Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

Summary blog post: rec98.nmlgc.net/blog/2025-12...

Ending 2025 with:
• Special attention given to Mima, Kana, and Chiyuri
• Insufficient caps for certain bullets
• The most uninteresting PC-98 performance question so far

Funded by [Anonymous] and Ember2528.

Screenshot of a video of TH03 Mima modded into firing a 64-ring of bullets that use the trail sprite feature of the game's bullet system. Demonstrates how such a high number of bullets will cause trail sprite glitches even within individual ring groups. Taken from the ReC98 2025-12-31 blog post.

Screenshot of a video of ideo of TH03 Kana's one Boss Attack pattern whose bullets use the gravity feature of the game's bullet system, recorded on Easy on Boss Attack level 1. The caption reads: "One of the rare patterns that arguably looks prettier on Easy, where the slower bullet speeds leave more room for the gravity effect to accelerate the fall." Taken from the ReC98 2025-12-31 blog post.

Screenshot of TH03's pellet sprite sheet, with byte boundaries as red vertical lines and the bugged transfer sprites at bit offsets 6 and 14 highlighted in red. The caption reads: "You can see this bug all over the video above, for example in frame 97, 105, 107, 109, 111…" Taken from the ReC98 2025-12-31 blog post.

Screenshot of a visualization of blitting a doubly-preshifted 8×8 pellet (32 pixels wide) to horizontal pixel #8, demonstrating how doubly-preshifted sprites wastefully write the second 16-bit word in the optimal 56.25% of cases. The caption reads: "8 start positions within the first byte + 1 start position on the second byte = 9/16 = 56.25%. The 9th variant for ((x % 16) == 8) wouldn't be part of a regular singly-preshifted sprite sheet where the renderer blits the (x % 8)th = 0th variant. But it would definitely be worth adding if alignment does matter at all." Taken from the ReC98 2025-12-31 blog post.

January 1, 2026 at 3:00 AM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

🚚 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

Screenshot of the overview table of all 16×16 bullet sprites and their animations used by all 9 characters in TH03. The caption reads: "The SPRITE16 area of certain characters might contain other bullet-like sprites, but these are used by a different gameplay system than the one described in this post." Taken from the ReC98 2025-12-31 blog post.

Screenshot of a video demonstrating how transferred pellets in TH03 have to physically travel through the 32 pixels before they appear on the other playfield. Recorded by revealing the VRAM contents below the opaque black TRAM cells that hide these pixels in regular gameplay, and clearing these contents on every frame. Taken from the ReC98 2025-12-31 blog post.

Screenshot of two videos of TH03 Mima's and Chiyuri's one Boss Attack pattern whose bullets use the trail sprite feature of the game's bullet system, placed next to each other. Taken from the ReC98 2025-12-31 blog post.

Screenshot of a video of TH03 Chiyuri firing multiple instances of her one Boss Attack pattern whose bullets use the trail sprite feature of the game's bullet system on Boss Attack level 1. Demonstrates how the slower bullet speed on that level will cause glitches when Chiyuri spawns a new 48-ring before all bullets of the previous 48-ring were clipped. Taken from the ReC98 2025-12-31 blog post.

January 1, 2026 at 3:00 AM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

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.

1. A cursory look at character-specific attacks
2. TH03's bullet logic
• High-level overview
• Trail sprites
• Rings and other groups
• Transferred pellets
3. TH03's bullet renderer
• Pellets, and unresolved VRAM alignment questions
• Delay clouds, and the unfortunate lack of a SPRITE16 feature
4. Migrating away from Twitter
• Twitter's technical downfall (not clickbait)
• Trying a Bluesky PDS
• Trying Mastodon
• Deciding on GoToSocial as a Fediverse server

December 31, 2025 at 8:38 PM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

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…

December 31, 2025 at 4:16 PM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

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

Screenshot of a certain microblogging platform's insistence to prominently display the date it crawled a post from a PDS, demoting the PDS's actual post creation date to an "archived" date. This spams user timelines and makes it hard to navigate the post history, disqualifying said platform for self-hosted archival storage.

(Also, any ActivityPub server allows me to freely edit posts and ensure lossless quality for uploaded media.)

December 30, 2025 at 2:22 AM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

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.

December 9, 2025 at 3:47 AM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

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.

