1) .PI is a common format for ending images and backgrounds.I downloaded such a program a while back. ViX is a Japanese program that can convert both PNG to Pi and Pi to PNG. Download it here. (http://www.vector.co.jp/soft/win95/art/se083112.html)
I have the PI image decompressor (thanks, mauve), but PNG to PI converter is needed to repack redrawn images back into PI format.
I downloaded such a program a while back. ViX is a Japanese program that can convert both PNG to Pi and Pi to PNG. Download it here. (http://www.vector.co.jp/soft/win95/art/se083112.html)I tried replacing some backgrounds and as a result the game glitches up and freezes. Although, piread recognizes converted redrawn images just fine.
What happens if you convert a pi to a png then back without editing it?Pretty much the same thing. The game freezes when you get to the image you were trying to convert (the image itself is also corrupted).
So yeah, we're still looking at a few months of work.
Mar 17 15:11:00 <Nmlgc> Alright! I now have plans for hacking all three methods of PC-98 text output. Time for a new announcement on Shrinemaiden.
Mar 17 15:11:36 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> OK!
Mar 17 15:12:04 <Nmlgc> Do you want to try your hand at writing again? :-)
Mar 17 15:12:08 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> ( And I hope you can write this one b/c I suck when it comes to explaining the patching process- )
Mar 17 15:12:13 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> I can trrrrry.
Mar 17 15:13:26 <Nmlgc> Looks like it will be a long road if we want to have proportional fonts and/or Korean text support - both of which are basically the highest possible achievements when it comes to this.
Mar 17 15:14:09 <Nmlgc> Of course, with me being all serious about this, I won't go for anything less.
Mar 17 15:14:50 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> :D
Mar 17 15:15:21 <Nmlgc> I'll first start with porting the existing thcrap engine to PC-98, though.
Mar 17 15:15:57 <Nmlgc> As soon as this is done, the engine will also be open-sourced.
Mar 17 15:16:08 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> That's sort of cool to have "backwards" compatibility all in one engine :)
Mar 17 15:16:36 <Nmlgc> It comes at a price though. Memory.
Mar 17 15:17:30 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> How much? Is it significant?
Mar 17 15:17:36 <Nmlgc> There will be no way to stuff the engine, the JSON loader, the custom fonts and the C runtime in that little amount of DOS' 640 KB of conventional memory the games leave unoccupied.
Mar 17 15:18:05 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> And really, you can create a "bare-bones" engine for the people who are concerned, right?
Mar 17 15:18:22 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> Like, I know you hate the idea of having more than one engine but...
Mar 17 15:18:25 <Nmlgc> Probably not.
Mar 17 15:18:27 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> Mm.
Mar 17 15:18:57 <Nmlgc> Because even with a empty TSR in conventional memory, the games refuse to start.
Mar 17 15:19:20 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> ...
Mar 17 15:19:22 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> >:C
Mar 17 15:19:38 <Nmlgc> Which means we have to use the higher memory areas, and this can only be reliably done with DOS 5.0 or higher... and this is kind of a problem, because the .hdi images everyone has only come with DOS 3.3.
Mar 17 15:20:15 <Nmlgc> So we'd have to bundle DOS 5.0 with the patch, which is kind of legally questionable...
Mar 17 15:20:40 <Nmlgc> The FreeDOS PC-98 port is not an option either because it doesn't even run the Touhou games.
Mar 17 15:20:52 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> Oh dear... it's the DOS that makes it questionable?
Mar 17 15:22:08 <Nmlgc> Well, yeah. It's old, but still copyrighted by Microsoft, as far as I'm aware.
Mar 17 15:22:31 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> http://www.amazon.com/DOS-5-0-Disk-Operating-System/dp/B0015YVBSA
Mar 17 15:22:32 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> :/
Mar 17 15:22:52 <Nmlgc> We need the version for PC-98...
Mar 17 15:23:59 <Nmlgc> Otherwise, we could just do it like all the emulator programmers.
Mar 17 15:24:07 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> What's that~?
Mar 17 15:24:15 <Nmlgc> "You need DOS 5.0 or later to run the patches, but we're not gonna bundle it, search it for yourself"
Mar 17 15:24:26 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> XD
Mar 17 15:27:15 <Nmlgc> Also, if a bare-bones engine had been fine, xJeePx would have just released his WIP patch.
Mar 17 15:27:32 <Nmlgc> It was him who asked for more space in the dialogs, remember? :-)
Mar 17 15:27:32 <Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen> Ah, it was just a thought.
