Atari 2600 Lemmings - in development

[Andrew Davie]

Hello all. I'm a new member of the forum.

I found the forum in a search for Lemmings-related data - in particular, tilesets and sprite sheets.  I'm in the very early stages of researching a Lemmings port to the Atari 2600. 

I'm a well-known and extremely experienced Atari 2600 programmer. In fact my background is as an OG games developer back in the 80s for various platforms that were around back then. Nothing special; I'm just a run of the mill programmer - but programmer nonetheless.

I've done Boulder Dash for the '2600, which was a big challenge, but it came out beautifully. From that I have an engine that effectively does tile-based graphics on the machine. I'm interested in seeing how Lemmings would work using that engine.  For reference, up to 256 characters in the character set, and each character is 5 pixels wide x ~10 deep (can be adjusted). There are "8" colours available including black. It's complex, but just go with those specs.

Anyway, I'm happy to see this forum here - and I'll try and mine it for information about tilemaps for the original game, and maybe sprite sets (although I have a few that seem suitable already).  Very very early days and I have my own forum/section where I'm blogging the development nearly every day. 

I've just completed a proof-of-concept to determine if I can display "hundreds" of lemmings onscreen at the same time. I can - sort of. Due to the extremely low resolution graphics (just 40 pixels horizontally x 66 vertically), things look rather large and will have mostly a zoomed-in feeling. But that's half the fun/challenge of this part of development; seeing what I can do within the limitations.

Here's a video of the latest "stress test". There's a link to my forum in the blurb there - not sure if I'm breaking forum rules mentioning it; hopefully not.

I hope to make friends here on this forum, and I particularly welcome those who might be interested in helping me ensure that I'm as true-to-the-original as possible. Drop me a message anytime.

Andrew Davie

[Simon]

Welcome to the forums!

Sure, feel free to link directly to your blog/forum 2600 Wizards: https://woodgrain.taswegian.com/

I had known about the commercial Atari ST port of Lemmings, but you're targeting Atari 2600 from the 1970's, and yes, that makes a difference. You'll have to reduce Lemmings even more than what they did for the NES. Looking forward to see what you'll do with it!

-- Simon

[Andrew Davie]

Welcome to the forums!

Sure, feel free to link directly to your blog/forum 2600 Wizards: https://woodgrain.taswegian.com/

I had known about the commercial Atari ST port of Lemmings, but you're targeting Atari 2600 from the 1970's, and yes, that makes a difference. You'll have to reduce Lemmings even more than what they did for the NES. Looking forward to see what you'll do with it!

-- Simon

TY. Modern '2600 developers can use an ARM chip on the cartridge to do extra legwork. The graphics are still limited by the TIA chip on the original machine, but memory limitations are eased.  The display, although just 40 pixels and a single colour per scanline, can be tweaked to produce apparently colourful graphics.

[Andrew Davie]

I have many/most frames and animations installed. The video shows some of these being displayed with many lemmings. My lmit is about 28 before I have to switch in the multiplexing/flicker. The video takes it way up to 75 just to explore the ability of the multiplexing to display more. I may work on culling "invisible" lemmings that are behind many others, and thus reduce flicker. Given the zoomed-in nature of my implementation, this won't happen too often, I hope.  Although the background is black here, the "level" is actually being drawn already. I just haven't installed any data. That will come soon.

See updates on my forum at 2600 Wizards - Lemmings

[Andrew Davie]

I now have a background import tool. Since I'm working with character graphics, what I'd really like to find is character-based data rather than the bitmap I'm using at present. In any case, this is still a "what-if", looking at display technology and limitations. It's really pushing the graphical limitations of the '2600; lots of wizardry going on here. It's also pushing "playability" - seeing such a limited area of the playable world might be a showstopper.

But still, I'm forging on, seeing what systems I can develop and how playable this might turn out to be.

This runs on actual hardware. Regular blog updates, and free in-progress binaries for any registered user, are regularly posted to my forum. Forum is 2600 Wizards

If anyone could point me towards character/tile based level data that would be awesome.

[Simon]

Lemmings 1 levels are tile-based on DOS and Amiga in the following particular sense: You have a limited number of tiles in per tileset, but the map author has free realm where to put them in the level. Any integer pixel coordinate is fine for every tile. Tiles will overlap. For play, everything becomes one large level map of pixels, not tiles. I believe that you don't want this.

Lemmings 1 levels on the Sega Master System were tile-based during play in the classical sense of tile-based maps: The map is a square lattice, and at each lattice cell, you have exactly one tile. Bashers will generate new tiles at runtime with the deformed terrain, and will even cancel when video memory runs out.

I don't know how the Sega Master System defines levels in the files. Maybe it's like DOS's overlapping tiles, maybe it's already small square tiles for the square lattice. I merely know about the above tile lattice during play, after the level has been loaded from the files. I haven't even played the Sega Master version and don't know if it has what you want.

-- Simon