Entry 9

The desktop text: mail, board and news, in English and parody

2026-09-22scriptuitoolingdecomp

Filestools/eemu.pytools/text.pydocs/engine/text.md

The in-game operating system's text is compiled into the overlays as C tables, and the DWARF (6) names every struct. tools/text.py dumps it; the full layouts are on the text page.

The twin tables are Parody Mode, and they are Japanese

Every table has a twin with a p or P suffix. AddMailList__16MailList_controlFv (INF desktop.prg:0x00409800) loads a byte at saveData + 0x842b and uses MailTblp when it is non-zero, MailTbl when it is zero. The DWARF names that byte ccSaveData.parodyFlag - the next one is voice. So the twins are Parody Mode's text, not a language switch.

In the US build the plain tables are English and every parody table is Japanese Shift-JIS. Mail 0 is Power of the Bracelet / 腕輪の力, mail 5 Thank You / 登録完了のお知らせ, and the Japanese bodies I read are ordinary translations of the English ones, not jokes; whether other parody entries differ in content cannot be told from this disc, which has no Japanese normal-mode text to compare with. The US text path sends Shift-JIS through ccGetExtendedCode and draws _ for anything it cannot map, so Parody Mode in the US Infection would presumably show mostly underscores. That is an inference from the code; nobody has set the flag and looked.

Mail replies only exist after start-up

In the executable, MailTbl[n].oneRes and .twoRes - the two replies the player can send - are mostly zero. __sinit_mailtbl.cpp (INF desktop.prg:0x00461c30, 16,472 bytes of straight-line code) copies ReMail[k] into them field by field, moving each word through an FPU register (lwc1/swc1), and mwLoadOverlay runs it through __initialize_cpp_rts when the overlay loads (4).

Rather than hand-map 294 copies, tools/eemu.py is a small EE interpreter - 128-bit registers, integer ALU, every load and store width including lq/sq and lwc1/swc1, branches with delay slots and branch-likely annulling, calls - that runs an overlay's constructor table over a copy of memory, the way __initialize_cpp_rts does. Anything it does not interpret stops the run with the pc. It runs every constructor in all four overlays without stopping. What changes:

After that, 147 of the 326 mails carry two replies (Thanks / There's no need. on mail 8, for instance).

The escapes

ccKanji::Disp (INF SLUS_202.67:0x0015e380, font.cpp) expands a string into an 82-byte buffer in a first pass and draws it in a second:

In the English mail #0 appears 322 times and #1 never; colours are mostly #Y (185) and #B (104, the area addresses: #BΔ Boundless Corrupted Fort Walls). The Δ is Shift-JIS 83 a2, so even the English text relies on the extended-code path for it. The deliberately corrupted mails (Ple%:*( and the sender Au]$) contain # and % as noise, which the renderer will read as escapes like any other.

What is in them

Mail senders in the English table, top of the list: BlackRose 45, Gardenia 25, Sanjuro 24, Piros 24, Natsume 23, Wiseman 22, Mistral 21, Moonstone 19, Rachel 18, Marlo 18, Nuke Usagimaru 17, Balmung 12, Terajima Ryoko 12, Au]$ 10, CC Corporation 8, Helba 6, Lios 6, ROY@BANDAI 3. Several of those characters belong to later volumes, so the table may carry mail for more than Infection; which entries Infection can actually send is not checked.

The news pages are images: each HtmlData names a CCS file and texture (xddn_010::TEX_xddn_010 for "New Transportation System Operational"), and only the headline is text.