Arrows can also be edited to be black (mimicking the Sega Genesis style of arrows).

Thanks for the info, then my memory is wrong. Nah, I am fine with keeping them blue, I am just curious. Actually, my hypothesis was that Lemmings DOS may be using VGA / EGA read mode 1 to mask out pixels that have black (= no terrain) below them, and that maybe dosbox may have an emulation bug there. But, obviously, I have not gone through the pain of tracking down and disassembling the corresponding code yet (although I have disassembled parts of the binary), and I figured that I'd just rather ask if anyone has more fresh data on how the DOS version actually looked than my 35 year old childhood memory

The arrows are red/yellow on DOS Lemmings.  It's not entirely clear why, but maybe reading/writing all the bitplanes for one-way arrows was too much for the PCs they wanted the game to run on.

Do they need to be red on your remake?  How far down this rabbit hole do you want to go?  Without disassembling the game engine and digging into how VGA hardware works, you won't get all the edge cases right.  If you don't care about handling custom levels, you could probably ignore the edge cases and make it just good enough so that the official levels look how they did in the real game engine.

On Amiga Lemmings, the color of the arrows is not altered.  I think if they could have managed this on the DOS version then they would have.

I imagine the following possibilities:

All players can control all lemmings but each player has a limited set of skills, so players must communicate and co-operate to maximise each player's skill usage.

Same again, except each player can only control a certain skill type or types. Again, communication would be required. Perhaps the players don't know what skills the others have, so must communicate to find out.

Multiple exits, multiple teams, players can only control one team, teams can only exit in their own exit, levels have a time limit so players must work together to make sure all teams have made it to their exit.

A mix of the above within the same game could work very well, perhaps as different modes that players can choose, or a random assortment so players don't know what's coming next and take each challenge as it comes. Anyone have any more ideas or suggestions? I'm very interested to see what people come up with.

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.