Lemmings font and green/brown background tile

[0xdeadbeef]

Since I had such great success when requesting the special levels graphics, I just try this one  more time:

Has anybody by chance extracted the font used by the Amiga (and/or maybe the VGA) version of lemmings?

I'm also looking for the background tiles used in the level description screens. The Amiga version had green tiles, the VGA version seems to have brown tiles. I'd take both.

And if we're at it: not as urgent, but indeed having all the menu gfx from the VGA/Amiga version (sound/difficulty settings etc) would be nice as well.

I mean, I could rip all of this from screenshots or probably from the VGA version DAT files, but in case someone could provide me with this stuff, I would greatly appreciate it.

[ccexplore]

Has anybody by chance extracted the font used by the Amiga (and/or maybe the VGA) version of lemmings?<snip>

Sorry, no luck from me this time.  

Also, do you really need to imitate the original down to this level of details?  I mean, making sure the level-playing parts of the game is as authentic as possible makes sense, since you spend most of your time on that.  I'm less convinced about the need to re-imitate the game's main menu UIs.  And does the Windows version of Lemmings even have the same menu graphics and fonts as DOS/Amiga?

And in the end, my guess is that you wouldn't even be able to get the game mechanics down to the same level of exactness as you could with the graphics, so you aren't going to make everything exactly the same even if they look the same.

[ccexplore]

I mean, making sure the level-playing parts of the game is as authentic as possible makes sense, since you spend most of your time on that.

To be clear, the last part should read "since the player spends most of their time there".  That's of course not to say that 0xdeadbeef won't be spending a lot of time coding that part too.  

[0xdeadbeef]

Compared to the need to get all the gfx, sound effects and levels, the font etc. is of course not as important for the "lemmings experience".
The again, IMHO the windows version somehow lacks the typical lemmings feeling because of some details like this.
So if I have the chance, I'd like to recreate as much of the original fun as possible.

[Mindless]

I mean, I could rip all of this from screenshots or probably from the VGA version DAT files, but in case someone could provide me with this stuff, I would greatly appreciate it.

I don't have the palette information, if I did I could add saving to bitmaps to my tool, making ripping alot easier...  

As for the Amiga, I'll take a look at it, but I can't promise anything... I think it uses the same compression method as the DOS game, but I may very well be wrong.

[ccexplore]

I don't have the palette information, if I did I could add saving to bitmaps to my tool, making ripping alot easier... &#A0;

Oh, if you have the means to to saving to bitmaps, then ripping should be straightforward.  As for the palette, I suggest the following approach:

1) replace one of the 4 bpp bitmaps with a block of same-color pixels.  Or if you feel fancy, change the graphics to include all 16 colors at least once.  (Shouldn't be hard, changing just 8 bytes should do the trick.)

2) screencap in DOSBox

3) In Windows Paint, use the "color picker" to find out what color it is

4) Repeat for remaining 14 colors.

[Mindless]

http://it.travisbsd.org/lemmings/_misc/gxplr.zip
changes:
 no longer loads palettes from groundxo.dat
 loads palettes from gxplr.pal
 exports bitmaps
 added grumpy personality*

*This is very dirty (as opposed to clean) code, for some reason it will NOT save bitmaps with filenames less than 4 character.  There may be more bugs and to get them all out would require a complete rewrite, something I've not time for right now.

Edit: bug replaced by another bug: now it randomly decides to not save a bitmap  X_X so if it doesn't save the first time, try again.

Edit: all bugs replaced by a lack of eof checking, which is odd since that code is in no way related to the bitmap saving code, I think it may be a compiler bug, but I cannot reproduce it in any other code...

[ccexplore]

This is universally regarded as shitty, but still, you might find some use for it:

http://eng-forum.lemmingswelt.de/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=news;action=display;num=1125768276

It's a topic on an apparently abandoned Java Lemmings clone called "jLemmings".  It's open source (GPL).

