I've just found another Lemmings 2 trap that succumbs to the
Medieval dragon framestepping effect. Though in a much more dramatic, shocking fashion......
The trap? :drumroll: The bouncing tennis ball of death in the Sports tribe.
But whereas the Medieval dragon merely slows down by half during framestepping, the effect on the ball is much more stunning--literally: the ball
freezes completely while you are framestepping!
This is awesome because if you are observant, you'll find that the ball doesn't actually kill on every frame. It basically only kills on one or a few frames in its animation cycle, namely at a point where it's going down and at the height where it starts touching the hair of a lemming standing below at ground level. So you can simply pause the game when the ball is at a nonlethal frame, and then frame-step repeatedly to hold the ball in place while allowing lemmings to walk past the ball harmlessly!
Unfortunately, even the
most reliable technique discovered to date for framestepping is still not foolproof. Because even with DOSBox's keymapper help, the game may still unpause during framestepping once in a blue moon. This is of course catastrophic for this glitch, since the ball bounces so fast, unless you have lightning reflexes such an accident will probably make the ball kill a lemming. So until I found a way to do framestepping absolutely flawlessly, I'm finding that I still need to apply some additional techniques (typically minimizing the time lemmings spent in the ball's death zone) in order to feasibly carry out Sports 1 and Sports 5 solutions that take advantage of this glitch. Some other solutions theoretically possible with the glitch alas still remains very difficult to successfully execute, until I have a method for framestepping that never fails.
Also, even when the framestepping works, I'm finding that when you do this long enough, once every so often the ball will still advance by one frame anyway. The timing when that happens seems to be pretty random and unpredictable. In fact, I've found that if you framestep enough times, multiple balls can actually become out-of-sync with each other!
Which again poses complications in certain levels where you may want to frame-step through multiple balls at the same time, like Sports 1.
For video demonstrations of this glitch, check out my DOSBox video for new challenge solutions to Sports 1 and Sports 5 (to be uploaded).