It's been almost 3 full years since the first release of my attempt at improved accessibility of the PC-98 Touhou Project pentalogy, and around 2.5 years since I've been struck with the DMCA notice that killed it just a few months later.
First things first... goddamn does time fly. Back then I was a 2nd year college student preparing for the second set of mid-terms, and now I'm a little over a year into being a graduated IT salaryman. On top of that, later that same year I had transformed the old Maloga Dotera website into it's modern-day LainNet incarnation. No longer bound by the shackles of dodgy free hosting services and now operated entirely by hand on a virtual server, I've been given nigh endless opportunities to play around with Web and other internet technologies, so naturally I popped up a Perl CGI bulletin board, this very blog, an archive of old and forgotten illustrations, the np2_gdi porting project, a nearly full archive of the SailorVGame website, a simple BJD gallery, a slowly growing official website for the PC-9800 Central Community, and even a made-from-scratch Futaba clone that was my graduation project... which will likely remain in unfinished hell for the rest of time.
All this is to say that many many things happened in that time... yet the whole chain of events regarding the collection feels like it happened just yesterday. I wouldn't rule out that my sense of time is totally out of whack, or that maybe I'm a bit overly sentimental of the period when I still had a meaningful presence in the Touhou Project scene (at least the chunk of it where people actually play the games) which would pretty much come to an end not long after the debacle. Still, I feel like enough time had passed where I can look back at it and give my readers some perspective on why I handled it the way I did, as well as outline to myself on what I could've done better if I had been wiser, with the almighty power of hindsight!
I'll also be yelling at the clouds later on.
The idea for the collection materialized during a voice chatting session I had with Iodine and a few other Touhou fans sometime in late October 2021. The two of us were commenting on the fact that the existing mainstream methods of playing the games were very old, and even when they were new they were hardly user friendly. Inspiration struck when I was browsing through my files and stumbled upon my installation of Andrew's Prince of Persia: The Ultimate Collection. I had realized that I could pull off the exact same concept for Touhou Project at an even higher level of integration. I got to work setting up the automated emulation environments and the necessary hard disk image, programming the wrapper that would put everything together inside the emulated environment, rendering custom titlecards for every game, writing the FAQ/Credits/Known Issues/etc, and finally publishing it on the 3rd of November, 2021
Needless to say, the project turned out to be a wild success, far beyond any expectations I had. Of course, much of the attention was drawn through word of mouth, in no small part thanks to the fame that Iodine and co. had at the time, all of whom helped spread the word. People all over were reporting satisfaction with the end product, and even Nmlgc had hopes for it. To this day I still see people regularly using it to play the games. As nature would have it though, it wouldn't last forever.
Come the tail end of March 2022 with a sort of "D-Day" for Touhou Project downloads, marked by an anonymous DMCA notice sent to staff of the moriyashrine.org website:
The DMCA notice alleged copyright infringment on grounds of illegal redistribution of the entire mainline and side installments of official Touhou Project games, and requested a takedown of any and all official game data from the website. Just a few months prior the community was dealing with fraudulent copyright notices, so nobody was sure whether this notice was legitimate or not. It would soon be revealed that the notice was indeed legitimate and came from Team Shanghai Alice, specifically from their legal representative: Ruw.
People weren't exactly pleased with the news, but they also expected it to happen sooner or later, since more and more of the Windows era catalogue was seeing digital distribution through Steam, available internationally. As such, arguments from people who weren't overly sympathetic towards MoriyaShrine generally boiled down to the fact that the series was becoming more officially accessible for everybody. I... partially agree with this, but I'll get to that later.
Right after this occurred, a flurry of questions was heading my way in regards to the safety of the PC-98 collection. I had a hunch it might happen, but ultimately I thought the older titles would get ignored due to their effectively abandonware status. Remember, both the PC-98 platform and official mail orders for all 5 games had been killed off for good in 2003. Official disks are almost impossible to obtain these days, costing literal millions (of yen) on the second hand market, and even if you could get ahold of them they'd likely all be dead considering the sharp drop in floppy disk manufacturing quality at the end of the 90s. Paperweights, I tell ya!
Plus, takedown notices for any PC-98 games were pretty much completely unheard of, with some prominent players of the time like AliceSoft even permitting redistribution, patched or otherwise, of their 8-bit and 16-bit computer game catalogue to sites like retropc.net. Yes, really. Pretty cool of them.
And then it happened...
In the night of 11th of April 2022 is when the notice came, though I only noticed the following morning.
Knowing everything I outlined above, to say that this was unprecedented... would be an understatement. Now, to get a bit personal here, the 12th was a day before a rather difficult mid-term Operating Systems exam, and I needed to be prepared as much as I could. Anxiety was certainly kicking in just from that alone, so I'd be lying if I said that the notice didn't tilt me the wrong way.