The graphics bundled in are horrible, but the game design allows you to replace the graphics easily, or so it says.  The game mechanics also needs some work apparently, but at least it is supposedly good enough that you can play a level without, like, crashing after the first second or something.

So maybe if you start off from this, you can save yourself some time.  Or not.  :-/

[Mindless]

This is universally regarded as shitty...

[ccexplore]

As for the Amiga, I'll take a look at it, but I can't promise anything... I think it uses the same compression method as the DOS game, but I may very well be wrong.

The compression is probably the same, in fact, it turns out the Lemmings compression scheme is somewhat reminicent of an apparently popular Amiga scheme called "Powerpacker" or something.  Not identical, but similar especially in how it has several types of reference chunks for different lengths/offset widths.  The fact that the header has big-endian fields also suggests an Amiga origin.

However, I think your problem would be in extracting the graphics once you decompress the data.  I don't know anything about the Amiga's graphics hardware, but it's quite likely that it doesn't use the planar bitmap memory organization that the PC's EGA/VGA uses.  So before you have a chance to extract anything from the Amiga version you'll first need to learn how its video framebuffer is organized.

As for the green/brown background, I have to check, but I would think it's probably just the same background pattern using different palettes.  So maybe all you have to do is to get the colors off a screenshot in WinUAE.

[0xdeadbeef]

About Amiga version:
As far as I remember, the Amiga had "Bitplanes", where for a 4Bit color mode, you would have 4 Bitplanes of the size of your images.
Then again, it's not sure that they stored the images in this format.
The most popular gfx format on the Amiga btw. was IFF-ILBM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILBM), but probably they didn't use this either, since it contained the whole palette and I would guess, the palette ist stored separately like in the windows version.

About DOS version:
Has anybody ever considered that the DOS version might use the same format internally as the win95 version (SPR files)? Just asking, since I investigated the SPR format lately.

And about jLemmings:
Well, I wasn't aware of this "rival" before I read about it in the other thread. I must admit, I'm still quite far away from a working game and don't even have the lemmings themselves in yet (maybe I'll start today with this task - at least it's well prepared).
Then again, my version at least is not as ugly:
http://home.arcor.de/0xdeadbeef/menacing.png
http://home.arcor.de/0xdeadbeef/escher.png

[ccexplore]

About Amiga version:
As far as I remember, the Amiga had "Bitplanes", where for a 4Bit color mode, you would have 4 Bitplanes of the size of your images.

Hmm, so maybe the format's the same after all.

For old systems like Amiga and DOS, games generally choose to store images in a format close to how the hardware handles it.  Simplifies programming etc.

About DOS version:
Has anybody ever considered that the DOS version might use the same format internally as the win95 version (SPR files)? Just asking, since I investigated the SPR format lately.

No, because Mindless and I already decoded the DOS version before and while you were doing the Win95.  The DOS format doesn't use the SPR format, for good reasons, since with DOS you get to directly mess with hardware, so as stated above, the closer your bitmap format is to the hardware, the easier.

With Windows, it's a different story.

Nice thought though, but no, they are different.

And about jLemmings:
Well, I wasn't aware of this "rival" before I read about it in the other thread.

You are rather generous in calling it your "rival".  jLemmings hasn't exactly garnered rave reviews......  

[Mindless]

About Amiga version:
As far as I remember, the Amiga had "Bitplanes", where for a 4Bit color mode, you would have 4 Bitplanes of the size of your images.
Then again, it's not sure that they stored the images in this format.
The most popular gfx format on the Amiga btw. was IFF-ILBM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILBM), but probably they didn't use this either, since it contained the whole palette and I would guess, the palette ist stored separately like in the windows version.

