I was speaking to Russell today, and Lemmigs (as usual) came up. The version of the source I have appears to be "Oh No! More Lemmings", and he seemed to rememeber that there was a fudge needed in that one to make levels work.That means the 3 being added was only in Lemmings, and not Oh No.
So, my source is correct for Oh No, and wrong for Lemmings. Lemmings had a #3 in there, Oh no had a #0. (or so he thinks...) My Amiga source is from L1.
Dont have the ST source.. But being 68K, Id imagine it was just the Amiga one for all the processing....
Ok, here's a twist to this ongoing saga
:
So, upon popular request, I went ahead and hacked CustLemm tonight. I was expecting that the change was in the line that compares fallcount to maxfallcount, with the constant value of maxfallcount set to a higher number.
Imagine to my surprise, that particular line remains the same in CustLemm!
So I looked elsewhere and quickly discovered the source of the difference. And guess what? The difference is in the initialization of fallcount in [what I make out to be] the "MakeFaller" macro! (ie. it's the stuff Mike's talking about with the #3 vs. #0 thing.)
What's really interesting though about this is that the same line actually appears a total of 7 times in the code, so there would've been 7 places for you to change if you hack the binary directly. But in all 7 places it appears in the context of the "MakeFaller" macro, which means that, if you have the source code, only one change (namely, to the macro itself) would've been needed.
If someone is hacking the EXE directly and wanted to change the safe falling distance, it would've been far easier for him to change the value of maxfallcount (just one place in the EXE), rather than having to change 7 different places where fallcount is initialized. To be sure, search and replace isn't really that difficult, but still.
So it seems to me that, rather than someone's hacking the EXE, it looks like the result of the higher safe-fall distance in Custlemm was more likely a change from the original source code. So this points to 2 possibilities:
1) Someone obtained the source code to Lemmings/ONML, and did the modification to the "MakeFaller" macro there, and then compile to generate the EXE
2) There is already an EXE out there that has the changed falling distance, and the person who made Custlemm made changes on the EXE, but never actually touched the falling distance stuff himself
Coupled with what Mike said above, I'm leaning towards #2, and so it really does sound like that there
is an "official" version of Lemmings or ONML out there that has the FallCount initialization changed, resulting in the higher safe falling distance!
I checked my copy of ONML and it is unchanged with regards to the fallcount initialization (ie. it uses 3 just like Lemmings), which would explain why Shvegait failed to find a difference. But of course, my copy of ONML was downloaded from abandonia.com, so I don't know how authentic it is. It's certainly not the exact original of ONML since there is no copy protection in my copy.