Before proceeding, please first read what I posted that day if you haven't done so previously so that you have the proper context and that you can follow the rest of the blogpost.
Alright, are you back? Great, let's continue.
As outlined at the middle and bottom of that page, it's received minor edits over time. The biggest removal was a purely emotional set of paragraphs at the perceived injustice. People called it out for being the cringe that it was, and I decided to remove it after a (damn long) while because it just has no place there. If you really feel like laughing at a grown man's moment of losing it over relatively unimportant online shit, there's always archive.org or the several Chinese translations of the page still available.
As I said previously, takedown notices for PC-98 games were entirely unprecedented, and general Touhou Project piracy (outside of Japan) enjoyed decades long luxury. ZUN himself has stated that he was aware of this and couldn't be bothered too much about it knowing the difficulties overseas customers would have to go through. Of course, this started to change in 2017 with the internationally available Steam release of HSiFS, as well as subsequent releases of newer games and rereleases of older games, at least down to MoF and nothing prior. Windows era game takedowns were at least somewhat expected to come sooner or later, but nobody could've predicted any action being taken towards the PC-98 titles.
Additionally, I simply didn't have any self-hosting resources. No domains, no VPSes, a Carrier Grade NAT-ed Internet connection, the likes. Had I known ahead of time what to expect I likely would've taken the initiative on time and come up with alternate plans, but alas.
If there's one good thing I did in 2022, it's outlining the facts regarding ZUN's slimy rebranding of software.
The depths of derivation in his works is very well documented. Windows era fans can tell you all about the many "inspirations"
taken from Sarai and other works in the early 2000s for all of eternity.
My focus was specifically on the PC-98 era, where we can with 100% certainty point to direct theft and resale of material
made and previously sold by other people, from the 'shopped blonde chick from Toshin Toshi 2, to the sheer hubris of taking credit
for the extremely impressive and well programmed SPRITE16.COM graphics engine through a sloppy HEX EDIT JOB of the program.
I seriously wish I was making that up, but I'm not...
Image courtesy of m1yur1
You thought the attribution rewrites ended there? As I was writing this blogpost I consulted with Nmlgc just to make sure I didn't make any mistakes in outlining the technical details. During our talk he drew my attention to a discrepancy between th01-02 and th03-05.
See, the most important library powering all 5 games is Akihiko Koizuka's master.lib. It's a 16-bit x86 library written almost entirely in assembly that handles a boatload of functionality, making DOS game development on both PCs and PC-98s easier. We're talking file I/O, memory management (EMS and XMS included), text display, graphics decompression, beeper playback and sampling, etc.; Long story short it's very comprehensive. The games don't use the entire library, but what they do use they use extensively (just search for the amount of references to super_ and graph_ for each game in ReC98). I even relied on the mouse processing functions to add mouse movement support to Lotus Land Story, and in general I use the library for my own DOS developments because it's pretty much indispensable for Real Mode dev.
Koizuka distributes a prebuilt library for small memory model development, the manual which documents every available function, and most importantly the entire source code of the library, which can later be assembled for whatever memory model suits the project. All five Touhou Project games use the large memory model, so ZUN assembled a MASTERL.LIB binary and linked it to the final executables.
One of the translation units in the source tree is VERSION.ASM. It defines a string that describes the current version of the library and the copyright information. The data in this file is referenced multiple times across the source, so normally when it is linked to your program the version definition and the copyright string should be embedded within. For example, my Lemonspin demo uses the library for almost everything on display, and we can see that the copyright and version strings are present in the binary:
We can also see the same thing in the first two Touhou games:
The whole string is suspiciously gone from the other three games though:
This doesn't make sense, since we know that th03-05 also use master.lib. The only three possible explanations are that ZUN removed all references to VERSION.ASM in the library source, simply commented out the db statements that declare the strings, or removed the assembled VERSION.OBJ object from the linking step manually (Remember, these old linkers cannot detect which objects are actually used in the code, they will link anything they're fed). Whatever the case, ZUN scrubbed out attribution that would only be seen if someone were to look into the binaries themselves.
Credit where it's due, there are some new features and bugfixes added to the library. We don't know if ZUN or Amusement Makers introduced them though. Whatever the case, this certainly doesn't warrant removal of attribution.
I am honestly speechless at this point. I thought that the SPRITE16 rebrand and attribution rewrite was bad enough, but this... you're never even supposed to see this information in regular play. There's no reason to remove this other than to be spiteful or petty. It really just makes me wonder even more why Masahiro Kajihara not only didn't get his name scrubbed out of the P.M.D. driver as distributed in th02-05, but got explicitly named in the credits of these games. My one and only guess is that P.M.D. was the most well known piece of software that ZUN used, and that if he tried to pull tricks he would immediately get caught.