Active ReC98 subscriptions for November 2025:

• €300 from Ember2528 towards better replays for Shuusou Gyoku, followed by a long-term plan to first decompile TH03, adding replays, porting it to modern systems, and then implementing netplay (although we're also going for a more short-term option of having netplay on PC-98)
• €125 from [Anonymous] towards anything (including tooling)
• €35 from [Anonymous] towards TH03 RE
• €10 from Root towards porting SDL2 to Windows 98 to get Shuusou Gyoku running there again

November 30, 2025 at 4:09 PM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

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.)

Active ReC98 subscriptions for October 2025:

• €300 from Ember2528 towards better replays for Shuusou Gyoku, followed by a long-term plan to first decompile TH03, adding replays, porting it to modern systems, and then implementing netplay (although we're also going for a more short-term option of having netplay on PC-98)
• €125 from [Anonymous] towards anything (including tooling)
• €35 from [Anonymous] towards TH03 RE
• €10 from Root towards porting SDL2 to Windows 98 to get Shuusou Gyoku running there again

October 31, 2025 at 2:14 PM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

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...

Screenshot of my initial design notes for the upcoming replay format used in the ReC98 builds of Shuusou Gyoku and PC-98 Touhou. Taken from https://github.com/nmlgc/ssg/issues/36#issuecomment-3429282865.

October 21, 2025 at 8:03 PM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

You know, the one in the first image. From ver0.86 rev96β5 on, you'll get the way more accurate glyphs in the second image instead.

(The third image shows an authentic font ROM by NEC for comparison.)

Screenshot of TH05's Music Room, with its text rendered using the infamous horrible abomination that is the secondary set of ASCII glyphs in Neko Project's old auto-generated replacement for the PC-98 ROM font.

Screenshot of TH05's Music Room, with its text rendered using new auto-generated replacement for the PC-98 ROM font created by Neko Project 21/W ver0.86 rev96β5 on.

Screenshot of TH05's Music Room, with its text rendered using an authentic font ROM by NEC.

October 20, 2025 at 6:51 PM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

Summary blog post (>2,300 words): rec98.nmlgc.net/blog/2025-10...

Featuring:
• The most wholesome warning I've ever seen in a C compiler, courtesy of GCC
• Unexpectedly slow SDL code on Windows

Funded by Ember2528 and Root.

An exemplary code snippet that demonstrates a case where GCC's `-Wformat-overflow` warning precisely warns about a sprintf() buffer that's too short to contain a format string with certain statically known properties, together with two other cases where GCC can prove that the buffer is sufficiently large and thus doesn't warn. Taken from the ReC98 2025-10-19 blog post.

Durations of saving an already retrieved 640×480-pixel buffer using the fast .BMP writer implemented in the P0256 build of Shuusou Gyoku, as opposed to SDL's much slower .BMP writer. The fast writer comes in at way below 0.2 ms, while SDL's writer takes multiple *milliseconds* and even gets slower as the bit depth *decreases*. Taken from the ReC98 2025-10-19 blog post.

October 19, 2025 at 9:55 PM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

🚚 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.

Screenshot of Shuusou Gyoku's main menu as rendered by the P0326 build on Windows 98, now using the correct MS Gothic font.

October 19, 2025 at 9:55 PM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

Summary blog post: rec98.nmlgc.net/blog/2025-09-29

Ending this overly indulgent subproject with, among other things:
• Heap fragmentation everywhere
• An asynchronous fade effect
• Silly binary size micro-optimizations

Funded by [Anonymous] and Ember2528.

Table inspecting the different states of the master.lib heap when entering and leaving TH05's Music Room in an early version of the debloated P0323 build, showcasing how heap fragmentation prevents the main menu's background image from being loaded a second time, which caused the game to crash prior to finding a workaround. Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-29 blog post.

Not-quite-pseudocode snippet showcasing an easy solution for a screen tearing landmine using the new `vblank_run()` mechanism that will deterministically run its task either now (if currently in VBLANK) or after the next VSync interrupt. Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-29 blog post.

Visualization of the DOS heap when trying to launch TH02-TH05's INTvector set program using the spawn-at-top technique I developed in 2023 for the TH01 Anniversary Edition. Thanks to ZUN's fantastic idea of bundling these small utility tools and TSRs into a single binary that's larger than each individual TSR, DOS fails to load ZUN.COM, as the total binary is much larger than the resident size of the interrupt vectors. Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-29 blog post.

Table of the various PMD versions bundled with TH02-TH05, listing their release date and resident sizes in conventional DOS RAM. The caption reads: "The PMD versions that ZUN shipped with each game. The byte size refers to the in-memory TSR size without any music, voice, or effect data added on top." Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-29 blog post.

