Never heard of this... but I got excited for a sec because I had this disk sitting around that said Commodore Promotional Pack on it-- sounded like the right kind of name.  Then I looked it up and it's just some bundled version of the game.  Couldn't check myself, anyway, because I don't have an Amiga :/

I hope someone can find this.

1993, Macintosh Performa 600.  From a technical standpoint, this computer was totally junk compared to other Macs of the time.  But it worked for us and we used it until 1999 as our only computer.  I give it a lot of credit for shaping me as a person, giving me a nice creative outlet and having lots of cool games on the included demo CD (you might have heard of this one called Lemmings).

I still have it, but the power supply died a few years ago and I've been too lazy to fix it because I've since picked up some slightly newer classic Macs that are a little more adequate to use than the kinda sluggish Performa 600.

I just moved all the Lix specific ones, but I didn't move the ones talking about multiplayer in general since they refer to all games.

I think you're misinterpreting the page, actually.  Turns out this isn't an admin command at all.  All I can do is turn RSS on and off.  The individual options can be set by anyone accessing the page.  Just use anything on that page and modify the RSS url.

For example, this URL will give you a feed of the last 20 posts as requested:  http://www.lemmingsforums.com/index.php?action=.xml;type=rss;limit=20" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">http://www.lemmingsforums.com/index.php?action=.xml;type=rss;limit=20

Moved to the correct location.  There's not a lot of ground to cover here, so people are likely to see your post no matter where you post it-- so I highly recommend posting it in the right place!

I also second geoo's advice; Lemmix is the best way.

Bumpity bump.  It's a little behind schedule, but I have successfully made a recording of this song.  Enjoy!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11388083/ONML Lvl 3 - AudioPCI.mp3" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11388083/ONML%20Lvl%203%20-%20AudioPCI.mp3

Portal is amazing.  One of my favorite games from recent years.  I still haven't reinstalled Portal 2 on my gaming rig yet, but I probably will thanks to the new level creation DLC.  Funny, I'm just excited to check out other puzzles.  While I can solve them, I'm terrible at making puzzles (exactly why I haven't made any Lemmings levels)

700 games?  http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/shocked.gif" alt=":o" title="Shocked" class="smiley" /> are you like the angry video game nerd or something? http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/winktounge.gif" alt=";P" title="Wink-Tongue" class="smiley" />

I turned into a collector at some point, so I've made lists of all the games I want to play for a given console and have dedicated myself to getting all of them.  Unfortunately, that has created a massive backlog of stuff to play!

I have been knocking my way through a lot of games.  College just got done for the summer, and I used a few spare days I had before I could head home just to start finishing things... since I own around 700 games and have probably only finished around 30% of them.

Right now my primary focus is Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii, since I never actually finish RPGs most of the time.  I'm mostly liking it.  Looks great for a Wii game and the music is phenomenal.  The gameplay is mostly interesting, though sometimes it gets repetitive and sometimes it gets extremely unfair (I've found it very easy to end up under-leveled for larger battles-- so grinding is somewhat of a necessity)

have you played it recently? We're trying to get it running on Windows 7 properly (with little luck so far)

could graphics and/or sound cards be a key?

I haven't tried playing it in a very long time, in fact, last time I did I was using a Pentium II with Windows 98 (my aforementioned system).  However, perhaps the similarities can be notable.  Lemmings Revolution says it needs a DX7-compatible card.  Perhaps just as my old Riva TNT didn't implement some DX7 features (it is a DX5-level card), neither does DX9 or Windows 7's version, DX9Ex.  I haven't yet had time to go deep into looking at what features might have been deprecated between DX7 and 9, but my first guess would be DirectDraw since we seem to mostly have issues with the 2D portions of the game (menus, UI, etc).  As far as I can tell, DirectDraw has been deprecated since DX8 and was merged into Direct3D, which might be what's causing headaches.

Heh, those screenshots took me back many years.  I got Lemmings Revolution at Christmas once and my PC ran it with similar graphical problems (the blank results screen, and the level selection icons didn't appear at all) because the Riva TNT card it had was too old.  Took about a year until I upgraded to a Radeon 7500 to play it without randomly clicking on the level select trying to hit the right icon by chance.

For the instrument mapping, you wouldn't happen to know off the top of your head if there is a "set" instrument set it always maps to, or is it more variable for one reason or another?

As far as I know it's set, if only because the waveforms are the same each and every time.  Whenever I played on there it sounded the same.  Nobody really has a clue exactly how it picks things though... it's a mystery those Ensoniq coders will probably take to the grave.

I now have a converted SF2 from the AudioPCI's Wavetable and am trying to match up instruments... the whale sound still doesn't seem to match up very well... Is there something special done to the instruments, like say being toned down several octaves or something?

Ensoniq's instrument format is a lot different (and in a few ways superior, apparently) than Creative's Soundfont.  It supports a lot of extra features to define exactly how the sample is going to sound.  Chances are that this is just part of the conversion process-- it might not be able to replicate the original sound exactly.  I remember playing around with a partially converted Soundfont version (is it complete now?) a few years ago and many of the instruments were de-tuned or off a few octaves.  Others didn't decay properly or just sounded odd.

Hey, I can shed some light on this musical mystery, since I have some knowledge in vintage sound cards and the likes.  I know exactly what this is.  (WARNING: Boring technical explanation ahead.)  While the early Sound Blasters all had the OPL synthesizer, up through the AWE64, later Creative cards (starting with the Live) did not include it.  Everything past the AWE64 was based on technology acquired from Ensoniq.  Ensoniq's early MIDI-based ISA cards like the Soundscape didn't have an OPL synth at all, but a lot of games only had OPL support and no MIDI yet (except for a select few) so Ensoniq made a sort of compatibility hack for people who didn't have a Sound Blaster to use alongside a Soundscape.  What it did was roughly remap OPL waveforms to MIDI instruments.  I don't really know the details, but what's for sure is that it was very rough and usually didn't sound that good.

Later, after the Soundscape cards, Ensoniq did a PCI card called the AudioPCI.  They said that it was Sound Blaster compatible, which was pretty handy because most PCI cards couldn't do that (a limitation stemming from how games were programmed to access the Sound Blaster in the first place-- through the ISA bus).  To my knowledge it was mostly software emulated.  While they got the wave audio working, the OPL synth couldn't be done due to the processing limitations of the day.  So they jumped back to their hack from the Soundscape and kept on using it.  After Creative bought out Ensoniq, they made the Live.  By that point Windows 9x had been out for several years meaning Creative didn't really want to bother with DOS compatibility, so they did the bare minimum, making Ensoniq's stuff from the AudioPCI work on the Live-- I suppose just as an act of courtesy.


In layman's terms:  The SB Live, which you heard this on, doesn't have the OPL synth that the Lemmings games were programmed for, and tries to be compatible with it by roughly replacing its sounds with MIDI instrument equivalents.  So what you heard is its best approximation.

My old Pentium II had an AudioPCI in it, and when I listened to the tape recording from the last page I recognized it immediately.  When I played Lemmings and also ONML on there it sounded just like that.  If you're looking for a recording, I can get the machine set up again and record it.  However it'll be a while, since I'm at college right now and my PII is not.  I'll be home for the summer in around 4 weeks, though.

the olden days of the Random Story thread. http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/tongue.gif" alt=":P" title="Tongue" class="smiley" />

Just wanted to say that that story is one of my favorite Internet memories.  http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/thumbsup.gif" alt=":thumbsup:" title="Thumbs Up" class="smiley" />

I will see if I can find it.  My NAS gets a little less organized every time I upgrade the drive and hastily copy old files over, so the folders are a complete mess now.