Mike! I want to ask you...

[guest]

Ok, good news:

I found a way to coax unpklite to unpack the CD version of Lemmings.

Turns out all I needed to do is to insert the "PKLITE" signature text at the place where unpklite expects to find it.  And then unpklite will decompress it just fine.

Almost sounded like someone trying (clearly none too successfully, I might add) to thwart you from decompressing the thing.  What an idiot.

Oh, and the mystery of the origin of this "CD version" of the game is solved as soon as I run it.  If you read the scrolling credits at the game's main menu screen, you'll see that there's an extra line that isn't there in the original Lemmings.  The new credit comes after the normal "PC Music by Tony Williams",  and reads "Code Maintenance by Mark Tsai".  (Oh, and also it was copyrighted 1995 rather than the standard 1991.)  Hmm....

So that explains it!  As some of you may recall, Mark Tsai is one of the co-authors who wrote the official "solution book" to Lemmings.  And that the book came with a CD with some extra levels (from ONML).  This must be the origin of this "CD version" of Lemmings!

What I didn't expect though, was that Mark Tsai was actually apparently given a role in making changes to the code of the program (ie. "code maintanence").  I would only hope that he wasn't responsible for the change in falling distance--of all the people on this planet, the guy who wrote the official solution book should know better than that!

So, hey, Mike, any comments on our buddy Mr. Tsai?

[guest]

Ok, I hacked and fixed the CD version of Lemmings.

You can download it at

http://www.geocities.com/guestlevels/lemmings/vgalemmi.zip

Just put it in the directory where you installed the CD version of Lemmings.  Run by typing "vgalemmi.exe" instead of "lemmings.exe".

I've tested it on "Steel Works" and verified that it has the correct falling distance (ie. same as the original, "floppy" version of Lemmings).

Note that this EXE will work with the floppy version of the game as well, and you might want to do that so you get the music fix (no annoying repeating of the first music when you restart).

[guest]

One final note:

You might now think that this CD version of Lemmings is also the origin of CustLemm.

But that's probably not the case since the size of CustLemm EXE is significantly smaller than the CD version of the Lemmings EXE when decompressed.  The decompressed CD EXE is over 100k, while CustLemm, which is not compressed, is only around 83k.  Moreover, the scrolling credits in CustLemm does not include the "Code Maintenance by Mark Tsai" line that the CD version does, and the copyright in CustLemm is 1991 rather than the CD version's 1995.

So it's still a little bit of a mystery where CustLemm came from and how it acquired the increased falling distance.

[DragonsLover]

Thank you so much quest!

Oh, and have you looked about the cheat and version number codes?

[Mike]

Mark created the Holiday Lemmings series, so would have had the source to enter level order, traps etc. Also to make final builds.

As to why we change things when a level doesn work... this is a fact of life in games with dead lines. A level that works on the Amiga one, might not work on the PC one for many reasons. In those days games were coder completly in assembler, and youd try and convert fomr 68000 to x86 in your head. This means understanding fully all the flags, branches and conitions that each langauge had. This usually works fine. But "sometimes" through the whole program (100,000 of lines worth), a condition is missed, or several that look to work, have knock on effects that you cant determain just by readin it.

So, this means when most levels work and a few dont. What do you do. Russell decided the simplest and quickest way was to change the fall count. It had minimal impact of the levels made. In L2 on the SNES, I had one level that didnt work right - for exactly the same reasons - and I opted to detect that level and change fallign for that one case. This isnt always possible...If there are many levels with problems, its just not practicle. And we certainly didn't think it would become an issue 15 years later!  :mikelaugh:

[Timballisto]

Wait a sec... I design my levels using lemmings original for testing...maybe you all should use the fixed custlemm for my levels.  I hope my levels worked despite the bug.

[Jase]

Hey I got a question...

WHY THE HELL IS THE DEVIL EXIT IN THE MAC VERSION SO SCREWED UP?

heheh im just asking cos IT IS UGLY!

roflcopter

ciao

[DragonsLover]

Mike, why Lemmings 3 doesn't work well with the Sound Blaster card type?

Do you know hot to patch or correct the game?

[ccexplore]

Is this referring to running it in DOSBox, or without DOSBox?

If it's in DOSBox, Mike won't be able to answer.  It'd probably be a DOSBox problem.  It's well known that DOSBox makes an effort at emulating the hardware but the emulation isn't perfect and generally not cycle-accurate.

If it's outside DOSBox, it's still likely that Mike won't be able to answer, especially if you're talking about running it in Window's DOS window.  Again, it just isn't the same as running it in true DOS.

If you're actually having a problem running it in the real DOS that the game was written to be run on, then maybe Mike can answer.  Or maybe not, since as far as I know he was never the one who's ever involved on programming the sound and music of any of the lemmings games.

[Mike]

Actually... I did help with the sound in Lemmings3

It does actually support soundblasters, gravis and Midi (from what I remember). It'll only work in "real" DOS, win9x (perhaps ME). I have no idea about DOS Box.