September 30, 2025 at 6:43 PM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

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)

Active ReC98 subscriptions for September 2025:

• €300 from Ember2528 towards better replays for Shuusou Gyoku, followed by a long-term plan to first decompile TH03, adding replays, porting it to modern systems, and then implementing netplay (although we're also going for a more short-term option of having netplay on PC-98)
• €125 from [Anonymous] towards anything (including tooling)
• €35 from [Anonymous] towards TH03 RE
• €10 from Root towards porting SDL2 to Windows 98 to get Shuusou Gyoku running there again

September 30, 2025 at 4:05 PM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

🚚 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/...

Screenshot of the VS Start menu in the P0323 build of TH03's Anniversary Edition, showing off the new Quit option and the version text. The caption reads: "Matching the style of the version text to the style of 「☪ The Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream」 on the other side seemed like the least bad option here. That outline is indeed created by rendering every line 9 times…" Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-29 blog post.

Screenshot of a video of the flashing 東方封魔録 animation before TH02's title screen, as rendered by the original game on Neko Project 21/W with a clock speed of 2.4576 × 27 = 66.3552 MHz. Showcases screen tearing and slow .PI blitting. Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-29 blog post.

Screenshot of a video of TH03's character selection screen in 1P vs. CPU mode, showcasing the screen tearing landmine upon entering the screen in the original game. The caption reads: "Recorded on DOSBox-X with 375,000 cycles, since exact machine specifications are not important to demonstrate these landmines." Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-29 blog post.

Screenshot of a video of leaving TH02's HiScore menu, as rendered by the original game on Neko Project 21/W with a clock speed of 1.9968 × 17 = 33.9456 MHz. Showcasing both a landmine (ZUN copying the invisible VRAM page onto the visible one without any palette trick to hide the copy, resulting in mixed pixels) and a bug (the scoreboard should have been removed from the PC-98's text layer by that point). The caption reads: "Recorded at 1.9968 × 17 = 33.9456 MHz for a change to magnify the jank that you perhaps wouldn't see at higher clock speeds." Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-29 blog post.

September 30, 2025 at 2:22 AM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

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…

The table of contents of the upcoming 2025-09-29 post on the ReC98 blog. It reads:

1. The scope
2. Retaining menu backgrounds in conventional RAM
• Fighting heap fragmentation
3. Resolving screen tearing landmines
• Deterministically running tasks in VBLANK
• An easy example (TH04/TH05 main menu reinitialization)
• A hard example (TH03 character selection)
• A lunatic example (TH02 High Score screen)
4. Intermission: Handling unused code on fork branches
5. Merging TH02-TH05's OP.EXE and MAINE.EXE/MAINL.EXE
• Scorefile inconsistencies
• Keeping TH05's binary size low
6. Replicating TH02-TH05's GAME.BAT in C++
• Calculating correct resident sizes
• Additional features and obstacles
7. Topping it off with an actual feature

September 29, 2025 at 10:41 PM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

Summary blog post: rec98.nmlgc.net/blog/2025-09...

This time with:
• More research into earlier Bluesky posts
• Special content for Peaceful Romancer enjoyers
• The 4th bug caused by C's integer promotion rules within 11 months

Funded by [Anonymous], Ember2528, Yanga, and Blue Bolt.

Screenshot of a video of the first 8 beats of TH05's All Cast sequence as shown in the original game, showcasing how the first picture crossfades onto the screen way behind the second beat of Peaceful Romancer indicated in the code. Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-16 blog post.

Screenshot of a video of the transition from the second to the third screen of Yuuka's TH05 All Cast sequence, demonstrating how the picture and text cues have to catch up with the BGM beat targets during such a transition. The caption reads: "As pointed out by the uneven placement of the Reimu and Rika cues. These are Yuuka's second and third screens; the fact that each character gets its own sequence of pictures is common knowledge by now, right?" Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-16 blog post.

The scorefile deobfuscation algorithm used in TH03, TH04, and TH05, compressed to a single line of C++20:

// [key1] and [key2] are `uint8_t` as well.
decoded_byte[i] = (key1 + (std::rotr<uint8_t>(encoded_byte[i + 1], 3) ^ key2) + encoded_byte[i]);

Look at that nice `std::rotr()`! Have fun expressing the same in C while remaining as succinct.
Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-16 blog post.

