tools to make touhou games a bit easier to play (Read 361 times)

[Aeon]

as the name states, some stuff to fix some anachronisms or slightly weird functions of the official touhou games. ranging from "oh neat" to "the game has to be played with this"

all-in-one touhou game hub: touhou launcher
a nice little piece of software that you can launch all the games from, if you have them. has some sorting options, and you can put fangames in. (well actually you can put anything that has an exe in if you want to be launching your browsers and word processors from a touhou launcher) older versions had some consistent crash issues, but it looks like someone else has been updating it pretty recently and it now supports up to 17.5 so it seems solid

rebind keyboard controls: autohotkey
touhou games have just about always offered rebinding support, but only for controllers. no idea how anybody uses them for 2d games, but keyboard rebinding has oft been shirked in the danmaku games. usually this isn't a problem for me, but sometimes i'll have a keyboard where you can't press shift, z, and x at the same time, and my pal has one without working arrow keys. autohotkey is a scripting software that, while it can do many things, excels at easy rebinds and macros. you have to usually write the scripts yourself, but doing so is quite simple. as an example, here's the code for rebinding touhou to use an asd-style of control:

a::x
s::z
d::lshift
i'm almost always running one of these scripts just so i can change what some things on my keyboard do, it's pretty nice


better netplay for touhou 9: adonis
does nothing but makes netplay not only easier but far better in touhou 9. i tried playing with a pal before using adonis, and it had some pretty strong latency, and this solves just about all of that. i figure it would be good to mention here if we end up playing this one

violet detector teleport rebind: nice teleport mod
this is what i meant with the "the game has to be played with this". if you're not familiar, there are a few upgrades you get over the course of violet detector, the most notable of which is a teleport ability. 8 directions and instant, and while a bit disorienting, is very good. however, it's very difficult to use because for some reason it is bound to double press shift. using it is pretty awkward in a tense situation where it would actually be useful, but this mod puts it on the c key. far more natural, in line with other touhou games, and makes the game very fun as you zoom around with camera trickshots

honorable mention: steam remote play
a free thing steam started recently that lets someone join another person's game with some magic super-lightweight streaming and input in realtime. only the host needs to have the game, and it runs so well i played the entirety of hyper light drifter in co-op, not as the host, and it never really messed with me. useful here because you can play antinomy of common flowers with it. fighting games can require a lot of precision so maybe it isn't going to work at a competitive level, but it's quicker than having your pal download the game and hamachi if they don't already have it

honorable mention: touhou patcher
it's worth more than an honorable mention, but i figure everybody already has it in some capacity if you play the games translated. a masterful both software and translation community. has a lot of weird patches too, puts some characters in every game, graphics patches, music patches, etc. kind of snoozing on 17.5 but they're probably just waiting for the full release. also if you are nice in their discord they will give you programming advice so i will vouch for them

[lazulum]

You put a lot of effort into this post, it's extensive and well detailed. I greatly appreciate your efforts and I think this will be a post I reference sometime in the future.

Especially for Touhou 9, never heard of the mods for online play before.

There's a lot here that I have never heard of before, especially that Touhou launcher. That is pretty neat, and looking at the screenshots gave me a lot of reminiscence. Many old fan games that I have forgotten about. It even has the PC-98 games, quite thorough.

These sorts of mods I can see as valuable for older games. Reminds me of how older shumps such as Battle Garegga have weird hitboxes and such.


> honorable mention: touhou patcher
it's worth more than an honorable mention, but i figure everybody already has it in some capacity

First I've hear-

>if you play the games translated
Oh.

I'm just joking, I didn't know about it, would always go and DL the patches manually from the various websites out there. This sort of tool I imagine will come very much in handy.

Again thanks for making this post, very helpful

[spongelevator]

ok wait so there is adonis and adonis2
and I mean adonis2 works most of the time but pofv's english patch also installs adonis
it probably does not matter but what is up with adonis vs adonis2

lol I did not know there was a 16.5 I have been living under rock
I shall remember teleportation patch so I don't have to enter konami code every time I want to do that whenever I reach 16.5

also is that steam one like the "family" sharing
where I can play games that my "family members" have because we are "family"
free gaem

I remember using touhou launcher before though I can only manage to have like 4 touhous on here before I have 10gb space left so I just put the folders in a folder because I like folders
does it make pc98 launch good I hope so
if such is the case then lotus land story can finally be completed without crust

[Aeon]

lazulum
glad to hear that it is helpful, i kinda just threw some things i've used recently together in a list. there's so much touhou stuff, finding a list of a bunch of similar things at once is kind of hard, so i'm hoping this could be of use to some fellow who searches "touhou keyboard rebind" in google or the like

you're right, some patches are particularly good for the older games. i know eosd has at least one to make the visuals more clear and similar to the later games, and if i remember correctly imperishable night has a massive amount of character mods. maybe the older iterations of zun's engine are easier to mod

yeah, wasn't sure if you would know about the touhou patcher. guess it makes more sense to play games in their original translation if you can, but it's a useful little guy for all kinds of things

spongelevator
iiiii do not know the difference between adonis and adonis2 but adonis2 is probably better. didn't know it came with some of the patches though

remote play is kinda like "family" sharing but only lasts as long as the original person is playing instead of the opposite

th launcher does make pc98 launch good if you make sure it knows about neko project. i use t98-next usually instead but it does boot up very fast, basically as fast as any game, through neko in the launcher

also if you guys come across any funky tools or touhou utilities feel free to drop em here, i'll update the op and there will be a fantastic list of illusionary conveniences