Well, just as I recently became an uncle to my sister's son a few days ago, I just received news from my mom that a late cousin of mine who I saw a few weeks ago for a death anniversary commemoration for one of my mom's grandparents at my house (tradition in the Vietnamese culture to hold commemorations for the deceased in the family) passed. Earlier this month was the first time I've seen him in quite a while and boy was I aghast at his pale and gravelly ill appearance. We knew he was really sick, but we didn't know it would just be 3 more weeks until he passed. Well, he and I got to talk briefly a few weeks ago, but still, I'm sad to hear this news of losing my cousin

I messaged his daughter (my cousin once removed who's a few years younger than me) to send her my condolences, and those extend to her brother (also my younger cousin once removed) as well.

Quote from: Guigui on March 20, 2026, 08:58:41 PMCongrats 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.

Thank you Guigui, I appreciate it! My mom and I came to visit my sister and my newborn nephew yesterday and he is just absolutely adorable

Version 2.9.3 hotfix update

Well, we found something game-breaking, of course!

Here's what needed to be changed for this hotfix:

Global 'Direct Drop' option

• Bugfix - Backwards-compatibility has now been implemented for replays which don't have the Direct Drop status written in (so, all replays pre-2.9.2 and any 2.9.2 replays for which DD was toggled off). This should have been done from the start, apologies for the oversight. Your existing replays will now play exactly as they did previously.

And, 2.9.3 also has the following updates:

Player Records

• Bugfix - When "Unlock All Levels" is toggled off, groups and packs are only shown as "completed" if all levels are completed, not just those that are visible/available.
• Player records are now stored in a more human-readable format in the player.ini data file. This is to make it easier to debug in the event of data mismatching.
• "Completion" status is now tracked in a much more stable way, and the available levels are updated correctly even if toggling "Unlock All Levels" on and off between sessions (tracking was previously broken if doing this).
• Simply copy your existing "default.ini" or "yourname.ini" file from settings/players/ into the same folder in the 2.9.3 directory and all of your progress should be intact as usual. A backup copy is automatically made when migrating anyway, so there's basically zero risk of data loss between versions, but do back up the original copy just in case.

DMA Levels

• Adjusted exit positions in Mayhem 10 Pillars of Hercules (this wasn't game-breaking, but needed doing).

A reminder of what's new as of 2.9.

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Get the latest version here.

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.