The Psygnosis logo seems to be in ILBM format... I don't know about the others.  Here's the first few bytes of the 'Psygnosis' file:

Code: [Select]

FORM  K+ILBMBMHD

Here's all the files ripped from the Lemmings disks and the HD Amiga executable, so you can load these up in Workbench and play the game w/o any loading time.
http://it.travisbsd.org/lemmings/_misc/LemmingsAmigaHD.zip

@0xdeadbeef: BTW, those screenshots look awesome, the only thing I'd change is making the level preview box wider so that it is proportional with the level.

[0xdeadbeef]

@0xdeadbeef: BTW, those screenshots look awesome, the only thing I'd change is making the level preview box wider so that it is proportional with the level.

Well, it's just a quick first layout trial. Indeed, the level preview is monochrome in all original versions (only kind of in the win95 version) though I'm not 100% sure if I will go for that. Benefit would be that the lemmings pixels would be more visible... Maybe I will calculate a gray value for each RGB pixel. We shall see.
Furthermore my preview box misses the animated objects at the moment because it is based on the terrain+fixed objects background image. So e.g. the entrance is missing.
I will have to fix this though it includes lot's of work for small benefit

About the proportions: I don't think that the preview window in any official version is proportional. The scrollable area in the original game is 1600x160 pixels, in mine it's 3200x320, so it's always 10:1. If you draw this with correct ratio, the preview will have either a terribly small height or a terribly big width.
E.g. my preview box is 200 pixels wide. Much more is not possible since I want to do a 640x400 fullscreen mode and the icon bar already takes 384 (32x12) pixels. Also I want to add two scroll buttons next to the preview box as in the amiga version.
So with 200 pixels width, the height with correct ratio would be 20, which is VERY small and looks awful. At the moment I use 64 pixels as height (1:3.125), though I must admit that it's a bit too much. The he next "modulo 0" divisor of 320 is 8, so I might go for that (40 pixels). Still, this is only 5:1 instead of 10:1...

[ccexplore]

Indeed, the level preview is monochrome in all original versions (only kind of in the win95 version)

This is a prime example of going overboard with imitating the original, IMHO.  (By the way, it's better called the "mini-map".  I usually reserve the term "level preview" for the one you see before the level is being played.)

Cheapo uses a full-color mini-map and as far as I know no one has complained.  (Well, maybe not yet.  Watch now as Mindless/Ahribar/Jazzem proves me wrong.)

Furthermore my preview box misses the animated objects at the moment because it is based on the terrain+fixed objects background image. So e.g. the entrance is missing.
I will have to fix this though it includes lot's of work for small benefit

Why would it be lots of work?  Just pick one animation frame out of the interactive object and you're done.  Actually, you can even have the interactive objects animated in the mini-map too!

I should note that the so-called "original" mini-map, you know the monochrome one, doesn't display the objects.  You should display the objects if you're going to make a full-color mini-map, and shouldn't if you're going to leave it monochrome.

[ccexplore]

Incidentally, I think the mini-map in the original is something like 112:20 width:height (I didn't count the horizontal pixels exactly so it might be slightly off.)

[Proxima]

Cheapo uses a full-color mini-map and as far as I know no one has complained.  (Well, maybe not yet.  Watch now as Mindless/Ahribar/Jazzem proves me wrong.)

Well, it's made (slightly) harder work for me as a style designer, since I've had to choose a colour for the dotted border showing what corresponds to the visible screen area on each style, trying to make it look good against the terrain colour.

But I admit that tiny complaint is hugely outweighed by the nicer appearance of the colour mini-map when the style is done.

[Mindless]

Well, it's just a quick first layout trial. Indeed, the level preview is monochrome in all original versions (only kind of in the win95 version) though I'm not 100% sure if I will go for that. Benefit would be that the lemmings pixels would be more visible... Maybe I will calculate a gray value for each RGB pixel. We shall see.

Grayscale for the terrain, and green for the Lemmings! That would look awesome!  B)

Also I want to add two scroll buttons next to the preview box as in the amiga version.