Screenshot of TH03's High Score viewer, rendering a `YUME.NEM` file that consists entirely of 00 bytes. The caption reads: "Since `YUME.NEM` stores names, scores, and stage numbers as raw sprite IDs, we get sprite #0 from `REGI2.BFT` for all of them. AAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAA A". Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-16 blog post.

September 17, 2025 at 12:07 AM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

🚚 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

The table of contents of the 2025-09-16 post on the ReC98 blog. It reads:

1. Revising TH02's main menu
2. Finishing TH03's High Score menu
3. TH04's title screen animation
4. TH05's All Cast sequence
5. Finishing TH03/TH04/TH05 scorefiles
6. A typo in TH04 Reimu A's Good Ending

Mockup of the TH01's "ＨＩＴ　ＫＥＹ" string in TH02, using the unused gaiji string that's still present in ZUN's original code. The caption reads: "This string is so unused that we don't even know its intended position, though." Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-16 blog post.

Screenshot of a video showcasing the default name replacement in TH03's High Score menu, triggered by entering `BBBBBBBB`. The video later showcases how name replacement happens for any character, not just `A` or an empty name. Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-16 blog post.

Screenshot of a video of TH04's title animation, on the last frame of the separately faded-in black outlines of the title screen's background image. The caption reads: "Also note that single black pixel in Reimu's gohei. 🎺" Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-16 blog post.

September 17, 2025 at 12:07 AM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

> 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…

The table of contents of the upcoming 2025-09-16 post on the ReC98 blog. It reads:

1. Revising TH02's main menu
2. Finishing TH03's High Score menu
3. TH04's title screen animation
4. TH05's All Cast sequence
5. Finishing TH03/TH04/TH05 scorefiles
6. A typo in TH04 Reimu A's Good Ending

September 16, 2025 at 4:30 PM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

Link: rec98.nmlgc.net/blog/2025-09...

… OK, it does have two bits of very silly Touhou content in the end. That'll have to do until the next one.

Funded by [Anonymous], Ember2528, and Congrio.

TH03's `ENEMY01.PI`, showing off the unnecessary line doubling of TH03's in-game sprites loaded from .PI files. The caption reads: "Since PI's location codes are designed around vertical repetition, line doubling has a negligible impact on compressed file sizes. Such an image still decodes into twice as many bytes as needed, though…" Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-10 blog post.

Screenshot of TH05's title screen crossfading effect, as rendered by the original game on Neko Project 21/W with a clock speed of 2.4576 × 27 = 66.3552 MHz. Showcases an unusual landmine where an incomplete VRAM-page-to-VRAM-page copy results in partially masked and partially unmasked colors, in addition to a screen tearing line. Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-10 blog post.

September 11, 2025 at 2:51 AM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

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.

Screenshot of the new wide-sprite blitting benchmark for PC-98, running on Neko Project 21/W with a clock speed of 2.4576 × 27 = 66.3552 MHz. The caption reads: "This recording in Neko Project 21/W at 2.4576 × 27 = 66.3552 MHz might even be representative?" Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-10 blog post.

Graphed results for the wide-sprite blitting benchmark, highlighting the Neko Project 21/W test at 66 MHz and showing `MOVS` winning at every width except 640 pixels, where `REP MOVS` takes the crown. The caption reads: "Number of frames required to blit [Width]×5120 pixels of a 1bpp bitmap to a byte-aligned position in VRAM, using the GRCG. The plots are relative to the respective `REP MOVS` result. Thanks to 1️⃣ オップナー2608 for the real-hardware test." Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-10 blog post.

Screenshot of the new masked crossfading benchmark for PC-98, running on Neko Project 21/W with a clock speed of 2.4576 × 27 = 66.3552 MHz. Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-10 blog post.

Graphed results for the wide-sprite blitting benchmark, highlighting Neko Project 21/W and showing how the optimized EGC implementation vastly outperforms not only the CPU and GRCG + CPU methods, but especially ZUN's original unoptimized code. The caption reads: "Number of frames required to crossfade [Width]×400 pixels onto all four planes of VRAM. Thanks to 1️⃣ オップナー2608, 2️⃣ Furball, 4️⃣ Will.Broke.It, and 5️⃣ spaztron64 for the real-hardware tests. Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-10 blog post.

