User blog:RottenBlock/32-Bit System 3.0 EXE, Rance 4.1/2, etc

After making my post about SCO files the other day, I went off to do what I figured would be only a few minutes of work on an entirely different project, preliminary research on the Alicesoft hint disks for the wiki. What I ended up finding was the abanonded, Alicesoft-related work of an emulator programmer named Takeda Toshiya. One of these projects was a 32-bit version of the System 3.0 EXE, which would allow Rance 4.1 and 4.2 to run on modern Windows systems without the need for a virtual machine!

One problem: the translation injector created for Rance 4.1/2 by SomeLoliCatgirl only works with the 16-bit app, and SomeLoliCatgirl hasn't been seen online in at least three years. I can't even shoot them a PM at the Hongfire forums, their former stomping grounds, because the forum has been collapsing for months and PMs outright don't work.. But more on that in a minute.

Toshiya's Alicesoft work can be found here. Because the page is abandoned, he's set it up to look blank until you scroll down. Toshiya's workcan give us three major advantages that we didn't have before: Now, I'll be frank: doing work to get the already-operational Rance 4.1 and 4.2 working on modern systems just to sidestep the virtual machine doesn't strike me as a great time investment. I will be poking around Little Vampire, but unless I find something that makes restoring 4.1/2 look like a breeze, I probably won't be touching it. Anyone who does want to restore the game would want to try any of the following approaches.
 * Working 32-bit System 1, 2 and 3.0 EXEs, allowing older games that were never ported to be played on modern Windows.
 * MIDI support for certain games. Our localized versions have relied on _inmm to simulate CDs for CD audio, and while that's arguably superior this is still interesting, and helpful if any of the listed games don't have CD audio to simulate.
 * Open source for the above. Among other benefits, this could allow for easier decoding of the SCO files I was discussing in my last post, or even upwards of the creation of a decompiler for Sys1-3, though I admit the latter is a little outside my depth.
 * Creating a new text injector setup for the 32-bit app.
 * Direct modification of the SCO files, as discussed in my previous post.
 * Creating a decompiler using Toshiya's system 3 source code, which could later be used on other projects.