Post by: finlay on June 01, 2011, 05:36:07 PM
I do have screenshots of the rest of the levels in Fun but I will have to stitch them together, which is what takes up all the time, essentially.
Post by: Mr. K on June 03, 2011, 02:17:45 AM
I've made a copy of the 12-level Mac demo I have, called the "Lemmings Mini-Game". Apparently other demos are only 4 levels. This one came on the Macintosh Productivity and Entertainment sampler CD packaged with a Macintosh Performa 600, purchased in 1993. It contains one interesting level I've never heard of anywhere else: Fun 2 is "The Apple Computer Level" which is winnable without doing anything at all. Fun stuff. I wonder if it's implemented the way the "special" levels are, or as a normal tileset.
The level list is as followed (except Mayhem, because I ragequit after screwing up The Boiler Room's solution three times in a row)
Fun 1: Just dig!
Fun 2: The Apple Computer Level
Fun 3: Now use miners and climbers
Tricky 1: This should be a doddle!
Tricky 2: Lemmings in the attic
Tricky 3: Ozone-friendly Lemmings
Taxing 1: Watch out, there's traps about
Taxing 2: Come on over to my place
Taxing 3: How do I dig up the way?
Mayhem 1: The Boiler Room
Mayhem 2: ?
Mayhem 3: ?
I've grabbed a few screens from my Power Macintosh 6100/60 (would've used the Performa but the power supply needs replaced before it'll boot again). The sound doesn't work on PPCs, because this is from before the processor transition (they fixed it in later versions of the full game, but not this obviously).
Download (Stuffit SIT file): here
Post by: ccexplore on June 03, 2011, 04:25:42 AM
Will definitely try it out soon once I have a chance.The Apple level is almost 99% a special graphics level, I can't imagine them wasting time piecing regular terrain and eraser terrain together to form graphics they can easily cut-and-paste with the special graphics method. Hopefully I should be able to confirm at some point, as I've been able to extract Mac Lemmings level data since a long time ago.
[edit: now 99.9% sure even without doing any file extractions. The exit object is recognizably from the "Roman/Pillar" set which features predominantly yellow hues. Unless they augmented that graphics set in that version with additional terrain pieces, it would be impossible to create the rainbow of colors with only the standard terrain pieces from that set. And frankly it would seem more work to create new terrain pieces rather than just do a special graphics level. Plus, other nonstandard versions on PC (eg. Covox etc.) have precedence of unique special graphics levels.]
BTW, any idea if there's any significance to "21" as it's featured in skill numbers on the Apple level?
Post by: finlay on June 03, 2011, 01:30:15 PM
However, I've still never worked out how to unpack the graphics.
As for the sound, I know that I had to use a program to hack into Lemmings to make the music work from OS 8 onwards. Could it be related to that?
Post by: ccexplore on June 03, 2011, 02:09:32 PM
I'm going to toss this in here since we were talking a bit about it and because I haThe level list is as followed (except Mayhem, because I ragequit after screwing up The Boiler Room's solution three times in a row)
Fun 1: Just dig!
Fun 2: The Apple Computer Level
Fun 3: Now use miners and climbers
Tricky 1: This should be a doddle!
Tricky 2: Lemmings in the attic
Tricky 3: Ozone-friendly Lemmings
Taxing 1: Watch out, there's traps about
Taxing 2: Come on over to my place
Taxing 3: How do I dig up the way?
Mayhem 1: The Boiler Room
Mayhem 2: ?
Mayhem 3: ?