Mar 17 15:27:36 * Nazeo_Aelko_Nezen nods
Mar 17 15:28:26 <Nmlgc> So, the porting will take a while because I used lots of native Windows APIs -.-
Mar 17 15:28:27 * You are now known as Nazeo
Mar 17 15:28:57 <Nazeo> Ah... lots of conversions then.
Mar 17 15:29:40 <Nmlgc> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb773559%28v=vs.85%29.aspx << Most convenient functions ever.
Mar 17 15:30:20 <Nmlgc> Also, 32-bit vs. 16-bit, etc.
Mar 17 15:31:38 <Nazeo> There's... 16bit?
Mar 17 15:32:20 <Nmlgc> Some assembly-related code needs to accommodate for 16-bit, which is what the PC-98 is.
Mar 17 15:32:34 <Nazeo> Ah...
Mar 17 15:34:41 <Nmlgc> And this entire process will pause one month before Reitaisai because we need to get the Windows stuff ready for Touhou 14
Mar 17 15:35:11 <Nazeo> Ah, okay.
Mar 17 15:44:05 <Nmlgc> http://www.shrinemaiden.org/forum/index.php/topic,13903.msg953831.html#msg953831 << That guy posted the same tool that Arcorann posted 3 months before...
Mar 17 15:44:23 <Nmlgc> ... the one that didn't work.
Mar 17 15:44:31 <Nazeo> Ouch.
Mar 17 15:44:37 <Nmlgc> And we need an open-source solution anyway.
Mar 17 15:44:55 <Nmlgc> But maybe we could even bypass the .PI format.
Mar 17 15:47:43 <Nmlgc> ... yeah, just intercept the loader and feed a .BMP file instead.
Mar 17 15:48:07 <Nazeo> That sounds the most useful since I think .PI was phased out.
Mar 17 15:48:47 <Nmlgc> PNG won't be feasible because the decompressor would take up too much space, and those images don't have alpha channels anyway.
Mar 17 16:08:45 <Nmlgc> I'll be off in a couple of minutes, so if you're writing anything...
Mar 17 16:08:53 * Nazeo nods
Mar 17 16:09:50 <Nazeo> If you do leave, I'm not posting until you see it :U
Mar 17 16:10:12 <Nmlgc> You can include this screenshot if you like: https://twitter.com/thpatch/status/313053071955595264/photo/1
Mar 17 16:11:16 <Nazeo> I think I will.
Mar 17 16:11:21 <Nazeo> Because pics are nice.
Mar 17 16:19:58 <Nmlgc> About the Korean text support... I view this more as a benchmark of overall Unicode support.
Mar 17 16:20:42 <Nazeo> Rather than progression, got it.
Mar 17 16:21:38 <Nmlgc> And if we want more space in the dialogs, we could just aim for proportional fonts from the beginning.
Mar 17 16:21:48 <Nazeo> I don't know why, but I'm having trouble wording the text output thingy.
Mar 17 16:21:52 <Nazeo> And oh.
Mar 17 16:21:57 <Nazeo> So I'll split that up.
Mar 17 16:22:22 <Nmlgc> That's because there's no way to circumvent the 8 pixel text grid without hacking the emulator.
Mar 17 16:23:55 <Nazeo> Oh.
Mar 17 16:24:34 <Nmlgc> So we'd have to write our own text renderer anyway if we wanted to use fonts which are smaller than 8 pixels in width.
Mar 17 16:24:46 <Nazeo> Is this what we want to do?
Mar 17 16:25:13 <Nmlgc> Well, if 8 pixels had been enough, xJeePx wouldn't have complained.
Mar 17 16:25:39 <Nazeo> Oh dear.
Mar 17 16:28:27 <Nazeo> And I drew a blank -.
Mar 17 16:28:29 <Nazeo> *-.-
Mar 17 16:31:53 <Nmlgc> You know what? Just copy-paste the log.
Mar 17 16:32:03 <Nazeo> Got it :U
Mar 17 16:32:17 <Nmlgc> Maybe pretty it up a little, make things a bit more clear, etc.
Mar 17 16:32:49 <Nazeo> Will do. I'll also invite people to #thcrap as well. Get some communal peeps in~
Mar 17 16:33:02 <Nmlgc> So yeah, for all lurkers out there:
Mar 17 16:33:16 <Nmlgc> As you see, we'll be doing this in the most serious way imaginable.
Mar 17 16:44:56 <Nmlgc> inb4 "do you really expect to get Korean translators"
Mar 17 16:45:10 <Nmlgc> I have one at my disposal.
