[WIN/LINUX] English Patch with ThCRAP, Plus V-Sync Patch, All From Within Steam

Overview

Getting Steam to run Mountain of Faith from the ThCRAP launcher and pointing said launcher to the V-Sync patch isn’t all that difficult, but I figured I’d make this guide to help make the process of playing Mountain of Faith in English with minimal input lag and a custom window size a more or less a straightforward, step-by-step process.!!! Keep in mind, however, that getting the V-Sync patch to work correctly seems to require an original “th10.exe” from the CD version of Mountain of Faith. It won’t work right with the .exe Steam gives you. You can still play the game in English without this, of course. This solution works for both Windows and GNU/Linux with Proton.

Step 1: Getting ThCRAP

ThCRAP (Touhou Community Reliant Automatic Patcher) is a fantastic ongoing creation of hard work and genius that allows pretty much all the official Touhou games to be played in multiple different languages, including English. It can install other patches that aren’t related to language, as well, such as retextures and the like. Its methods don’t involve replacing any of the game’s original files, either, which makes things much cleaner.

It’s recommended to get the regular version of ThCRAP, which you can use to launch every official Touhou game from, without needing to download the same patch for each game, but for the sake of portability and an easier time with the whole ThCRAP -> V-Sync Patch -> MoF chain, I’m going to mainly cover the standalone version of ThCRAP. With this solution, you won’t even have to open the “scary” text-based gui for anything.

You can get the standalone patch from ThCrap’s standalone patch page; just search for it. Once there, look for “Touhou 10 -Mountain of Faith-“.

Step 2: Throwing all of Mountain of Faith Into a Subfolder, and Unzipping ThCrap

After you downloaded the ThCRAP standalone zip, right-click Mountain of Faith in Steam and hit Properties -> Local Files -> Browse Local Files. Make a new folder in there, and name it whatever you want. I just called it “th10” again. Drag everything from the folder you’re in into that new folder. This step has to be done because we can’t have two files named “th10.exe” in the same folder, yet we will need two files to be named “th10.exe” for this whole thing to work.

Open the .zip you got with 7Zip or whatever you use, and extract it all to the original game directory(…SteamAppsCommonth10).

Step 3 (Optional): Getting the V-Sync Patch (Requires Original th10.exe From Disc Version)

Unfortunately, getting the V-Sync patch to work requires the game executable from the regular disc version instead of the Steam version. I’m not sure why this is; it might be that there’s some kind of DRM in the Steam version’s exe preventing the patch from running, or the patch is expecting certain hex values in certain places in th10.exe and can’t find them. Whatever the case, if you don’t have that original .exe, you’re gonna miss out on lag reduction and custom window sizing (the default size is really small, so you’ll likely have to deal with low-res fullscreen).

I probably shouldn’t hand the original .exe around, so you’ll have to find that yourself, if you don’t already have it.

Once aquired, rename “th10.exe” in your subfolder to something like “th10_steam.exe” and just drag the original version’s “th10.exe” into the subfolder from the disc or wherever you have it.

Download the V-Sync patch from Touhou Wiki’s “Game Tools and Modifications”, just search that up. Go down the list until you find “Vsync Patches”. Hit download under the section title, and extract the .zip to it’s own folder somewhere. Then, go to its “vpatch_rev7” folder and move “vpatch.exe“, “vpatch.ini” and “vpatch_th10.dll” to your subfolder you created in Mountain of Faith’s install directory. You can delete the vpatch folder you downloaded if you don’t plan on using this patch for any of the other games any time soon.

Open up “vpatch.ini”, and consider making the following changes:

• Change “enabled” under [Window] to 1 instead of 0
• For 1080p screens, change width to 1280 and height to 960 to make the 4:3 window nice and big without having to deal with the problems fullscreen would introduce. For my 4k screen, I’ve found 2667 width and 2000 height make the window as big as possible without it getting covered by the taskbar.
• Change vsync to 1 instead of 0

Step 4: Renaming ThCRAP So Steam Launches It, and Pointing ThCRAP to the Right .exe

Rename both “th10 (thpatch-en).exe” and “th10 custom (thpatch-en).exe” from your main folder, where Mountain of Faith used to be (…SteamAppsCommonth10), to “th10.exe” and “custom.exe” respectively. Steam expects these .exe names.

Finally, go into the ‘thcrap’ folder, then edit “games.js”. This is either going to be just inside the ‘thcrap’ folder, or in “thcrapconfig”.

Change “”th10”: “../th10.exe”,” to point to the V-Sync patch. If you don’t have the original CD .exe for the V-Sync patch to use, just make it point to the ‘th10.exe’ that steam gave you from the start. Both of these should be in the subfolder you made, which holds all of the original game files and the V-Sync patch files. When looking at the paths below, omit the first and last quotation marks, and replace [*YOUR SUBFOLDER*] with the subfolder you made’s name.

• (POINT TO vpatch.exe): “”th10”: “../[*YOUR SUBFOLDER*]/vpatch.exe”,”
• (POINT TO th10.exe (in case vpatch can’t be used): “”th10”: “../[*YOUR SUBFOLDER*]/th10.exe”,”
• Change the Custom path to “”th10”: “../[*YOUR SUBFOLDER*]/custom.exe””

Roughly what the code would look like if you want to use the V-Sync patch:

Or without using vpatch:

If you do everything right, your main folder should look something like this:

This same general process should work with Subterranian Animism, Undefined Fantastic Object, Double Spoiler, Great Fairy Wars, Ten Desires and Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom, though I haven’t tested it with any of them yet. Though not on Steam, it should also work with Perfect Cherry Blossom, Imperishable Night, Phantasmagoria of Flower View and Shoot the Bullet. For Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, some extra steps involving Locale Emulator will need to take place for the game to run. Also, because the way the paths for this are set up, this will work fine with Wine for GNU/Linux and Proton. I’ve found that in my case, the game would only launch if I renamed thcrap_update.dll in the thcrap folder to something else, so thcrap doesn’t check for updates. For some reason, that just wouldn’t work right in Proton for me.

Other Possibly-Useful Things

• If using a controller, consider mapping ‘bomb’ to a button you can always have your finger on (like RB/R1), so you can bomb with minimal delay if you’re about to be hit.
• This probably goes without saying, but for a controller, use the d-pad and not the analog stick. If the game can’t take certain inputs on your controller, try AntiMicro to map your buttons to keyboard keys. If your dpad is horrible (360 controller), consider just using the keyboard.
• When training for a no-continues run, it will save a lot of time to go through the game once with continues and then use the practice mode to get better at indivdual stages, versus constantly going through the first few stages just to have another shot at learning a part you’re stuck on.