The Amiga version had scroll buttons? I'm not aware of any...  ::

[0xdeadbeef]

Grayscale for the terrain, and green for the Lemmings! That would look awesome!  B)

Yes, that's what I had in mind. The Win95 version uses a similar approach.  Then again I could also only fade the colors towards gray or e.g. blue. This would also save the problem of the selection box'/lemmings' visibility.
Last possibility would be to store color information for selection border and lemmings for each tile set. Then I could leave the mini-map colored.

The Amiga version had scroll buttons? I'm not aware of any...  ::

Hm, I'm quite sure there were red decorations left and right of the "mini-map" (reminds me of "mini-me") which you could click to scroll left and right.

[Mindless]

http://it.travisbsd.org/lemmings/_misc/gxplr.zip

...

Edit: all bugs replaced by a lack of eof checking, which is odd since that code is in no way related to the bitmap saving code, I think it may be a compiler bug, but I cannot reproduce it in any other code...

I fixed the bug, so now if you go past the end of the file, it will give you a little "EOF" notice.  Strange division bug. :-/

Hm, I'm quite sure there were red decorations left and right of the "mini-map" (reminds me of "mini-me") which you could click to scroll left and right.

Unless WinUAE has an emulation bug (which is quite possible), the left red decoration does nothing, while the right instantly scrolls you to the right end of of the level.

[0xdeadbeef]

Unless WinUAE has an emulation bug (which is quite possible), the left red decoration does nothing, while the right instantly scrolls you to the right end of of the level.

Hm, probably you're right. I just tried it  in WinUAE as well. Dunno, but I thought these red things would let you scroll.
Anyway, in my version, they'll probably will

[ccexplore]

Grayscale for the terrain, and green for the Lemmings!

Incidentally, at least on the Amiga version of ONML, the lemmings in the mini-map are yellow, not green.  (The terrain is green btw.)

So as you can see, even the game designers themselves know that there is absolutely nothing special (read: not worth imitating) about certain aspects of the mini-map.

The grayscale idea could work, although interestingly, the more I think about it the more I might prefer the "monochrome" one.  The monochrome mini-map in the original game does have the advantage that you don't notice the stretching as much, since the lack of colors and low resolution means you basically can't make out the terrain very well.  It is kinda weird to call this an "advantage", but it does make the stretching much less noticeable.

[0xdeadbeef]

Incidentally, at least on the Amiga version of ONML, the lemmings in the mini-map are yellow, not green.  (The terrain is green btw.)

I know, but they're indeed green on gray in the win95 version.

So as you can see, even the game designers themselves know that there is absolutely nothing special (read: not worth imitating) about certain aspects of the mini-map.

My view is not limited to the Amiga/DOS version. Indeed I take from each version what I like best.  E.g. the hires gfx from the win95 version, probably also the mini-map. But I prefer also some parts of the original Amiga version (e.g. the particle effect, the level description screen etc.)

The grayscale idea could work, although interestingly, the more I think about it the more I might prefer the "monochrome" one.  The monochrome mini-map in the original game does have the advantage that you don't notice the stretching as much, since the lack of colors and low resolution means you basically can't make out the terrain very well.  It is kinda weird to call this an "advantage", but it does make the stretching much less noticeable.

I think this is also true for the grayscale version. I'll have to try how this works out in my case, but it looks ok in the windows version.

[ccexplore]

But I prefer also some parts of the original Amiga version (e.g. the particle effect, the level description screen etc.)

How's the particles different from the DOS and Win95 versions?  :: Don't they all have particle effects for the 4 terrain-removing skills?

Incidentally, I'm curious what decisions you've made regarding music.

[Mindless]

Yes, that's what I had in mind. The Win95 version uses a similar approach.  Then again I could also only fade the colors towards gray or e.g. blue. This would also save the problem of the selection box'/lemmings' visibility.

The Win95 version, strangely, shows the entrance in the minimap but not the exit. O_o

[ccexplore]

Incidentally, I measured the minimap on the DOS/(Amiga?) version to be exactly 104x20.

