Entry 288

Open questions after the triage: menus, the desktop and the text

ui

This entry answers the question left open by The desktop text: mail, board and news, in English and parody, Text rendering reproduced, and what Quarantine's KFED.BIN is, The ALTIMIT desktop runs from the disc: opening, main screen and mail, A new game's desktop, run by the game's own event scripts, The title screen from DEMO.PRG: boot, logos, menu, and the hand-off to the desktop, The title's Option is the system menu in its title mode, and the title music written up, The World's top page (TOPPAGE.PRG): log in, the board, log out, and the hand-off to the field game, The field UI: ccThMenu's HUD, event windows and battle menus, frame by frame against the game, The HUD in Mac Anu: the field UI over the town, the menu buttons, and talking, The Chaos Gate menus, the opening's tutorials and item boxes, and the gate a target again, Talking and shopping in Mac Anu: the PC, shop and Recorder menus, wired into the runtime, The rest of PERSONAL, PARTY and OPTION: Key Items to Log Out, checked against the game, and Log Out back to the top page, Trade, a party member's list and Gift, the administrators and the Grunty breeders, The minimap: Mac Anu's plan, the field's and the dungeon's maps, SELECT and event 3's map lesson, The staff roll: the ending's credits as ccThStaffRoll runs them, checked frame by frame, The gate hack: GtHackMenu and ccHackMenu, the virus cores into a protected area, Event 4 as a player plays it: the dungeon's boxes and Gott statue, their menus, the Fortune Wire and the trap room's doors, The noise: ccNoiz drawn on its own layer, and the events' interNoiz, The first play-test's bugs: the holy ground, the weapons, the fades, the transfers, The party's HP and conditions through the doors and the event scenes: storeCondition, The target cursor turned and the drain gauge shaded: TRF and TG sprites, "The church's black screen: a field set-up's windows on the set-up's own screen", "The hacked areas' noise, the game's DEG2RAD, and the event pages' unknowns", "The desktop's and title's Controller page: the labelled boxes round the pad", "The loading display between areas: the town's and the area's cards", "The spells' screen noise on the field UI; the effects' smoke callers all accounted for", "ALL FIELD PORTALS OPEN: the banner of an area's last portal (ccThDfComp); the entries' placeless sounds", "The heals', cures', revivals' and resistant shield's effects started in play; the party panels shake and the protect marks show", "A book given to a party member in town raises its stat; the third member remarks on a present", "The later volumes' save: the extension, Init and NewGame checked against their own code; Mutation reaches its title", The top page, the field's menus and the battle's tables on generated tables, Escape asks before quitting, The selector sounds like the title, The launcher's turning icons, copyright and credit.

FilesUNKNOWNS.md

This entry closes the open questions of 34 entries about the menus and screens: the desktop and its text, the title, the top page, the field UI (the HUD, the menus, the minimap), the noise, the staff roll and the launcher. The triage of 2026-09-28 (UNKNOWNS.md) split every entry's open paragraph into single questions and checked each one against the later log, the docs and the code. The answered ones are listed below with their evidence. What is still open is restated at the end, with the entry that asked it, the play questions first. Open questions of these entries that belong to another subsystem are restated in that subsystem's entry: 283, 284, 285, 286, 289, 290 and 291.

