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The 8th part of Questionnaire ("When did you discover Touhou?") is really surprising. If the statistic is true (most of the participants answered honestly), a big percent of fans who knew about Touhou since PC-98 remained, but most of the fans from the Golden Age (PCB-UFO) didn't participate in voting. Did they move to other fandoms? But still characters and soundtracks from EoSD-SA are most highly ranked, Most of voters discovered Touhou in the period from 2015 to 2020. So it might explain, why for several years in each voting around one third of participants had not voted before (this year again). But it can't explain some strange results from previous years. There are some other interesting moments. Around half of the fans have not played most of the mainline games. In "Touhou original game competitions" (question 11) there are UDoALG (the latest "Phantasmagoria" (which is not a "Phantasmagoria")) and Soku, but no AoCF. More than one third of participants discovered Touhou via Youtube, so it maybe the best instrument for popularization. Less than half of the fans likes Touhou Fandom (IMO, it is a problem), even Touhou games are more loved.

News round-up Oh wait, there's nothing really interesting happening in this game. Mostly event reruns and more character alts being shoved into the EoSD (A6) universe (we just got EoSD Youmu and Yuyuko these days...) At least the DanKagu successor has been released, even if I have not heard anything of that game ever since... End notes Just as I realized, I have not updated this thread for over half a year. To be frank, with all the boring bullshit and/or repetitive activities going on in the game, I really did not feel like there was any incentive to keep going. Things got so bad that I even got to the point where I am skipping story and event cutscenes - something I would have thought unacceptable to do just a year prior. I still keep playing the game, but by now it is mostly due to sunken cost fallacy. Meanwhile, I have tried out other games, and I am just 1 step away from completely uninstalling it and saying "Fuck it, I'll just go play Azur Lane instead" (which I already started since May - oh, the irony; going from mocking the game to playing it unironically...). Because at least that other one keeps being interesting, and when making the transition from LW, you realize how backwards the Touhou-themed game is (also yes, AL players are rather spoiled and always eating well - from huge cast to events that contain mini-games to a more interesting way of pulling, upgrading and enhancing characters, and an abundance of Live2D animations that are more than just a floating GIF). It may also be a bias on my side, but I would still say that AL is a superior game to LW. But that may also be from being an independent IP, supported by a big company that can pump tons of money into it to make the game as flashy as possible. Surely, it is very silly, stupidly hyper-sexualized game at some points, and with some stuff that you would prefer not to have been in your game, but it is still much more entertaining than whatever is going on right now in LW (even if I still have my love for Touhou as a series and universe). I kept making jokes earlier this year that LW earned its 2 million players after 3 years. Meanwhile, AL got 5 million players ON THE JP SERVER ALONE in a matter of weeks after release. So there's that... A game that just came from a non-existent until that moment IP managed to beat a game made under the logo that had 20 years of fame and recognition. Not that it makes the game automatically superior, just an interesting bit of data to put into perspective. Anyway, good luck and see you another time. Peace!

You like retro things? Yeah... Are you one of those people that go out of their way to install 20+ year old games? You know you are masochist right? This is why i decided to make a guide in how to run PC98 games, to save you time. and because i promised it Let's begin! 1) Required programs: We are going to use RetroArch for this guide. You can get it at https://www.retroarch.com/ If you are on Linux, please use the version found here https://flathub.org/es/apps/org.libretro.RetroArch because it has some things we will need that other versions lack. And disable flatpak sandboxing, see my Touhou on Linux guide for steps. Of course, we are going to need PC98 games for this. You can get them in a familiar place, and if you are good searching inside archive.org. I recommend that you place your games in a fixed location, like for example create a Games folder and place them there. If you want to know why and what RetroArch is: In simple terms, it's a fronted (like the packaging of your ice cream) that is made to provide an easy to use User Interface for almost every emulator in the planet, without sacrificing advanced settings for the looks. It's like the king of emulators. 2) Installing the emulator: As we know, RetroArch just facilitates installing the actual emulator. Go to Main Menu, Online Updater, Core Downloader. Then, scroll down until you find NEC - PC-98 (Neko Project II Kai) and click it. If you don't see the Kai version, try out the version without the Kai. 3) First Run: Now, to finish setting things up we need to run the games. Click on Main Menu, Load Core and select NEC - PC-98 (Neko Project II Kai). Then, click on Load Content and browse to the file location where your games are and launch a game. You will see a black screen with some cryptic techy text, ignore it and press F1. Scroll until you see Add to Favorites. This will provide you easier access to the game, it's going to save you time. Then, scroll until you see Core Options, and make sure the settings displayed match the ones in this image, then exit with backspace: 4) Enjoy! It was that easy. It may seem too simple, but figuring out the right options for a smooth experience took me a while, it's better to have them centralized in one place. Some small advice, do the Add to Favorites for every game and save the image above for easier setup (i don't remember if RetroArch saved the setup for all the games in the emulator). And to make the game load faster use the built in shortcut for Fast Foward in the L key. But you should enable a shortcut for the better version of Fast Foward. You can find it in Input, Hotkeys, Fast Foward (Toggle) Did your computer explode??? If you have any issues, please tell me and i will do my best to help you. Same if you know something to improve this guide.