What really drives me up the wall in this whole story is that there were and still are people willing to defend ZUN's actions with the softest of excuses imaginable: "Oh he was young, he didn't know better.", "What? It's just in the doujin spirit, relax man.". I was 20 years old when I put together this package and later published those cringeworthy paragraphs at the end of the distribution page. I got rightfully blasted for that. I was also being put on blast for being an effective thief by redistributing the games for free. Technically correct, sure, but I don't exactly feel bad about it when it's in regards to games that no longer see commercial availability.
ZUN was around this same exact age in '97/'98 when he was publishing the games. A grown-ass man, not a toddler. He absolutely knew and still knows that theft is bad, yet he did it anyway. And don't even think about bringing up any "doujin spirit" bullshit into this conversation. Sure, doujin works are generally derivative of other properties, even of other doujin works, but to straight up steal from another in the scene is something that should be an obvious no-no to anyone.
Off-site hosting in a copyright haven? A seedbox? I dunno, I certainly wouldn't have used GitHub Pages, that's for sure. The titlecard renders were really just placeholders for proper illustrations that never ended up coming to fruition. Other than that, I'm satisfied with how the end product turned out. It's primary goal of making the five titles a more plug-and-play experience worked out, even if only for a short while. My only disappointment is that nobody else stepped up to stick it to the man and improve what I had initially put together.
The rest of the blogpost is mostly rambling.
If you've been paying any attention to the growth of Touhou Project even in just the past 10 years, you'd see that it hardly ends at direct sales of game discs at Comiket booths. There's official merchandising, multiple manga series, collaboratively developed spin-offs with other studios, Touhou-oriented events, and many more unofficial variants of these same things, some of which do end up officially sanctioned by Team Shanghai Alice.
For the longest time the franchise has been lauded for being "incredibly lax" in regards to copyright and intellectual property rights enforcement. I don't doubt that these relaxed standards were at their peak early in the history of the Windows era, where the franchise and especially the fanworks based on it had it's most explosive growth, both at home and globally. While the old engine Windows trilogy certainly had it's own levels of success purely on the merits and quality within... let's face it, we all know how the vast majority of fans entered (and still enter) the scene in the first place: appreciation of the very fan material that spawned from these games.
Taboo as it may be to say these days, we've made jokes at the expense of so-called secondaries for many years because "they don't play the games", but in my opinion they play an incredibly vital role in the scene: They're free marketing. Think about it, by using Touhou Project intellectual property in their fanworks, secondary material creators prop both themselves and the franchise/ZUN up. It's a symbiotic relationship that did wonders, and the timing of it all happening in the mid 2000s couldn't have been more perfect. This of course also extends to other types of fan activity: cosplaying, hijacks, fads, you name it. I know a lot of people who started off as fans of secondary works, only to later migrate to mainline titles and/or the fighters. Some of them even dominate community leaderboards right now!
The grand point here is that without this relationship, Touhou Project wouldn't even be 0.1% big as it turned out to be. Shoot-em-ups had turned into a dying genre by the time the PC-98 era ended, relegated to a niche that they never recovered from. While it helps that the Windows era adopted a more unique, slower take on danmaku game design, it alone wouldn't be enough to turn it into a massive franchise. In the eyes of many, it's not the official mainline entries that define Touhou Project, it's everything else: the fighters, the print works, and the unimaginable number of fanworks.
Here's the thing though. If you look at the official fanwork guidelines today... well, they honestly don't seem that lax to me. They went through several revisions over time, and these days we even have them in English officially. Let's go over some of the bulletpoints as they stand right now, one by one.
Nothing to say here, this is a perfectly reasonable demand.
I'm not the only one who sees this as incredibly vague, right? Is a game not allowed to satirize the tropes of the series, even for laughs or to make some kind of point? Is direct criticism of the series not allowed? This could mean literally anything and can be arbitrarily defined by ZUN at any point on a case by case basis.
Sounds like something that really doesn't even need to be said, but we'll get back to it later.
I'm honestly not sure how this could even be done without taking assets from existing titles or relying on official game engines. If we were to put that aside, the only interpretation I could think of for this is that you're not allowed to make a shoot-em-up or fighter that plays like one of the existing official entries. I guess every Danmakufu game ever made is totally screwed. That's not very lax, now is it?
Oh we're definitely coming back to this one later too.
Seems redundant considering the bulletpoint right above exists.
Here's the first one that's very clear cut: You're not allowed to use Touhou Project to express how you see the world; from political beliefs, to even just general views on life itself. You may only abide by the rules and logic of the fantasy world's universe. There's... plenty of arguments to be made how this stifles artistic integrity, considering that our beliefs shape the art we create (what is art without meaning?). It should be noted that ZUN does not abide by his own standard here whatsoever, getting more and more egregious by very bluntly laying out his views on current day world events and overall pop culture through plots and dialogue in the official games and print works.