Answered

  • 9: how the game decides which mails a volume delivers — answered by 41 / docs/engine/desktop.md "Mail" (event opcodes 107-109; event 1 delivers 4, 5 and 320)
  • 9: what ccGetExtendedCode maps and how the % codes are drawn — answered by 23 / docs/engine/font.md
  • 9: the BBS dateindex — answered by 58 / docs/engine/toppage.md (the index of the date cell: 0-5 plain, 0 in parody)
  • 9: whether Parody Mode can be switched on in the US Infection — answered by 43 (m_ParoFLG is only cleared; it cannot be chosen)
  • 23: what Quarantine loads KFED for — answered by 239 (read into two buffers, never read)
  • 23: the line spacing of mail and board bodies — answered by 37 / docs/engine/desktop.md "Mail" (body lines at 48 + 17 r)
  • 23: whether the text code changed in volumes 2-4 — answered by 25 (Outbreak's ccKanjiStrlen counts every %x pair)
  • 37: the desktop's other modes: News, Accessory, Audio, Data — answered by docs/engine/desktop.md "News", "Accessory", "Audio", "Data" (crates/piney-desktop)
  • 37: the event scripts that deliver mail and lock icons — answered by 40, 41
  • 37: the desktop's sound printed, not played — answered by 42, 46
  • 37, 41: DEMO.PRG's title and opening, name entry, TOPPAGE.PRG — answered by 43, 45, 58
  • 41: the scripts' windows on the desktop — answered by 45 (the setup stage draws the event's windows)
  • 41: name entry (NameEntry_Control) — answered by 45
  • 41: the script's movie streams and overlay loads skipped — answered by 49, 52 (streams), 91 (the desktop's overlay and pass)
  • 41: what the setup screen shows during event 1's 59 frames — answered by 45
  • 43: the title's load screen and Option menu stand-ins — answered by 50, 51
  • 43: PSS movie playback and the stream — answered by 49, 52
  • 43: the title music context — answered by 46, 51
  • 43: SetNextData and PlayNextData — answered by 201 / crates/piney-demo/src/opening.rs set_next_data
  • 51: the port's all-sound-off cutting only the voices — answered by BUGS.md (the dungeon music under Helba's theme; all_sound_off_stops_the_music)
  • 58: the field game (modes 5 and 6) — answered by 59
  • 64: nothing calls FieldUi yet — answered by 66
  • 64: the Chaos Gate's menus (28, 57-62, 78, 79) — answered by 68, 96 (62, the gate hack)
  • 64: the talk, trade and shop menus — answered by 70, 73
  • 64: the other tutorials — answered by 68, 75
  • 64: the Key Items, Status, Equipment, PARTY, Gate Out, Log Out and OPTION pages — answered by 71
  • 64: Data Drain's own menus — answered by 102
  • 64: the field objects' menus — answered by 98, 148
  • 64: ccThGameCtrl (cmndTarget, menus from buttons) — answered by 66, 77 (the map button)
  • 64: damage numbers — answered by 79
  • 64: the chat balloon's drawing — answered by 120
  • 64: ccNoiz — answered by 104
  • 64: rotated sprites drawn unrotated; the drain gauge's Gouraud cells — answered by 144
  • 66: the menu buttons not run in eemu — answered by 80 (tools/test_gamectrl_rs.py frames: ccThGameCtrl with its buttons)
  • 66: the menus' target requests (TargetFix, Target, TargetClear) dropped — answered by 70 / crates/piney-game/src/world.rs, area.rs apply them
  • 66: the talk, shop and gate menus and the map button — answered by 68, 70, 77
  • 66: PERSONAL's last row lost the L of Log Out — answered by 68
  • 68: the gate hack (62) — answered by 96
  • 68: GoToArea and ChangeArea go nowhere — answered by 72
  • 68: TransferOut dropped — answered by 129 (towns run effTransfer)
  • 68: the AI orders dropped — answered by 148 (ChatMenu1-3)
  • 68: Party Add made no character — answered by 74, 90, 108
  • 70: the pages still to come: Trade (48, 49), 21, 23, 27, 56 and 50 — answered by 73
  • 70: SetMerchantCamera's changeCamera(3) and (1) not carried out — answered by 76 (the merchant's camera; tools/test_merchcam_rs.py)
  • 71: the run-time's new-game save (skill list zeros, stats 0) — answered by 76 (ccSaveData::Init, NewGame, InitSpcParam; tools/test_save_init_rs.py)
  • 71: what bootParam means beyond Add's greeting — answered by docs/engine/battle.md "The party's bootParam from area to area" (74, 80)
  • 71: what SetActuater(1, 160, 200) means — answered by 232 (the small motor, power 160, 200 ms, the queue)
  • 71: where drainDemo, voice and strWinMode are read — answered by 105 (drainDemo), 89 (voice), 85 (strWinMode, the subtitles)
  • 71: still unported: 62, 66 and 67, 71-73 — answered by 96, 102, 148
  • 73: a member's book use (SpcUseItem) and PresentOther dropped — answered by 196
  • 73: feeding a Grunty (Feed, GruntyGrowth) and World::grunty — answered by 162