Using resource extraction and some logic, I believe Mayhem 2 is "Just a Minute..." and
I should be able to extract the regular graphics much more easily, but it's probably exactly the same as the full game so it may be pointless.As for sound and music, I also couldn't get it to work on my emulator on the PC, though I have no idea what OS version it tries to emulate or how accurate it is (it really isn't that great). But I did manage to copy the "music" file over to regular Lemmings which has working music in emulator (that copy of regular Lemmings may also have been patched), and by seeing how the music changes as a result, I believe the demo cycles through these 4 music in given order:
1) can-can
2) [the original composition that starts with "me fa so do2" in relative solfage]
3) [the original composition that starts with fast notes of "me me so me etc." in relative solfage]
4) Dance of the Reed Flutes (from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker)
(will update 2 and 3 later once I found corresponding DOS or Mac level music from full game)
One exception is Fun 2, the Apple Computer Level, which seems to have no music (though I can't be sure if that's really the case had sound been working in the demo itself). [edit: to clarify, this means Fun 2 of the demo didn't get #2 in the list of 4 above, but Fun 3 does skip ahead and go to #3 in the list]
Post by: ccexplore on June 03, 2011, 03:19:22 PM
Unfortunately it's been such a long time since I last extracted the Mac special graphics, I forgot exactly what I did and it may take some time before I worked it out again
Okay, wasn't as bad as I fear, though it would've saved me hours of time if I took care to jot down a note! (I did now so I won't forget again.) Anyway, I've attached the extracted special graphics terrain bitmap, though it's not really not much more than what you already saw from Mr K's screenshots.
If I have time I'll try to downconvert it into a resolution and size suitable for DOS Lemmings, in a way that preserves the terrain using how the Mac mechanics go from 2x2 blocks of hi-res pixels to corresponding low-res pixel, with the eventual goal of creating a clone of this special graphics level for PC Lemmings. That said, it's all pretty moot when the level is solvable without doing anything!
Post by: finlay on June 03, 2011, 03:51:11 PM
As for sound and music, I also couldn't get it to work on my emulator on the PC, though I have no idea what OS version it tries to emulate or how accurate it is (it really isn't that great). But I did manage to copy the "music" file over to regular Lemmings which has working music in emulator (that copy of regular Lemmings may also have been patched), and by seeing how the music changes as a result, I believe the demo cycles through these 4 music in given order:From what I remember of your emulator (because I saw a screenshot of it back in the proverbial day) it runs some flavour of OS 7 – so you wouldn't need a patch to get the music working. Interestingly, the patch was only needed for Original Lemmings – I've never had to patch a copy of ONML to get the music working. Presumably, however, it emulates a PowerPC rather than whatever came before that.
1) can-can
2) [the original composition that starts with "me fa so do2" in relative solfage]
3) [the original composition that starts with fast notes of "me me so me etc." in relative solfage]
4) Dance of the Reed Flutes (from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker)
(will update 2 and 3 later once I found corresponding DOS or Mac level music from full game)
One exception is Fun 2, the Apple Computer Level, which seems to have no music (though I can't be sure if that's really the case had sound been working in the demo itself). [edit: to clarify, this means Fun 2 of the demo didn't get #2 in the list of 4 above, but Fun 3 does skip ahead and go to #3 in the list]
The Special levels in the original game got their own music – presumably it was programmed so that the special levels automatically went to music resource 18 or something, which would explain why the Apple Computer level hasn't got any.
As for the musics you didn't know, are they this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxubCD6ILeg
and this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC_rKgJViqc
?
(Interestingly, the demo I knew, which is downloadable as "Lemmings Jr" on the Lemmings Universe website, had similar music, but Nutcracker was for level 3 (Lend a helping hand) and Ten Lem was used for level 4 (And then there were four))
Post by: ccexplore on June 03, 2011, 04:16:32 PM
As for the musics you didn't know, are they this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxubCD6ILeg
and this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC_rKgJViqc
Yes and yes, thanks for the links.
Much better than referring to levels in the full game.
Post by: Mr. K on June 03, 2011, 10:49:13 PM
Anyway, I just pushed this through a 68k Mac emulator (Basilisk II) with System 7.1 and also System 7.5.5 installed and... no music. Which is weird. There are several old games where that happens, and I've never figured out why. Must depend on specific sound hardware from the early Macs/Mac IIs or something and later versions patched it to use software.
Post by: ccexplore on June 04, 2011, 12:01:14 AM
ccexplore, the Apple Computer level does indeed have music. It's the first song finlay linked (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxubCD6ILeg) -- I remember that from way back when I played this as a kid, it was my favorite song on the demo.
Thanks for verifying. Since I couldn't get sound to work on the actual demo, I suspect that the inability to get the music to play using the hack of replacing the music file from full game with demo version is probably more because it was a special graphics level, and not because it was intentional.
So with that resolved, the cycle of 4 songs occur completely over all 12 levels without interruption.
