A brand new way to play Seihou 1: Shuusou Gyoku
Someone on GitHub called "nmlgc" is carrying out a couple of projects related to "old-school Touhou". One of them is "ReC98": this aims to take the PC-98 Touhou games and reconstruct their source code from scratch, which would make a lot of things possible, including patches to modify those games and even a whole system of community-based automatic patching in the vein of the THCRAP for the Windows titles. The other one, which is what I'm here to talk about, is "GIAN07": https://github.com/nmlgc/ssg
秋霜玉 / Shuusou Gyoku. Contribute to nmlgc/ssg development by creating an account on GitHub.
GIAN07 is a fan-made re-release of Seihou 1: Shuusou Gyoku, developed in an effort to make some good use of the original game's source code (which is already publicly available, even though in an incomplete form, unlike the source code for PC-98 Touhou titles) and fix its compatibility issues on modern Windows systems (it was made on Windows 2000, so trying to run the original game on pretty much anything from Windows Vista onward will give you problems). It also includes the option to add and select custom music packs to listen to the soundtrack during gameplay, featuring perfectly cut loops and CD sound quality instead of having to rely on the original raw MIDI files.
The person in charge of this project, "nmlgc", also released several music packs with recordings of the game's soundtrack made to replicate the sound of the Roland SC-88Pro synthesiser that ZUN used to compose it. These music packs include both the original and arranged soundtrack, as well as both recordings made by "nmlgc" themself with the Sound Canvas VA plug-in and the already existing recordings of real hardware by "Romantique Tp": https://github.com/nmlgc/BGMPacks/releases/tag/2024-10-05
Shuusou Gyoku's original and arranged soundtrack, recorded through the synth that ZUN wrote them on, cut into loops, and packaged for in-gam
The instructions to install the GIAN07 version of Shuusou Gyoku (as well as all the links to get everything you may need) are all available on PC Gaming Wiki [https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Shuusou_Gyoku], but I'll try to copy them all here anyway.
First of all, I'm not sure if this is strictly needed, and it doesn't appear on PC Gaming Wiki, but here's the original release of the game: https://archive.org/details/seihou-1-shuusou-gyoku
Seihou Project
Download and extract the ZIP folder. You'll find the executable file (although it's very likely its name shows up as "èHëöã "), an English version of D3DWindower, and only one subfolder (whose name will probably show up as "ǮNjÇØ") containing the game's prologue and messages from the members of "Shunsatsu Sare Dou?" and also ZUN.
Then, download the latest version of GIAN07 by nmlgc from GitHub: https://github.com/nmlgc/ssg/releases/latest
A minor maintenance release with no new features, but most notably updating the Windows 98 build to SDL 3. The remaining changes: The game
Extract its contents to the same folder as the original game's executable file. You'll find it includes the executable file of GIAN07 (or rather, four different versions of that file) and a subfolder called "bgm". The latter is where the game will look for music files to play during gameplay.
Download from here whatever music packs you wish to listen to during gameplay: https://github.com/nmlgc/BGMPacks/releases/latest
Shuusou Gyoku's original and arranged soundtrack, recorded through the synth that ZUN wrote them on, cut into loops, and packaged for in-gam
The differences between the various music packs are a rather complicated matter, but the link above includes a very summarised explanation of this by nmlgc themself (along with another link to their blog where they provide an even more detailed and technical explanation). In any case... Grab all the music packs you chose to download, and move them to the "bgm" subfolder.
And now, everything is ready to play Shuusou Gyoku on modern versions of Windows. Run the GIAN07 executable file (I'm not sure if this is necessary, but just in case, run the game as administrator), go to the "Config" option on the Main Menu, then go to the "Sound / Music" option on the Config menu, and lastly go to "BGMPack [ . . . . ]". There you'll see the list of music packs you saved in the "bgm" subfolder, from which you can choose one.
Now that I've told you about nmlgc's GIAN07 project and how to play it with its music as it was originally intended to be heard, it's time to talk about how I personally like to play this game and listen to its soundtrack, and how you can do the same. But I'll need a whole second post for that.