  • 73: CalcReal and ChangeEquip dropped — answered by 76 (per-frame CalcReal), 187 (equipment changed in a field stays)
  • 73: set_spc_base_msg not called — answered by crates/piney-fieldui/src/newgame.rs (called by InitSpcParam's port)
  • 73: nothing gets Kite to menus 21, 23, 27, 50 and 56 in Mac Anu — answered by 108, 110 (members in town), 90
  • 77: portals, gimmicks and fountains not fed into the map; the Fairy's Orb's yellow areas — answered by 164, BUGS.md (a_fairys_orb_shows_the_portals)
  • 77: what sets mapHideFlag — answered by docs/engine/map.md (the constructor, RoomSelect, the stairs in GotoNextRoom)
  • 77: Dun Loireag's DrawMap — answered by 97
  • 96: the hacked arrival (GateHackingOut) — answered by 106
  • 96: the gate hack's noise (ccNoiz) — answered by 104
  • 96: gate_hack_anim waits on ghoFlag — answered by 106 (ghoFlag set by the constructor, cleared by GateHackingOut)
  • 98: the doors' palettes for clutType 3 and 4, and their sound ids — answered by 147, 138
  • 98: effOpenTrapBox, effStatueOfGod, effVirusCrystal, effCrush*, the idol's dust ring — answered by 116, 118; effVirusCrystal from ccRtownPC::eventMode remains, in the volumes' entry
  • 98: EntryBreakObject — answered by 140
  • 98: the objects' menus 34-37 and 39, DataDrainMenu (66) — answered by 148, 102
  • 98: the map item step (WaitMap) — answered by BUGS.md (a_fairys_orb_shows_the_portals)
  • 98: the Grunty ride item step — answered by 166
  • 98: DisableThEvent — answered by crates/piney-game/src/world.rs, area.rs (ccDisableThEvent)
  • 98: the party AI's UseItemRequest does nothing in the field — answered by 230
  • 104: ccGameOverNoise — answered by 158
  • 104: which town is game.town 4 — answered by BUGS.md (the console's town 4 is Lia Fail), 260
  • 129: the black screen in the church — answered by 174, BUGS.md (story 11's set-up windows)
  • 129: a merchant's sysopeAct transfer — answered by crates/piney-world/src/merchant.rs sysope_act, 132
  • 129: the stream effects not checked (tools/test_effect_str_rs.py to be written) — answered by 131
  • 135: the fountain's FountainMenu3 pair — answered by 163
  • 135: ccClearSpcCondition, which the bosses' deaths call — answered by 192
  • 183: "Nothing new." — no longer applies: the entry states no question
  • 196: the pad's vibration in town — answered by 232
  • 200: the later titles' menus (five items) — answered by 201
  • 200: the desktop's tables read with Infection's row counts — answered by 209 (typed per-volume tables)
  • 200: what reads the blocks at +0x8432 and +0x8462 and the extension's last 0x100 bytes — answered by 246 (nothing)
  • 210: six trade and shop harness cases fail (errorData) — answered by 214
  • 210: the world, areas, streams and announcements still read the executable — answered by 215, 217
Still unknown
  • (play) [[98]]: the epitaphs (ccEpitaphMsg, Step::Epitaph) and the book viewer (ccThBook, Step::BookStart) are not carried out: crates/piney-world/src/field_world.rs item_step returns false and crates/piney-game/src/area.rs logs "item step not carried out" — using those items shows nothing. - (play) [[77]]: the map button is not held by menuClrWait, ccCheckGtHackAnm or a wiped-out party, and the field and dungeon map is not hidden while ccGame.inBattle (docs/engine/map.md; area_frame in crates/piney-world/src/map has no battle test; check whether ccThMenu's map alpha already hides it) — the minimap in fights. - (play) [[50]], [[51]], [[196]]: Adjust Screen's display offset (Request::DisplayOffset) is dropped (crates/piney-game/src/desktop.rs, world.rs) — the Screen option does nothing. - (play) [[67]]: a member's equipment remark in town (ChangeEquipReport) is dropped (crates/piney-game/src/world.rs) — equipping a member in town. - (play) docs/engine/title.md: the opening's cancel flash is not modelled — skipping the opening stream. - (volumes) [[94]]: the later volumes' staff rolls (stfroll2-4) are not tried; GAPS.md lists Quarantine's staff roll as its own. - (volumes) [[276]]: Mutation's staff roll, and what the desktop does after it (the save for Outbreak's carry-over). - [[9]]: the meaning of mailFlg and reFlg: their writes are ported (docs/engine/desktop.md "Mail"), their readers are unnamed (docs/engine/text.md Unknown). - [[23]]: how the GS samples the kt 0 and kt 2 sprites, whose sx and su differ by a texel; the renderer assumes top-left sampling (docs/engine/font.md Unknown). - [[23]]: which view and scale the font layer uses (docs/engine/font.md Unknown). - [[23]]: where the ccKanji texture sits in VRAM; the port re-uploads