Quote
Anyway, I just pushed this through a 68k Mac emulator (Basilisk II) with System 7.1 and also System 7.5.5 installed and... no music. Which is weird. There are several old games where that happens, and I've never figured out why. Must depend on specific sound hardware from the early Macs/Mac IIs or something and later versions patched it to use software.
Hmm, so maybe the emulator wasn't broken then in terms of sound.
When I was browsing through the extracted resources for the demo game's main file, I did seem to see something about the sound driver used being "hardware optimized" or something, so your theory seems to hold water.
Actually come to think of it, I wonder if I can get music to work on the demo version by replacing the resource holding what appears to be the sound driver with the corresponding version from full game? If I succeed I'll let you know.
Post by: finlay on June 04, 2011, 01:57:16 PM
EDIT: WTF it has a goal of 75% instead of 90% as it is in the real game, presumably making it actually completeable.
Post by: ccexplore on June 05, 2011, 01:04:33 AM
Mayhem 3 is Steel Mines of Kessel.
Whoops. I got confused apparently.
If you extract the resources yourself, you'll find only 11 levels, one of which is the special graphics level. So one level was repeated but I forgot it was Fun 1 and Tricky 3, and all the levels are in their harder version configurations, title and skills-wise (the demo uses the "oddtable" system just like the full game), so I ran into "Time to Get Up" and thought that's that for Mayhem. I forgot that one was used in Tricky 2 already, and also forgot about Steel Mines....
Not sure what to make about the save percentage.
It sounds like this "demo version" was possibly released after the full version, so maybe they figured out the mistake by then and have corrected it? 75% is way too generous though I think.[EDIT: actually, just checked, the DOS full version is also 60/80 for that level! Of course, as is relatively well-known, the DOS version also gives you 20 of builders, blockers and bombers, rather than 10, so it was always easier to begin with.
Did the Mac demo have 20 for skills too instead of 10?]
Post by: finlay on June 05, 2011, 02:02:16 AM
I wasn't actually aware that the DOS version has 20 of each skill. You had it easy, man
(The only other version I've played it on, and the only other version that I've played through the entire game on, is the PSX version – I seem to remember that it had 60/80 but not sure about the skills. Anyway it was pretty much a straight port of the Windows version in many ways, and that in turn was based on the DOS version instead of the Amiga version – you can tell because it uses the limit of 80 lemmings and has no water on most levels, which makes no sense for a relatively high-powered system like Windows or Playstation. The Mac version was based directly on the Amiga version but reduces the limit to 80 lemmings as well – it sticks a lot closer to the stats of the Amiga version and the terrain isn't explicitly changed significantly in any level, beyond hi-res graphics. The goal of 72/80 fits with the general pattern in the game of keeping the percentage consistent with the Amiga rather than the number of lemmings that you can lose...)
Also yeah, "Time to get up" isn't in it – it's Boiler Room→Just a Minute→Steel Mines.
Post by: Tsyu on June 11, 2012, 06:44:22 AM
Post by: mobius on June 11, 2012, 08:13:39 PM
If it isn't too much trouble, could someone rip the Apple level? I know the level is very, very simple, but I would still like to have it.
Are you, by chance, Tseug? (who once went by Tseug)
Post by: Tsyu on July 21, 2012, 04:12:50 AM
Edit: Since I can't properly extract that file (the one at the bottom of this post, just below the screenshots), I would highly appreciate it if someone could properly extract it and upload the decompressed files in a more common format, like Zip or 7-Zip.
Post by: ccexplore on July 24, 2012, 08:41:54 PM
If your extraction program doesn't have an option to extract all forks, you can end up with just the data forks of the files, which for many Mac Lemmings game files is empty (ie. everything of interest stored in the resource fork instead). This is done probably because there is a predefined structure to data in the resource fork of a Mac file.
Anyway, I would still think that StuffIt should be Mac-aware enough to have an option for you to extract both data and resource forks, but even after doing that it will probably take you a separate program to parse the resource forks extracted.
I have actually done a bunch of that programming work a long time ago with the help of documentation scrounged from the web and from a colleague that still has really old Mac programming books. And as earlier parts of this thread attested, I did the extraction work on the Apple level, so I guess I can pass that onto you. But be disappointed--because it is a special graphics file, the level file itself will not contain any terrain, it will just have the entrance and exit. The terrain is all in the graphics.
