩

And yes, the extend glitch happens for the same reason once your score is ≥20 million and if that one segment lies at 0x3E?? (P1) or 0x2E?? (P2). And 0x2EF4 is exactly where the 2021 Ultimate Collection happens to place that segment if you play on anything other than DOSBox-X.

Found the cause of TH03's score reduction glitch! youtu.be/JltuH7nAO4Y?... It occurs on certain PC-98 setups if you destroy a fireball with anything that isn't an explosion on a frame where you previously got a VSync/PMD interrupt within a specific window of CPU instructions.

github.com/nmlgc/rec98.... [💰] Confirm T0414 Ember2528 is still with us, and once again bought all remaining capacity from the store! €154 towards his current long-term plan of Shuusou Gyoku replays followed by TH03 decompilation and porting. Thank you so much!

Many thanks to this month's subscribers! (As in, December's.) The current plan: 1) Lots of TH03 gameplay code (≥8.65% of MAIN.EXE) 2) Headless Shuusou Gyoku for automated replay validation 3) Probably a bit of TH02? Unless we've got clearer funding for something else by then.

🚚 Delivered a complete decompilation of and research into TH03's bullet system! A minor iteration on TH02's rather decent system, but definitely the point where bullet systems in PC-98 Touhou took a turn for the worse. 🐞 1 bug 💣 1 landmine 🎺 4 quirks 🪨 33 pieces of bloat

What was this delay. In exchange, I've got an unexpectedly long >6,500-word blog post about TH03's bullet system and a certain other issue, coming your way very soon. Fingers crossed I'll get it out while it's still 2025 in UTC.

TH03 Chiyuri has a very rare quirk where 1 or 2 bullets are randomly missing from the 48-ring pattern in her Level 1 or 2 Boss Attack if she launches it multiple times in a row. Explaining the cause certainly contributed to the massive delay of the upcoming blog post…

How to disqualify yourself for self-hosted archival storage: • Effectively prevent backdating by prioritizing crawl date in the AppView everyone uses • Importer insists on JPEG, and ignores tweets if you try PNG 🤮 Onto the Fediverse, then. activitypub.nmlgc.net/@rec98

The border between the two playfields in TH03 is not just visual, but an actual part of the simulated game world. Every transferred pellet or fireball physically travels through these 32 pixels before it appears on the other playfield.

Many thanks to this month's subscribers! Once again, the scope has expanded to include TH03's bullet and combo systems. Bullets are only missing one detail and will get a dedicated blogpost very soon. We're going to see at least 5 pushes and 10% more RE for MAIN.EXE in December.

TH03 decompilation will progress *so quickly* once I get the basic gameplay systems done. ZUN really did implement most of the character-specific systems by copy-pasting the same code 9 times with minor variations. That means ~3× the decompilation speed of TH01 at its fastest.

Many thanks to this month's subscribers! The next delivery will fully cover TH03's enemy, fireball, and explosion systems. No netplay this year though, Shuusou Gyoku replays have shaped up to be too complicated. (It might also make sense to have TH03 replays before netplay.)

While I'm working on TH03, let's design the replay format I'll use for Shuusou Gyoku and PC-98 Touhou! If there's anything you've ever wanted to see in a replay format, now's your chance to influence the design and feature set. github.com/nmlgc/ssg/is...

A landmark Neko Project 21/W release happened yesterday! SimK has finally murdered the horrible abomination that was the secondary set of ASCII glyphs in Neko Project's old auto-generated replacement for the PC-98 ROM font. twitter.com/simk98l/stat...

🚚 Delivered the planned Shuusou Gyoku maintenance release. SDL 3 is now a hard dependency (even on Windows 98!), the SDL 2 code path is gone, and the Linux version now compiles with GCC ≥15. No new features, but a few bugfixes and speedups surrounding screenshots and fonts.

Many thanks to this month's subscribers! The current plan for the rest of the year: 1) Shuusou Gyoku maintenance (will quickly free up some budget) 2) TH03 RE 3) Better replays for Shuusou Gyoku 4) TH03 netplay (would be nice to get it done by the end of the year)

🚚 Released the first version of the TH03 Anniversary Edition together with the first debloated builds of all five games! Primarily reduces lag in menus and cutscenes as a first step towards portability, but also comes with a single new feature. Download: github.com/nmlgc/ReC98/...

The end is near! >9,800 words, and probably the last big blog post for this year. I wanna code again! Out within the next few hours…

$ git diff --stat debloated~193 debloated […] 259 files changed, 4145 insertions(+), 8099 deletions(-) ~4,000 lines of ad-hoc PC-98-native graphics code, bloat, landmines, bloat- and landmine-documenting comments, and binary-specific inconsistencies removed from game code 🎉

🚚 Part 3 is out, bringing five disconnected and small decompilations and actually shifting the percentages on the front page for a change! 🐞 5 bugs 💣 3 landmines 🎺 2 quirks 🪨 24 pieces of bloat

> Next post is about five small and disconnected RE tasks > Try to write five short paragraphs with bullet points in the style of touhou-memories > Still end up with over 2,000 words Coming to you within the next few hours…

Part 2 of my 4-part 2025 PC-98 Touhou portability series is out! This one is also our second deep dive into PC-98 blitting performance with two new benchmarks, and also looks at the two libraries that ZUN used to load PI images. Not a lot of Touhou-specific content in this one.