Some things I want to add. Generally speaking, if your pc is... quite old or not very good, tinker around with the cpu clock multiplier, most of them can run the emulator on 48 or 32 in my case, makes the game just work better overall. If your pc for any reason cannot handle a multiplier of 24, I would recommend switching to ANEX 86. That emulator is known for having good and stable framerate but, sadly, horrible audio and graphical quality. In the case of touhou, some bullets flash/blink and its really annoying. If you are using neko project without Retroarch, you can setup a option for savestates in the emulator by heading to np21Int.ini and typing "statsave=true" in a new line somewhere. Another option for an emulator if Nekoproject doesn't run would be T98-Next. Runs the first 3 touhous pretty decently in my really old laptop where Nekoproject couldn't. Don't expect much from LLS or MS though, you need a decent system for those.

It's been over 24 hours since the results were published, but only now I got the chance to write something on the topic. Honestly, this year I am very content with the results. Last year, I remember that at first I was a little disappointed by the EoSD stomp over everything, but it was rather understandable given the symbolism of last year (20 years since the beginning of the Windows game series). But this year, it seems like things did not repeat for PCB (Youmu scored 4th place, and Yuyuko scored 10th). Now, I am quite curious to see what next year will bring... (credit for the tables goes to Maribel Hearn, who translated the results at super-speed just after the official publish) Probably one of the most interesting things is the fact our two main characters, Reimu and Marisa, have taken the first two places. I do not when this happened last time, but it must have been quite some time ago. Flan and Koishi are still keeping strong, same with a few more of the SDM cast. I will not say too much about music, because these are results that never change, and probably never will. I think we expect UN Owen, Septette or Hartman to be in the first 5 songs until the heat death of the universe... And on a more personal note, things are going not so bad. The characters I have cheered for seemed to either keep their spot or slightly go up, with some exceptions. At least compared to last year, they are performing a little better. ALSO AKYUU WENT UP BY 1 POSITON, AND KOSUZU BY 4? DAMN, THEY BE DOIN' NUMBERS! I am so proud of them. Big OOF though for Hecatia, and especially Raiko. They deserved more... Anyway, what do you thing about this year's results? Are you satisfied with them? Has any of the characters you have voted for gone upper or lower in the charts? Is there anything you wish could have changed? Tell your thoughts about this edition, and see you until next thread (whenever that may be...)

It's hard for me to be to disappointed in these rankings. We may say a lot of these songs are overrated, but that tends to be in context of all the tracks that don't get their deserved recognition; considered each on their own, every one of these tracks are masterpieces. Nor are occasional changes impossible; Idolatrize World is a relatively recent addition compared to the rest of the top ten, and seems to be there to stay. I'm just happy that some of my favorite tracks are still in the top twenty-five. Basic Overview: Highest Akiyama track is still Broken Moon at #13 Highest PC-98 track is Bad Apple!! at #58 Highest Music Collection track is Greenwich in the Sky at #70 Highest new-to-the-poll track is The Deviants' Unobstructed Light ~ Kingdom of Nothingness at #43 Eight tracks received only one vote each; one from the PC-98 era, six from the fighting game spin-offs, and one that I can't identify (I figure it's a translation confusion; anyone know where "Big Talk" comes from?). Side note, why doesn't Soul's Resting Place have a recorded ranking from the past two polls?

Recently, I have found something really interesting. The Chinese Library of Alexandria of Touhou Doujin content which was also burned several years ago. It had over 10 thousands of different items (For now, Moriya Shrine has less than 1 thousand items). Today I will tell you about Down Touhou Wiki or Down Station. I'll start at the very beginning. In 2012 several large-scale resource sharing websites stopped services one after another. Touhou fan content sharing instantly returned to the era of torrent seeds, and some files have been lost. But misfortunes never come singly. At the end of 2013, TLMC announced that it would stop updating, which meant that no one would collect and organize new files on a large scale (Taimowang (台魔王), the main provider of Touhou fan music resources around that time in China, also disappeared). When the Touhou fan content was facing destruction, in order to protect it, nine persons stood up and established the Down Station with THBWiki support. After the efforts of many people in the first one or two years they went from archives of ancient times to archives of the latest exhibitions, from doujinshi to albums and games, the Down site has gradually become the website with the largest amount of Touhou fan resources, supporting a large number of Touhou fans. However, as time goes by, policy changes on resource sharing websites have caused many resources to become invalid. Faced with such a large number of resources, it takes a lot of effort and time to check the invalid links one by one, find available files, and transfer them to the backup server. In addition, the Down site was originally a website created by someone in a short period of time. The system stability and security were worrying, and the stability of the backup server was also not good. It often self-destructs and downloads fail. For most maintenance personnel, there were more interesting things to do than continuing on the Down station... Of course, the above were not the main reasons for closing the site. The last straw that broke the camel’s back was: In the current copyright environment and the increasingly close relationship between the Chinese and the Japanese fan communities, so they thought it was not appropriate to do something like this site. They thought everyone should use legitimate channels to support fan creators. After that the project was closed. So yes, it was self-destroyed (with THBWiki help) in January of 2018. They promised that they would make a shipping guide, but the site is *down* now. And some content from there may be lost. Now you know what can happen in similar situations, so I hope something like that will not happen with Moriya Shrine. The only Chinese alternatives (I know are left) are lilywhite and thdog. And here comes the punchline. 8 months later (August 18, 2018) in the official magazine of THBWiki there was an article where DoujinStyle was mentioned as one of Touhou sites (in neutral-positive tone). If you didn't know it is a pirate doujin site with Touhou music and games. So THBWiki just advertised a pirate site after they closed their one "because of legal reasons". So The Library was burned for nothing. To be honest, it is quite sad. What do you think about this?