Post by: Tsyu on July 24, 2012, 10:18:03 PM
File extraction for Mac is tricky because they have this screwy (fine, "special") concept of multiple "forks" within a file. Basically (this is a bit of a simplification) the Mac think of a file as capable of having multiple streams ("forks") of data, rather than just one single stream of bytes. In particular, many of the Mac Lemmings game files store the majority of "interesting things" (eg. graphics, sound, etc.) in the resource forks of the files.
If your extraction program doesn't have an option to extract all forks, you can end up with just the data forks of the files, which for many Mac Lemmings game files is empty (ie. everything of interest stored in the resource fork instead). This is done probably because there is a predefined structure to data in the resource fork of a Mac file.
Anyway, I would still think that StuffIt should be Mac-aware enough to have an option for you to extract both data and resource forks, but even after doing that it will probably take you a separate program to parse the resource forks extracted.
I have actually done a bunch of that programming work a long time ago with the help of documentation scrounged from the web and from a colleague that still has really old Mac programming books. And as earlier parts of this thread attested, I did the extraction work on the Apple level, so I guess I can pass that onto you. But be disappointed--because it is a special graphics file, the level file itself will not contain any terrain, it will just have the entrance and exit. The terrain is all in the graphics.
Thanks for your info! Yes, it turns out that StuffIt 9.0 for Windows is indeed capable of extracting the resource forks as NTFS file streams, but it does not extract them at all by default.
Anyway, here is the level file. Note that the level uses 0x66 for the special graphic index, so it will need to be changed for DOS Lemmings.
Another question: How does Mac Lemmings determine which 2x2 pixel areas are solid ground? I'm asking because I'm willing to make a vgaspecX file from the graphic that you extracted.
Post by: ccexplore on July 24, 2012, 10:45:50 PM
Another question: How does Mac Lemmings determine which 2x2 pixel areas are solid ground? I'm asking because I'm willing to make a vgaspecX file from the graphic that you extracted.
I need to go back to my notes to confirm, but for each 2x2 area, if at least 2* of the 4 pixels are terrain, then the 2x2 area is solid, otherwise it isn't.
*I forgot whether it is 2 or 3.
Post by: ccexplore on July 25, 2012, 12:39:43 PM
*I forgot whether it is 2 or 3.
My notes say 2. 2-4 pixels of terrain will put the whole 2x2 block as solid.
Then again, we're talking about the "you-win-doing-nothing" Apple level. You could probably make the solid/empty choices randomly to all the nonempty 2x2 blocks and still wind up with a more interesting level, haha.
Post by: Tsyu on July 25, 2012, 11:11:43 PM
Post by: Clam on February 11, 2013, 07:26:40 AM
Code: [Select]
[DosOrig_9]
GraphicSetClass=TBaseDosGraphicSet
BrickColor=4293980256
GraphicExtFile=VGASPEC6.DAT
GraphicFile=VGAGR3.DAT
GraphicSetArchive=
GraphicSetId=0
GraphicSetIdExt=7
GraphicSetName=Apple
MetaInfoFile=GROUND3O.DATThis caught my eye while I searching for stuff on the level, since it was mentioned over here.
Post by: Ron_Stard on May 27, 2014, 08:10:25 PM
Post by: Tsyu on May 27, 2014, 09:49:04 PM
I can't manage to play The Apple Computer Level on Lemmini. Can anybody help me?This level is included in SuperLemmini; you can find it at Level -> Select Level -> Lemmings -> Bonus -> The Apple Computer Level. (If you're still having problems with sound stuttering, please follow the instructions in this post if you haven't done so already.)
Post by: Ron_Stard on May 27, 2014, 10:28:16 PM
I can't manage to play The Apple Computer Level on Lemmini. Can anybody help me?This level is included in SuperLemmini; you can find it at Level -> Select Level -> Lemmings -> Bonus -> The Apple Computer Level. (If you're still having problems with sound stuttering, please follow the instructions in this post if you haven't done so already.)
Thanks, the problems regarding sound solved after downloading the newest versions of SuperLemmini
.