I am currently writing yet another replacement engine for DOS Lemmings. Comparing to dosbox I have noticed something that I didn't notice before: on most tilesets, the color of the arrows as my engine reads them from the original game assets and displays them differs from what is shown in dosbox. For example, on marble levels, the arrows should be blue according to the assets, but dosbox displays red arrows.

On the web, I find screenshots with both colors, but unfortunately no indicaion of the emulator used (and I cannot find images from a real VGA screen). I had a copy of Lemmings on our good, old 286 when I was a child, and I remember them being blue, but that's about ~35 years ago, so I wouldn't trust my memory too much here. I suspect a dosbox bug, but there is no way to tell for sure without looking at real hardware.

So, does anyone remember (or better yet: still run a real hardware setup) how those arrows looked on real hardware? There's two screenshots below, on from my engine, the other from real hardware.

Quote from: WillLem on March 20, 2026, 02:46:43 AM

Quote from: gag2000 on March 18, 2026, 05:57:34 PMThank you

No worries!

Went ahead and added a global Direct Drop option in RetroLemmini 2.9.2. I'd been considering doing this anyway to further align RL with Windows '95 Lemmings, your shout just gave me the nudge.

So, DD can now be applied globally to all levels. Players can leave it toggled off if they prefer not to have it active, and it can still be activated on a per-level basis by the level designer. And crucially, its status is written into the replay for compatibility when sharing replays.

Cool. There is direct drop in Windows 95. I probably won't use it much, but I can see the sense in turning it on on a level by level basis.

Quote from: The Tomato Watcher on March 19, 2026, 02:20:14 AMI imported Paradise's music bank into Audacity (since it can work with VOX ADPCM) and found that it steals not only tim5, tim7, and lemming3, but tim3 and tim8 as well! All 5 tracks are recordings from the DOS version (with the AdLib sound card) at 8000 Hz. That's not the rate at which they're played back in the game due to how the soundchip is clocked, which is why the example above sounds a little slow.

I did a little digging into Yun Sung's other games, and found one called "Bomb Kick" from 1998 that steals, among other things, spdbass.mid from Lemmings Paintball!

I took the time to properly rip this one (which wasn't much time, it's the same procedure I took for the Lemmings arcade protoype SFX) so you can more easily make out how they (poorly) abridged the original tune.

Seems to be played through the Sound Blaster AWE32.

Wow, what a mess they've made of the original song! What a bunch of thieves!

Congrats on your sister and on you kaywhyn ! That is indeed a very nice moment for your family, enjoy it.

I remember being an uncle for the 1st time at the age of 12, my sister was older than me and she had kids very early. Found memories.

Just a heads up, that I'm not going anywhere, that I'm still going to be around despite my circumstances with a new addition to the family, but my sister gave birth to her first child as of about 7AM PST (Pacific Standard Time) this morning (March 20, 2026) to a beautiful boy. My parents came to visit her in the hospital this morning.

So, I'm officially an uncle to a nephew! In the same way my parents are finally first time grandparents after more than 70 years.

I'm going to go visit my sister and her newborn son tomorrow at her house when she is discharged from the hospital tomorrow. Pics to come later, either another post here or maybe on my "kaywhyn's blog" topic

Quote from: Proxima on December 09, 2018, 12:34:46 PM"The Crystal Cavern Mark II" doesn't have any traps on Amiga.

Turns out it does, it's just only visible by one pixel until triggered! I also didn't see it until it was too late I was just messing around.

Quote from: gag2000 on March 18, 2026, 05:57:34 PMThank you

No worries!

Went ahead and added a global Direct Drop option in RetroLemmini 2.9.2. I'd been considering doing this anyway to further align RL with Windows '95 Lemmings, your shout just gave me the nudge.

So, DD can now be applied globally to all levels. Players can leave it toggled off if they prefer not to have it active, and it can still be activated on a per-level basis by the level designer. And crucially, its status is written into the replay for compatibility when sharing replays.

Version 2.9.2 hotfix update

Another hotfix. Apologies for the rapid fire releases this week, I'm hoping to get the current dev cycle finalised in time for Easter. This will most likely be the last hotfix for 2.9 unless we find something outright game-breaking.

Anyways, here's the updates for 2.9.2. This can be considered an experimental release - we'll refine and stabilise some of this stuff in the next update:

DMA Levels

• Changed "\!" to "!" in all level titles.
• Unlocked all non-RR99 release rates (the incorrectly locked RRs were due to a cleansing bug in the Editor which was fixed after these levels were originally processed).

Global 'Direct Drop' option

• It's now possible to activate Direct Drop globally in settings, so that any level can be played with 'maximum exit physics' (lems can exit in midair, from any fall distance, and in any state/transition, as long as they make direct contact with the exit's trigger area).
• Level designers can also still activate DD on a per-level basis in the Editor, and levels which specify it as active will override the global setting.
• DD status is written into replays for cross-compatibility when sharing replays with other users. Users who have DD deactivated are notified in the window caption ('Direct Drop Active') if they are playing back a DD-active replay.

Hold Alt + LMB to assign

• This is an experimental feature for now, but if people like it we'll keep it in. Basically, holding Alt and keeping the left-mouse-button pressed allows skills to be assigned to any lemming within the cursor. This is fantastic for making repeat assignments of the same skill in real-time (it makes We All Fall Down a breeze!), but it fires very quickly so does require some care. It will probably be made optional if kept, and the mechanism itself may need some refinement. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Bugfixes

• Release Rate sound pitch is now the same during a replay as it is when changing the RR in-game.

A reminder of what's new as of 2.9.

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Get the latest version here.

Quote from: kaywhyn on March 20, 2026, 02:19:37 AMthe SuperLemmini/RetroLemmini conversions that are based on the Lemmini version of the pack, like MobiLems v6, shouldn't have locked RR's for any of the levels since locking the RR isn't possible in Lemmini even though it is possible to have a locked RR in both SuperLemmini and RetroLemmini.

The locked RRs for all these packs was happening due to a cleanse bug in the Editor. Thankfully, it's an easy fix to correct them all using RegEx in Notepad++

I've now triple-checked everything in all packs for:

"locked = True" when it should be "False" - all fixed
"locked = False" but "maxRR" is the same as "minRR", which also causes the RR to be locked - all fixed

And, of course, the cleanse bug is fixed in the Editor so this shouldn't happen again when converting/cleansing packs in the future!

So I mentioned that I properly ripped the Arcade Lemmings samples in another topic, then realized I never actually uploaded them here! Oops!

The sampled sound effects in LB999's download have some clicks and pops, which is why I made this rip. Attached are the game's samples converted to WAVs via Audacity (ArcadeLemmingsSampleRips.zip) and the original VOX ADPCM samples copied directly from the game's ROM (ArcadeLemmingsVOX.zip).