one scratch page per kanji (docs/engine/font.md Unknown). - [[120]]: the balloon's text is drawn through a 128-row Init(3, 24) texture, where the game's chat kanji is Init(2, 16); one line looks the same. - [[45]]: the kana, symbol and kanji grids of name entry, not reachable in the US build. - [[251]], [[253]]: whether the unused selector had music, or drew a copyright, of its own; no code survives. - [[77]]: what sets WORLD_MAN.specialRoom (+0x160) beyond the known rooms (docs/engine/map.md Unknown). - [[77]]: RT01ICONPOS and the pulse angles are the game's globals; the port starts a new area's pulse at 0 (docs/engine/map.md Unknown). - [[144]]: a rotated cell's off-screen test reads a leftover width and height; the port takes 0 (docs/engine/map.md Unknown). - [[144]]: the menu's turn uses f32 sine and cosine, not the VU's; a sixteenth of a pixel at most. - [[73]]: PresentMenu's states 20-22 and BreedingMenu's 23 with index 0 never set; a trader of neither kind reads a stale register, as in the game. - [[71]]: past the equipment tables the port reads zeros where the game reads what follows (game UB). - [[94]]: ccBufferSampling (+0x138c) and the second mask (+0x1358) are created and never used, as in the game. - [[70]], [[71]], [[73]]: the menus keep their own copy of rand() (PcMenu among them), not the world's shared generator; FieldUi::set_rand is not wired. - [[142]]: the dogs' menu draws talkNum from rand(), not from the town's ccRand. - [[94]]: the generators' state at the ending (the random characters) differs from a console's run. - [[66]], [[76]]: a menu a button opens stops the camera and player a frame later than the game, and camera 3 appears a frame later (the menus run after the world's tasks). - [[71]]: the equipment, party-add and Controller tasks finish one frame later than the shortest the game can take (disc timing). - [[69]]: menu 79 bumps its wait twice a frame, so Kite is mid warp-out at the change, as in the game. - [[96]]: after a success, proccess stays 2 until the area changes; how many frames the game shows it. - [[58]]: whether the top page task's first Main runs in the frame it starts (docs/engine/toppage.md Unknown). - [[58]]: how the fader behaves while the system menu freezes the layers (docs/engine/toppage.md Unknown). - [[58]]: the set-up passes run at once and draw nothing; their timing is not modelled frame by frame. - [[174]]: whether the game's info_now on the set-up screen places its lines where SetupScreen does. - [[174]]: the tail of the last window before stream 10 is not timed. - [[43]]: the boot check's timing and the stream's end-flash alignment are inferred. - [[51]]: LOAD_FRAMES: the real time between ChangeRequest and ccSetupDesktop's ccAllSoundOff (docs/engine/title.md Unknown). - [[71]]: the OPTION helper's CD load, in real frames. - [[186]]: how long the game's loads take, and so how much of the loading display's fade and logo a player sees. - [[186]]: the load request's +0x18, which also stops the display; its setter is not traced. - [[226]]: whether the PS2 shows the recall's fades black too; every checked step matches the game. - [[237]]: the port's quit prompt uses the desktop's window, where the field's own confirmations use the field menu's. - [[247]]: nothing tells the player that a finished part's save loads in the next; New Game from a previous volume's save is not checked from a build (the import itself is the save's entry). - [[68]]: the gate-target fix has no eemu check of its own. - [[196]]: the present's remark is not run in a town with three members. - [[100]]: the minimap's markers are not checked frame by frame; tools/test_map_rs.py covers the rule. - [[77]]: the map for the special dungeon types 8 and 9 and for story rooms of type 15 and up is not checked; labels are compared as strings only. - [[158]]: the game-over noise's draws are not checked frame by frame against ccGameOverNoise; the counts are tested. - [[159]]: ccMessage's rate-2 drawing (its button's pulse); the harness hooks it. - [[70]]: no run-time shot of a shop; covered by the checks. - [[75]]: no shot shows the world moving under a tutorial menu. - [[148]]: the object menus against the game's pictures; the checks are frame by frame in eemu. - [[94]]: the staff roll's pixels and the ending song's start and stop, not compared. - [[104]], [[179]], [[190]]: the field noise's, the crisis town's and the spells' screen noise's pixels; no capture. - [[193]]: the ALL PORTALS OPEN banner against the game's pictures. - [[194]]: the panels' shake and the protect marks against the game's pictures.