You'll have to use the DOS setup program. However, that was written in Pascal, and may have some problems on modern machines; theres a thread about that somewhere on here.

Without running the setup program, you'd have to manually set the environment variables up...

Heres the original thread....
http://eng-forum.lemmingswelt.de/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=tech_id;action=display;num=1101044298

I cant remember shows sound engine we used, but it drove the guy doing it mad! So I was asked to help out and get it running with him. I then did the installer and sound detection stuff...

[Mike]

I just installed L3 to see if sound would work, and with DosBox it does. &#A0;You will have to fix the installer though using that link.

Right out the box, it doesnt appear playable. There is a V1.53 that is supposed to work though.


http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/comp_list.php?showID=721&letter=L

[DragonsLover]

In fact, there's the same problem on Lemmings 3 v1.53. This is because of the CD version. When playing the game using the CD, the Sound Blaster Music is replaced by the CD tracks, and the game works fine!

There's also the possibility to play the game without any sound, this works too.

So, the corrected installer should make the game to work perfectly? That way, I'll try!

By the way, I remembered this thread, it's just that I didn't know it was the installer that crashed the game, but the game itself. Thanks!

[DragonsLover]

Ok, I want to come back on a point.

Now, Lemmings and Customized Lemmings are hacked. LemEdit too, it's ok for it. But what about:

- Oh no! More Lemmings
- Save The Lemmings
- The Lemmings Companion
- Xmas Lemmings 1991
- Xmas Lemmings 1992
- Holiday Lemmings 1993
- Holiday Lemmings 1994

These ones aren't hacked!

All I want is to get ALL versions to be ORIGINAL like the AMIGA ones! I'm dreaming to have all the versions to be corrected. I want the safe fall distance to be 60 for each one, VERSIONNUM and CHEAT CODE should work too, I also want the menu of selecting the type of the PC included, the music to be perfect and the skills menu should appear too at the bottom of the screen when not playing the game under Windows (for the older Windows versions).

I want ALL this for EACH version. Is THAT possible?

Sorry if I insist , but I really want for these games to be perfect. If there's a possibility to improve the games, why not doing the maximum for them all?

If hacking all this could be too long, then can you send me the program you use to hack Lemmings (pklite)? Ok, I'm not a pro with the programming, but I could try!

Please!

[ccexplore]

All I want is to get ALL versions to be ORIGINAL like the AMIGA ones! I'm dreaming to have all the versions to be corrected. I want the safe fall distance to be 60 for each one

The safe fall distance is never really 60 in the original version (even on the Amiga).  It has nothing to do with hacking or not hacking.  It's basically a bug in how they track the falling distance, so that even though the game tries to look for the number 60, the calculation can be off causing slightly higher numbers to still pass the test.

It's true that supposedly some of the games uses the number 63 instead 60.  At least Mike seems to think that for ONML they purposely changed the distance to 63, even though on my copy it's still 60.  So as you can see, we don't even know at this point what the intended numbers are for all the different games.

, VERSIONNUM and CHEAT CODE should work too, I also want the menu of selecting the type of the PC included, the music to be perfect and the skills menu should appear too at the bottom of the screen when not playing the game under Windows (for the older Windows versions).

I have no idea what the heck the "skills menu" is.  Do you mean the skills toolbar where you select climbers/floaters/etc.?  I have never seen it disappear in DOSBox, or even when playing the game under Windows DOS for that matter.

It's quite possible they might have good reasons to remove the PC-type selection screen on certain versions of the game.  Forcing it back into the games where it is removed might do more harm than good.  Or maybe it'll be okay.  Who knows.

How do you know that VERSIONNUM and CHAET CODE is universal for all these games you listed above?  Doesn't ONML use SLAMRACING for example?  You are assuming way too much about the universality of the cheat codes.  Keep in mind that cheat codes are not meant to be an official feature of the game in the first place, there's no reason they have to work on every game, and there's certainly no reason they have to use the same one for all of them.

If hacking all this could be too long, then can you send me the program you use to hack Lemmings (pklite)? Ok, I'm not a pro with the programming, but I could try!

Please, don't embarass yourself. Seriously, it's not something for the novice.  Actually, even if you were to pay me $1M to do this, I'm still not sure whether I'll be able to figure out all these things you want to change.

-------------------------------

So when's all said and done, the only imperfection that's really an imperfection is the music handling, as far as I can tell.  I don't want to promise anything on that, and it's certainly very low priority, but maybe I'll look into it sometime in the not-so-near future.

[Shvegait]

I have no idea what the heck the "skills menu" is.  Do you mean the skills toolbar where you select climbers/floaters/etc.?  I have never seen it disappear in DOSBox, or even when playing the game under Windows DOS for that matter.

This happens to me (skill bar disappears. It's still functional, but there are no graphics there.) on Windows 98 (DOS) with the original Lemmings, along with XMas Lemmings 91 and XMas Lemmings 92. However, the skill bar DOES appear in CustLemm, Holiday Lemmings 93, and Holiday Lemmings 94 (I haven't tried ONML on that computer yet). So there appears to be some discrepancy as to how that is handled...