Ah... We already thought that this wording was bound to cause confusion. That BIOS statement was supposed to be a part of the comparison to other emulators, and not directly relating to our patches. In our case, this "BIOS" is a copy of DOS 5.0 for PC-98. You would have to copy it onto each .hdi to use the patches.
Basically, when you play the Touhou PC-98 games in any emulator, you emulate a game running on top of DOS running on top of the PC-98 architecture. So we should probably more correctly refer to them as "the DOS Touhou games for PC-98" instead of just "the PC-98 Touhou games".
Anyway, fixed the post above, it should be clear now.
I worked out what the problem was with the PI files. If you open a PI file in a hex editor, at offset 4 there are two bytes defining pixel aspect ratio. In the original PI files they are 00 00, while the files outputted by ViX have 01 01. For some reason the games don't like this, despite the fact that both convey exactly the same information. Changing the bytes back makes the image work.Thanks a lot! I fiddled around with it a bit and everything seems to work just fine:
...OK, so there may be other problems (http://i.imgur.com/gfJhfRZ.png), but you can get around those, right?
.CDG format (along with other formats like .KAO or .BMT) files usually contain various game sprites (characters, bosses, bullets, etc.)
There was a PC-98 Touhou plugin for graphic viewer Susie (Touhou Sprite Susie Plug-in by h0shu), but unfortunately, it's lost along with developer's web site. The only thing remained is a screenshot from h0shu's blog:
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/h0shu/20071226
Just waiting on xJeePx to finish proof-reading~
As friggin' amazing as this is, anything that isn't gameplay becomes a staticy mess that sometimes freezes for no reason. Is there a known cause? This happens only with the patching in MS and LLS in both Anex86 and Neko Project.
As friggin' amazing as this is, anything that isn't gameplay becomes a staticy mess that sometimes freezes for no reason. Is there a known cause? This happens only with the patching in MS and LLS in both Anex86 and Neko Project.
I had the same problem with LLS and MS for Anex, Neko, AND T98Next. All I did was re-patch the two and it completely fixed the static problem. Hope it works for you.
EDIT: Just to clarify, I did not re-patch the original hdi. I redid/reapplied the patch on the ones with static.
Shouldn't be "Alice Margatroid" be Alice? ???
I mean Alice was know as just Alice in the PC-98 Games.
Margatroid was introduced in PCB...
Also, can you change the font used in T98-Next?
It displays "W" as "<"
That's been a problem with T-98 Next even before the English patches. I don't think there's a solution, or if there is, I don't know it.
Indeed, it was a problem when testing on Anex 86 as well.This can be fixed. ;)
I use the T98-Next font.rom for the font file in NP2 simply because it's easier to read than the provided font files. There's no difference between "h" and "m" in those bmp files and the font overall looks a little messy. I haven't noticed any problems with the English patches with that rom file either so far.T-98 Next FONT.ROM is essentially Anex86 .BMP font file (which is included in the archive). And yes, it's easier to read than the default Neko Project font. :)
I did notice something odd. While reading through the text in PoDD with Reimu during the dialogue parts, certain parts scroll the text very slowly. It's not a big deal but it appears that only segments are supposed to do that, after watching a Youtube video to confirm. On the patched version, it seems to stick for quite a few lines of dialogue. Looks like whatever trigger that sets the text speed is being skipped. Again, not that big of a deal, just a minor annoyance.I didn't change the text code much. Will look into it.
Found a problem. Was playing LLS on hard with homing Reimu (NP2 if that makes any difference). After failing stage 6, after the fade out, I got a STOP error.
Sorry to necro this thread, but I have a problem.Ah, yes, I think we've encountered this problem before. Make sure that the CPU settings are set to 2.4576MHz x 32 (78.6432 MHz) in the Configure option. If it doesn't help, try re-installing the patch.
I tried to patch LLS and play it on Neko Project 2. It plays flawlessly, but it won't display the endings at all. It just stops the emulator with the red text and japanese characters and STOP.
1.- How did you edit the .GRP files from HRtP?Most of the images with text can be found in the .PI files. HRtP .GRP files are essentially .PI files, just like the ones found in other games. To edit those, follow these steps:
2.- How did you Edit the Text from the Images?
The games are quite laggy on Neko Project 2 during the bullet-intensive portions, any way to fix that?
IIRC PC-98 Alice and Windows Alice being one and the same hasn't actually been fully confirmed yet.
Alice: Long time no see.
Reimu: We've only just met.
Alice: No, that's not what I meant.
Reimu: Am I supposed to remember?[8]
Alice: Don't you remember me? Well, either way is fine though.