Deleted all the spam mails, checked in a week later, and now I have 35. Ten more than the week before.

What the fuck.

Good Morning!
#vgm #retrogames #retrogaming #SEGA #mastersystem #quartet

I always thought it sounded like someone's internet nickname for a forum/chatroom/YouTube channel/whatever.

For some reason, I got like 25 spam mails over the span of the past seven days, most of which pretending to be from Amazon Japan.

With the release of the Power Base Converter (a backwards compatible device), Sega pushed Master System titles under the "Sega For The 90s" label. Ys was an early example marking its first North American re-release. Complete copies with all 3 elements have become increasingly rare.

Windows for GG v4.0 (1999)(Kemp, Victor)(PD)
Found in: Sega/Game Gear/Demos

Two videos on Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu for the TurboGrafx-16, uploaded by RndStranger and Pixelmusement respectively within literal minutes of each other.

@randomstranger.bsky.social @pixelmusement.com Did you guys plan this or are you just that in-sync? :v

Gotta afford that lifetime supply of copium somehow.

Come to think of it, I've never played this game long enough to even see its Game Over screen...

Does DiPP even count as a Hifuu album when GFC was the first one to feature Maribel and Renko...? 🤔

What's funny is that he's actually really good in the Mega Drive port (and possibly the arcade original, too). In this version, though, it looks like they made him significantly worse in every way.

I've also been noticing some changes in my mindset, primarily my increasing willingless to let go of things that no longer serve me in order to have more mental capacity for the positive things in my life.

Been going on walks once nearly every weekend, too, when the weather is sunny. It's nice to see nature come to life again with the trees blooming and/or slowly growing new leaves.

For instance, I've been making time for gaming last weekend again. Managed to beat Aladdin on the Mega Drive for the second time, and also played through the Wonderswan Color remake of Final Fantasy II (in which Firion turns the Emperor into a toad).

It's been about three weeks now, and I think I'm starting to feel better again. It'll still be a while before I have anything worthwile to report on or show off, though. For now, I'm still taking some me time while waiting for circumstances in my life to allow me to reignite my creative spark.

It genuinely baffles me how sites can even *make* revenue from ads that barely get a chance to show before the user closes the page in disgust.

Or put them directly where the sun shines until they're bleached beyond recognition (if it works like that).

Oh god, I played this back in the day. The German dub is even worse, and while you *can* switch to Phantomilian, even that feels like a step down from the original (Huepow has much less phonemic variety, for one).

Dragon Wang
SG1000 | SEGA | 1985
#retrogames #retrogaming #SEGA #SG1000 #kungfu

Now *you* can be the twilight princess.

When the tiger's a little fru(i)ty...

Gulkave
SG1000 | Compile/SEGA | 1986
#retrogaming #retrogames #SEGA #shmups #SG1000

It's surprising to see just how flat the model 1 SG-1000 really is. It looks a lot taller in most photos depicting it from a downward angle.

Kinda like the model 1 Master System, really...

Oh god, yeah, Cistern in particular. Tiny keys with the exact same color as the ground they're on, and that's just *one* example out of many. The shadows cast frequently didn't make any sense, either.

Part of me is wondering if that'd still be true on a technicality, given that Windows 3.x is effectively still a frontend for DOS.

...which, now that I think about it, makes Lucca's whinging even more hypocritical. He's bitching about the supposed abolishment of the meritocracy while he farts out half-baked shit like this.

Even on top of that, I feel like they really dropped the ball with the remastered graphics. I'm talking visibility issues to the point where I frequently had to switch to the old graphics just to be able to make things out.

Screenshot of the barrage of formulas involved in deriving values from TH03's round speed variable, taken from the ReC98 2026-03-16 blog post. It reads: "This variable is then used to derive a whole variety of speeds and limits: • Speed of pellets and fireballs while they transfer to the other playfield: (4.375 + ⌊round_speed/3⌋) • Speed of the single pellet fired when killing an enemy with an explosion whose chain has a hit count of ≥3 and ≤(14 - (⌊round_speed/2.0⌋ × 2)), after it transferred to the other player's field: (1.5 + (⌊3 × round_speed⌋/16)) • Additional fireball speed added on top of the randomized base speed between 1.25 and 3.25: ⌊round_speed/2⌋ • Required charge_exatt within a chain to fire an Extra Attack after destroying a fireball with an explosion: (7 - ⌊round_speed/2.0⌋) • Required charge_exatt within a chain to fire an Extra Attack after destroying a fireball with a regular player shot or Charge Shot, or an enemy with an explosion: (6 - ⌊round_speed/2.0⌋) • Required charge_fireball within a chain to fire a fireball after destroying an enemy, fireball, or pellet with an explosion (12 - ⌊round_speed/1.0⌋) • Two other things in character-specific Extra Attack code I haven't RE'd so far Yup – the difficulty setting in the Option menu merely controls where all of these values start out at. After 6,144 frames of gameplay, or 1:49 minutes, even an Easy round will have accelerated to Lunatic levels."