The playing field is 1664x160 (although horizontally, some parts may be unused).  So basically the mini-map is twice as compressed horizontally as it is vertically.  Not exactly big news, but just for the record so to speak.

[0xdeadbeef]

How's the particles different from the DOS and Win95 versions?  :: Don't they all have particle effects for the 4 terrain-removing skills?

Incidentally, I'm curious what decisions you've made regarding music.

About particles: I mean the particles used when the bomber explodes. Methinks they were the color of random (?) terrain pixels around the lemming while the windows version has particles which change the colour during their lives. The diggers, bashers and miners don't use real particles. These are part of the sprite animation.

About music: well, I will concentrate on this if everything else works. First comes the game, then the sound, then the music. Probably I will go for the midi versions. Though they might sound not as good as the Amiga version in some cases, it will be much easier to implement and consume less cpu time.

[0xdeadbeef]

Incidentally, I measured the minimap on the DOS/(Amiga?) version to be exactly 104x20.

The playing field is 1664x160 (although horizontally, some parts may be unused).  So basically the mini-map is twice as compressed horizontally as it is vertically.  Not exactly big news, but just for the record so to speak.

Hm, sure about the 1664? I use 1600 at the moment...
No big issue to change this though...

[Mindless]

The level area is 1584 x 160.

[ccexplore]

Hm, sure about the 1664?

This is what the DOS game seems to use internally, but interestingly, it won't even let you scroll that far (the DOS version is even less than 1600, and some of the maps have to be cut off more than it does on the Amiga, eg. Taxing 27).  This is something that might differ from version to version.  What's the Win95 version?

That's not really the point though.  The point is the ratio.  If you use the dimensions the DOS/Amiga version uses for the mini-map, since the level area of the screen is 320x160 and you compress twice as much horizontally, a screen worth should be a perfect square in the mini-map.  That's all.  

[ccexplore]

(the DOS version is even less than 1600, and some of the maps have to be cut off more than it does on the Amiga, eg. Taxing 27)

Taxing 27 doesn't seem to be the correct example.  Try Mayhem 29.

[0xdeadbeef]

Anyway instead of making the lemmings walk at last, I played around with the mini-map:

Colored:
http://home.arcor.de/0xdeadbeef/lemmcol.png

Gray:
http://home.arcor.de/0xdeadbeef/lemmgray.png

Monochrome:
http://home.arcor.de/0xdeadbeef/lemmono.png

Which do you like the most???

IMHO the colored map still looks best, followed by gray and monochrome.

BTW: the animated objects are in there as well. Wasn't nearly as much effort as I expected...

[ccexplore]

Definitely the color one.

The grayscale one is actually the worst.  I think the problem is that the conversion to grayscale just doesn't provide enough contrast between the different colors.  It makes the monochrome one looks clearer by comparison.

[0xdeadbeef]

Ok, the gray conversion can be tweaked a little to look more like the win95 version. What do you thing about this:
http://home.arcor.de/0xdeadbeef/lemmgray2.png

In this case, I just added 0x80 to each RGB value.
Of course this could be also combined with coloring. E.g. using green scale instead of gray scale:

http://home.arcor.de/0xdeadbeef/lemmgreen.png

Actually, I like this a lot. Looks retro in a charming way while providing a little more eye candy than the original.

[JM]

I like those images.

[ccexplore]

Yep, those are definitely an improvement.  I'm still leaning towards the full-color one, but at least the grayscale one is worth considering now.

[ccexplore]

but at least the grayscale one is worth considering now.

"Grayscale" includes the "greenscale" one as well.

Though if you're going to make the lemmings green dots, you obviously should choose a different color for the terrain.

[Mindless]

In this case, I just added 0x80 to each RGB value.
Of course this could be also combined with coloring. E.g. using green scale instead of gray scale:

http://home.arcor.de/0xdeadbeef/lemmgreen.png

Actually, I like this a lot. Looks retro in a charming way while providing a little more eye candy than the original.