ReC98
rec98.nmlgc.net
ReC98
@rec98.nmlgc.net
https://rec98.nmlgc.net

The Touhou PC-98 Restoration Project. Decompiled 100% of TH01 to provably legit C++ code, remaining games in progress. Which mods or ports do *you* want to see?
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!
[💰] Confirm T0414 · nmlgc/rec98.nmlgc.net@0f375a5
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....
github.com
January 1, 2026 at 5:28 PM
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.
January 1, 2026 at 3:47 PM
🚚 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
January 1, 2026 at 3:00 AM
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.
December 31, 2025 at 8:38 PM
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
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
December 30, 2025 at 2:22 AM
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
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.
November 30, 2025 at 4:09 PM
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.
November 25, 2025 at 1:42 AM
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.)
October 31, 2025 at 2:14 PM
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...
October 21, 2025 at 8:03 PM
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...
SimK on X: "Neko Project 21/W ver0.86 rev96β5を公開しました。 ・代替フォント生成時に機種依存アルファベットを極力幅6pxになるようにした ・フルスクリーン時のDirect3D描画が上手く行かない場合がある不具合を修正 https://t.co/2FpJ5kktFH" / X
Neko Project 21/W ver0.86 rev96β5を公開しました。 ・代替フォント生成時に機種依存アルファベットを極力幅6pxになるようにした ・フルスクリーン時のDirect3D描画が上手く行かない場合がある不具合を修正 https://t.co/2FpJ5kktFH
twitter.com
October 20, 2025 at 6:51 PM
🚚 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.
October 19, 2025 at 9:55 PM
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)
September 30, 2025 at 4:05 PM
🚚 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/...
September 30, 2025 at 2:22 AM
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…
September 29, 2025 at 10:41 PM
$ 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 🎉
September 29, 2025 at 7:33 PM
🚚 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
September 17, 2025 at 12:07 AM
> 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…
September 16, 2025 at 4:30 PM
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.
September 11, 2025 at 2:51 AM
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…
September 10, 2025 at 11:00 PM
📝 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...
September 6, 2025 at 3:48 AM
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…
September 6, 2025 at 1:12 AM
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.
August 31, 2025 at 12:42 PM
Here's all the ZUN quirks, bugs, landmines, and bloat from previously RE'd code that I missed or got wrong in previous pushes and fixed for the upcoming ones.

Reverse-engineering is hard.
August 28, 2025 at 6:51 PM