github.com/nmlgc/rec98.... [💰] Confirm T0440 A final €400 from Ember2528 for the announced and AI-unrelated farewell gift: Kioh Gyoku SC-88Pro BGM packs, releasing my loop builder, and better loop detection to support a mystery goal. Thank you for all the years of support. 🙏

On October 5, 2019, I launched the ReC98 crowdfunding website. Today, 7 years later, there really is no more incredible journey to be had. So here's is my final feature and retirement announcement. No matter how this is received, I have already won. 😮‍💨 rec98.nmlgc.net/blog/2026-10...

You could use this code to procedurally generate optimal Shuusou Gyoku runs from your favorite programming language via old-school machine learning or something. In reality, nobody cares, and you'll all just be here for one thing. >18,700 words coming to you in a few hours.

Finished the retirement part of the next blog post. >7,700 words with the full timeline, nuance, and plenty of burned bridges that hopefully close off any way back into this hellhole I should have left in 2011. The vibecoders will soon appear like the sanest actors in the room.

OK, received tons of words, but zero serious offers to continue working in this scene in any capacity, matching the trend started in April. Hence, this business model has run its course, I made the right call, and the decision is final. First round of refunds has been sent out.

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...

Popfan@gensakudan.com · 4mo ago

But on the other hand, I understand how demoralizing it must be to do this all by hand and with a human element, all while so many around you choose the easy, more prolific option that sacrifices quality. Not even ample financial compensation can really offset that in the long run.

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.

GitHub - redpanda-cpp/mingw-lite: MinGW-w64 GCC distribution. Fast and flexible build scripts; minimal dependencies; works on NT 4.0 and 98. Inspired by w64devkit.

MinGW-w64 GCC distribution. Fast and flexible build scripts; minimal dependencies; works on NT 4.0 and 98. Inspired by w64devkit. - redpanda-cpp/mingw-lite

github.com

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.