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