It has been getting better as of 2018 thanks to DOSBox-X adding support for the platform, but even at its best, it will always consume way more system resources than what would be appropriate for those games. PC-98 emulation is messy and overly complicated.Even though complete decompilation will take a long time, partial reverse-engineering results will be very useful to modders who just want to work on the original PC-98 versions of the games.STD files that could just be interpreted by an alternate VM, midboss and boss battles are entirely hardcoded into the executables. While stage enemies and their bullet patterns are controlled by bytecode in TH04's and TH05's.
There are a number reasons why achieving moddability via full decompilation seems to be more worthwhile for the PC-98 games, in contrast to a PyTouhou-style black-box reimplementation:
This is also why ReC98 values readable and understandable code over a pure decompilation. This property is maintained for every Git commit along the way.Īside from the preservation angle and the resulting deep insight into the games' mechanics, the code can then serve as the foundation for any type of mod, or any port to non-PC-98 platforms, developed by the community. Perfect therefore means that the binaries compiled from the code in the ReC98 repository are indistinguishable from ZUN's original builds, making it impossible to disprove that the original code couldn't have looked like this. Since we only have the binaries, we obviously can't know how ZUN named any variables and functions, and which comments the original code was surrounded with.