Lemmini

[0xdeadbeef]

What makes Awesome so frustrating is the fact that it's only one body part which is just scaled and replicated. However not even the artists of the Mac version seem to have had access to this piece as they only exchanged the head and left the rest in lowres.

[WNivek]

Hmm, I wonder... Any chance someone has access to a copy of the game Awesome, and is able to extract the original sprites from there?

[0xdeadbeef]

Good idea!
Actually, I was able to rip the graphics from Awesome running on WinUAE:
http://lemmini.de/Awesome_tile.gif

Surprisingly, at least the version used in the Mac graphics seems to be a little improved (the "horns" look better).

A manually improved (but still lowres) variant:
http://lemmini.de/Awesome_tile2.gif

[WNivek]

I'm no expert, but it looks like the image you have there is slightly stretched, with certain individual rows and columns repeated to fill the gaps. It'll look better if you can snag an 'original size' version. Or gimme a while and I could probably manually cut out the doubled lines. I'd get right on it, but I'm sorta busy at the moment.

[ccexplore]

Surprisingly, at least the version used in the Mac graphics seems to be a little improved (the "horns" look better).

It's not surprising at all; it's not like DMA downgraded from the original Awesome graphics; if the Lemmings level is indeed an exact screenshot of a level from Awesome, the tile should be near identical to what you'd see in the Lemmings level.

The only use of the tile is if you want to manually touch-up a hi-res version of it, and then manually replace each instance of it in the level graphics with a hi-res version of the tile.

[0xdeadbeef]

It's not surprising at all; it's not like DMA downgraded from the original Awesome graphics; if the Lemmings level is indeed an exact screenshot of a level from Awesome, the tile should be near identical to what you'd see in the Lemmings level.

Yeah sure, I just wondered why they improved only a few pixels here and there and then gave up on it. Indeed the changes are so minor that first you'd think they only exhanged the two big heads.

The only use of the tile is if you want to manually touch-up a hi-res version of it, and then manually replace each instance of it in the level graphics with a hi-res version of the tile.

That's the idea. Indeed when also extracting the heads (and the star), one could create a program that creates the graphics from x,y positions and scales of the three object types. I'd think the downscaled body parts would look a lot better if they were downscaled using a proper algorithm and in the high resolution.

A lores head btw:
http://lemmini.de/head_lores.gif

Note that the left jaw has much more detail than the Mac mock up.

[WNivek]

I finally got around to cleaning up that body-piece tile. It's still small but I've cut out all the duplicated rows and columns, so it looks much better.


Not only does it look cleaner, it also overlays perfectly on the largest copies of the body tile on Awesome Level. So now someone just needs to produce a nice 2x version of it.

Also, between your rip, the Lemmings level, and screenshots from the Atari ST version* of Awesome, I've managed to piece together a good copy of the head sprite.


(* I couldn't get the Amiga one working, but the graphics of that guy seem to be pretty much the same between the two - only the colors changed, and I edited my work to match the palette of your Amiga sprite.)

I should probably note that the top two rows of pixels did not show up in the screenshots I was getting, nor do they appear in the Lemmings level, but I put them in 'cause you had them in the Amiga rip.

Anyone know for sure what that dark bit over the eyes is supposed to be? Is it perhaps a reflection of the player's ship?

[WNivek]

Sorry to double-post, but I've found a bit of a bug regarding the top of the Lemmini's playfield. Specifically, if a lemming is somewhat off the top of the screen and the player tells that lemming to bash, Lemmini crashes.

Additionally, under certain circumstances it's possible to make a lemming build past the top of the level, causing a crash. I have seen this happen before, but have thus-far been incapable of reproducing it. It may be worth noting, though, that the one time it happened, it was caused by a lemming who had previously managed to climb up through a ceiling by way of repeated building.