September 11, 2025 at 2:51 AM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

Second part is in proofreading. Over 9,300 words about PC-98 blitting and the .PI format, coming to you within the next few hours…

The table of contents of the upcoming 2025-09-10 post on the ReC98 blog. It reads:

1. Benchmarking wide sprites
• Algorithms
• Results
2. Reworking the blitter
3. Benchmarking masked crossfading
• Algorithms
• Results
• Future work
4. Optimizing .PI image handling
• Initial attempts
• Extending PiLoad
• TH03's silly line-doubled sprite sheets
5. Meeting our performance target (and uncovering ZUN bugs along with it)

September 10, 2025 at 11:00 PM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

📝 Wrote a post about the various strategies of porting PC-98 Touhou to modern platforms! Also clears up common misconceptions about the performance of the PC-98 originals.
This one is required reading for anyone who wants to see these games ported.

Link: rec98.nmlgc.net/blog/2025-09...

The table of contents of the 2025-09-06 post on the ReC98 blog. It reads:

1. Deciding on a porting strategy
2. "Accurate slowdown"
3. Picking a CPU clock speed for emulators
• Can 66 MHz be enough for anybody?
4. "Frame-perfect"
• Resolving screen tearing
5. Port implementation thoughts
• Non-issues
• Palettized and planar graphics
• Page flipping

The list of PC-98 hardware models that Amusement Makers tested PC-98 Touhou on and confirmed working (taken from http://www.kt.rim.or.jp/~aotaka/am/get.htm), followed by a remark about "accurate slowdown" (taken from the ReC98 2025-09-06 blog post.) The whole text reads:

なお当サークルでは
・ NEC PC-9821Xs i486DX2 66MHz
・ NEC PC-9821La13 Pentium Processor (P54C) 133MHz
・ EPSON PC-486MS AMD 5x86-P133 換装
などで正常に動くことを確認しています
These models are one whole CPU generation apart and their clock speed differs by 100%. Which one of these is supposed to have the accurate slowdown?"

Screenshot of TH04's Music Room, demonstrating the screen tearing landmine that the original game exhibits on every frame, with an overlaid colored visualization of which lines correspond to which frame. The caption reads: "Which frame are we even on? 😵 This landmine is the reason why the first rule explicitly restricts rendering to a single VRAM page. Check the Music Room blog post (https://rec98.nmlgc.net/blog/2024-02-03#mess-2024-02-03) for an explanation of what went wrong here. Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-06 blog post.

Screenshot of a frame within the shake animation at the beginning of TH02's Stage 3, demonstrating how shaking VRAM by 16 pixels temporarily reveals parts of the tile area below the HUD. The caption reads: "This definitely counts as a bug to be fixed in this game's Anniversary Edition, but how would we fix this one on PC-98 where we do need the tile area in VRAM? Moving the tiles to another place and patching the .MAP (https://rec98.nmlgc.net/blog/2023-03-30#diffs-2023-03-30) at runtime?" Taken from the ReC98 2025-09-06 blog post.

September 6, 2025 at 3:48 AM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

Trying something new this time! The next release touches on so many topics that one blog post would have been way too intense for everyone.

So I'm splitting it up into 4 posts, with each focusing on a different topic.

First part (~8,000 words) coming within the next few hours…

The table of contents of the upcoming 2025-09-06 post on the ReC98 blog. It reads:

1. Deciding on a porting strategy
2. "Accurate slowdown"
3. Picking a CPU clock speed for emulators
• Can 66 MHz be enough for anybody?
4. "Frame-perfect"
• Resolving screen tearing
5. Port implementation thoughts
• Non-issues
• Palettized and planar graphics
• Page flipping

September 6, 2025 at 1:12 AM

ReC98

@rec98.nmlgc.net

Many thanks to this month's subscribers!

Code is done escalating, and now it's the blog post's turn. Got >13,000 words now and it's still missing lots of content… I'll be so relieved once I get to spend the rest of the year on TH03 and Shuusou Gyoku with no more distractions.

Active ReC98 subscriptions for August 2025:

• €300 from Ember2528 towards better replays for Shuusou Gyoku, followed by a long-term plan to first decompile TH03, giving it a single Anniversary Edition release on PC-98, adding replays, porting it to modern systems, and then implementing netplay (although we're also going for a more short-term option of having netplay on PC-98)
• €125 from [Anonymous] towards anything (including tooling)
• €35 from [Anonymous] towards TH03 RE
• €10 from Root towards porting SDL2 to Windows 98 to get Shuusou Gyoku running there again

August 31, 2025 at 12:42 PM

Add to Home Screen

Light up
your news

Add to Home Screen

Light upyour news

Sign in to Lightnews

Sign up to start reading

Connect Bluesky

Connect with Bluesky

Light up
your news