Yes ZUN, stealing is bad. I'm sure You would understand.
Not going to get into matters regarding adult material here.
Redundant as it already falls under the personal beliefs guideline.
The rest of the bulletpoints boil down to only allowing fanworks to be distributed through a handful of authorized distribution channels. My point here is that ZUN is very much not lax when it comes to the Touhou Project brand and intellectual property. Not as cut throat as a typical corporation, sure, but doing whatever the hell you want is certainly off-limits, especially when you get into commercial distribution.
Let's shift our focus back to the following two bulletpoints:
So as you can see, ZUN reeeeally doesn't want you using his graphics, audio, code, and other official material in your work. It's fine when he does it though.
Simple, Touhou Project's roots are in being not only highly derivative, but straight up built on stolen material. With the knowledge that he erased PromisenceSoft's signature as the creator of SPRITE16 and straight up culled Koizuka and co. out of the picture in th03-05, does it really come as any surprise that he can't be arsed to even namedrop a Special Thanks to authors that highly influenced his works like Takemoto Izumi? Even in Japan they struggle to get concrete answers when confronting him with straight questions, with ZUN commonly falling back to a faux aloof "Well I guess I did get inspired in the end" or similar answers.
To be honest with you all, I wouldn't have such a stick up my ass if these games, especially the first five, were some silly little freewares... but they're not. Each and every official Touhou game release has been a commercial one. For money, for profit.
I mentioned earlier how I only partially agree with Steam availability obsoleting ye pirate methods of olde. There's two reasons for this. First, you're being sold something with Steam DRM, meaning that you cannot simply play the games as you wish without Steam running. "What's the big deal" you might be wondering. For starters, forget about playing the games on platforms that Steam doesn't support, which in mid-to-late 2024 only goes as far back as Windows 10, recent Linux distributions, and non-32bit versions of MacOS. Plus, applying mods is out of the question. The games are not translated out of the box, so you're not even granted the simplest of gestures like English translated dialogue. So yes, if you want to say... play Mountain of Faith on your aging Windows 2000 box that was able to play the retail dump perfectly fine, or simply apply either a static or dynamic/thcrap-powered translation, you have no choice but to crack the Steam DRM. Is it hard to do? No, not even remotely difficult, but it crosses a moral boundary for many that were hoping they could finally put an end to doing, only for them to get screwed over anyway. All ZUN has to do is flick one switch, but he can't be bothered to do that.
The other reason is that the newer releases are becoming progressively worse products. The big box of bugs that was th18 was so bad that it got memed to death before the full version even released. Only the biggest, most gamebreaking bug got resolved by the time the full version came out, with the rest forever being left to rot. Th19 was such a colossal disappointment that it finally managed to unite the scene when it comes to the opinion of "Worst VS game in the series". Tons of mainstay features gone, netplay not being P2P leading to a Japanese programmer (@progremaster) writing a P2P netplay tool that pretty much instantly obsoleted the vanilla method, bugs bugs bugs bugs bugs, character balancing so terrible that the one and only balance patch completely changed the fundamental game plan for at least half of the playable cast (always a red flag indicating a complete lack of playtesting), and just in general less tight design.
And what's the price of admission? 15 bucks per game. That might seem tiny to you Westerners, but for the rest of us that can pay at least a bill or two a month. Besides, would you seriously put games like th10 and th12 on the same level of quality and polish as th18 and th19? I don't think so. Let me remind you that you still don't get even a basic translation. No other franchise gets to get away with international releases and expect paying customers globally while not even providing them a means to read most of the text in the games. I might not even have a problem with this had Team Shanghai Alice not gone after the distribution channels for translated game packages or slapped the very modders and translators that made their games more accessible worldwide in the face with DRM. "Give us money or else".
Oh, but all is forgiven because ZUN is our lovable little beer connoisseur that manages to pump out new games on a regular schedule all on his own while being dead drunk. Well for one thing it's not even a solo development effort anymore, as it's been confirmed that a good portion of the new animated graphics are drawn by his wife. Secondly... how is the whole alcoholism thing cute exactly? Did the scene collectively decide to forget all the crap that alcoholism carries with itself? Even my closer friends are calling me nuts for having this perspective, saying that it's probably just for show and not really serious. Sorry, but I'm not convinced.
And guess what mate! By giving him your hard earned money, through mainline game purchases or otherwise, you're fueling this. Then a bunch of you (especially in Japan) act like you saw a cute kitten any time he brings a glass of beer to a livestream or event , all while highway robbing you with increasingly shittier games.
I don't have much else to say at the moment, I've aired out my thoughts. Is it a bit unhinged? Yeah, probably, but just know that I too used to look at ZUN with somewhat high regard when I was younger. It's really only disappointing that the image I had of him wasn't as good as I once thought.
You can go home now.