Visualization of TH03's data segment starting from the "Extra Attack charge per chain" arrays for the two players, showing how indexing these arrays out of bounds can access and manipulate score digits (causing the score reduction glitch) or the number of Story Mode extend gained (causing the extend glitch). The caption reads: "With ☯️ being the number of Story Mode extends gained. These score digits do not include the one's digit, which represents the number of continues used and is stored separately. The 16 bytes below hold more gameplay-relevant data relating to Yumemi's Charge Shot and Gauge Attack, but researching that was out of scope for this delivery." Taken from the ReC98 2026-03-16 blog post.

Screenshot of a table displaying the possible addresses of TH03's fourth code segment (which decides the specific variant of the score reduction and life extend glitches) in various PC-98 Touhou packages from out there in the wild, depending on the sound card model and resulting PMD driver. The caption reads: "* The Touhou98 Experience v3.00 release is also built around this .HDI. † Created by copying the TH03 files onto that one old widely circulating TH04 .HDI that needed a later DOS version due to 📝 the no-EMS crash bug. Representative of other 5-game .HDI setups that might be floating around the Internet or that people have built for themselves, or real-hardware setups. †† The bold columns indicate the default setting the package came with." Taken from the ReC98 2026-03-16 blog post.

ffprobe output of a TH03 formation video to Bluesky, demonstrating how the platform applies the two worst imaginable video processing steps for PC-98 footage (re-encoding as H.264 with YUV420P chroma subsampling, and enforcing 30 FPS by dropping or duplicating frames) to videos you upload there. Taken from the ReC98 2026-03-16 blog post.

Summary blog post: rec98.nmlgc.net/blog/2026-03...

This time with:

• All the formulas
• All the hitboxes
• Kotohime starring in two of the videos
• The most complicated glitch explanation so far
• Yet another Bluesky rant

Funded by Ember2528, [Anonymous], and LeyDud.

Screenshot of a video that visualizes TH03's frame data of a fireball-originating explosion against a pellet, demonstrating how these explosions are rendered 8 pixels lower than the position that collision detection uses for their hitbox. Taken from the ReC98 2026-03-16 blog post. The caption reads: "Thanks to the anonymous backer for providing the Anything budget for these multi-row tabs at the end of the 6th push!"

Screenshot of a video showcasing what happens when exceeding TH03's 40-enemy cap when constructing a formation sequence that starts with a 12-enemy formation followed by the 16-enemy "Four Lines of Four" formation. Demonstrates how closely timed bombs can reserve a majority of TH03's enemy slots for explosions, which prevents successive formations with high enemy counts from being spawned for one of the players, which in turn causes them to skip a lot of formations in its internal 256-formation cycle (29 in this example). Taken from the ReC98 2026-03-16 blog post.

Screenshot of a video showcasing how removing the enemy damage cap of TH03's explosions can change the timing and placement of explosions. Demonstrated by chaining formation #4 (Racetrack) and colorizing the resulting explosions based on the amount of damage they've dealt to enemies. The caption reads: "I chose black for explosions that currently can't deal damage to enemies. The other 6 colors (dark green, light green, dark red, light red, dark blue, and light blue to represent 0 to 5 dealt hits in this order) are TH03's regular in-game VRAM colors from #5 to #10." Taken from the ReC98 2026-03-16 blog post.

Screenshot of a video of a TH03 explosion destroying a fireball and spawning two red fireballs in response, recorded from 1:04 minutes into the Kotohime vs. Marisa demo on Kotohime's playfield. The caption reads: "Note how the "primary" new fireball described above is spawned from the center of its explosion, while the "additional" new fireball is spawned from the center of the explosion that caused the old fireball to explode." Taken from the ReC98 2026-03-16 blog post.

🚚 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

The table of contents of the upcoming 2026-03-16 post on the ReC98 blog. It reads: 1. An important note about durations in TH03 2. TH03's chaining system 3. Difficulty-specific tuning • round_speed • enemy_speed • Angle tuning 4. TH03's combo system • Boss Attacks and Panics 5. TH03's enemy formation scripts • Gameplay details • Function reference 6. TH03's enemies themselves 7. TH03's explosions 8. TH03's fireballs • Destroying fireballs with regular player shots or Charge Shots 9. TH03's score reduction and extend glitches • The fix (← new builds here!) 10. Completing the Fediverse migration • Polls • Bluesky rant, part 2

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.