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Apple ][ "Lemmings" Proof of Concept

216 points| killittosaveit | 3 years ago |deater.net | reply

46 comments

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[+] vardump|3 years ago|reply
C64 Lemmings playthrough, all 100 levels: https://youtu.be/lTKmyqqugG0

Features scrolling (!), although with a narrower playground. C64 truly gets pushed hard here.

Impressively, even Shadow of the Beast level is there: https://youtu.be/lTKmyqqugG0?t=2443

The biggest advantage for C64 is of course sprites. C64 version used them for the background, that's why it's narrower.

More details about making of C64 Lemmings: https://codetapper.com/c64/diary-of-a-game/lemmings/the-maki...

[+] rob74|3 years ago|reply
> Impressively, even Shadow of the Beast level is there: https://youtu.be/lTKmyqqugG0?t=2443

Cool! Although there's a "glitch" there - the Basher Lemmings stop bashing midway through the tree trunks because of the black areas which are actually only meant as tree bark texture. This really drives home the fact that (almost) all collision detection in Lemmings 1 was based on the actual on-screen pixels (the exception being "non-diggable" and "one-way-diggable" areas).

[+] rob74|3 years ago|reply
Impressive! The music is really well converted, and the colors have a very... psychedelic look to them, which I guess is appropriate too :) What's different from other versions however (at least Amiga and PC, with which I am familiar, and also the C64 version as far as I can see here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTKmyqqugG0) is that the Lemmings seem to pause after each step, in the original game the movement was continuous. Maybe due to some calculations which have to be done while no animation is playing?
[+] deater|3 years ago|reply
a lot of the jumpiness in the sprites for the Apple II version is because in "hi-res" mode each 2 bytes gets you 7 pixels, so it's a lot easier to do sprites that are 7 pixels wide. Every other system tends to have 8-pixel wide sprites. So it makes it hard to convert graphics (you could make arbitrary-sized sprites but it's a lot slower and often involves large complex look-up tables)

back in the day the reverse caused problems too, you can look up the grumbling of people porting Prince of Persia to non-Apple II systems and having to convert all the multiple-of-7 graphics to systems expecting things to be multiples of 8

[+] tda|3 years ago|reply
At https://youtu.be/6P3zubc53bw?t=1081 a lemming drops off the left side of the level and proceeds to walk over the interface as if it were part of the level. Don't recall that behavior
[+] bitwize|3 years ago|reply
Pretty sure I stumbled across this via Homestar Runner fandom. The author made a custom level shaped like Strong Bad's head.

Even on this page, the mention of a Peasant's Quest port and the references to "good graphics" give him away as an h*r fan.

[+] Lio|3 years ago|reply
I love these sorts of what if experiments. Just how far can we push these old machines?

What if Apple pushed IIGS over the Mac? What if Commadore had got behind the Amiga properly?

I always wondered if it would be possible to run Doom in a meaningful way on the original 1987 Acorn Archimedes[1], the first computer with an Arm processor[2].

It had 256 colour chunky pixels, 8-channel stereo sound and a, for the time, very fast processor.

Would a game like that have tipped the market in its favour if it had been there at launch?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes

2. Not counting the development board for the BBC Micro.

[+] rbanffy|3 years ago|reply
> What if Apple pushed IIGS over the Mac?

The II was a dead end. The 65816 was not a nice ISA to program for. Very powerful for the clock, but going with the 68000 allowed the Mac to continue relevant up until the transition to PowerPC.

> What if Commadore had got behind the Amiga properly?

I think the best missed opportunity of the Amiga was when Commodore refused to allow Sun to sell the 3000 as a low-end Unix workstation. At the time, it was unclear whether Unix and its descendants would be the winner of the OS wars, but it would have been wonderful if the Amiga was launched with the same OS Commodore ported to their never launched Commodore 900 workstation.

> it would be possible to run Doom in a meaningful way on the original 1987 Acorn Archimedes

I bet there is a port for it. The first benchmarks indicated the plain Archimedes had higher FP throughput than a 16MHz 386 with a 387.

> Would a game like that have tipped the market in its favour if it had been there at launch?

I don't think I ever saw an Archimedes being sold outside the UK. I only heard of them because BYTE magazine had excellent coverage of interesting machines available abroad. I wish they would be more available in the Americas (back then I lived in Brazil)

[+] Gordonjcp|3 years ago|reply
There was a port of it to the Archimedes.
[+] brainwipe|3 years ago|reply
I didn't expect to be able to time travel to 1996 by clicking a link, but I'm exceptionally glad I did. Thank you!
[+] xbar|3 years ago|reply
I think the boot up audio of the key presses and the drive's stepper hit me harder than the lemmings. But I am impressed with the translation.
[+] balls187|3 years ago|reply
First game I ever owned was Lemmings for the Amiga.
[+] emsixteen|3 years ago|reply
Really cool, always loved Lemmings. Weird game.
[+] garaetjjte|3 years ago|reply
I did some work on L1 engine that is playable in the browser: https://milek7.pl/.stuff/lems/. Not sure how it will turn out, but I have some ideas about adding time-travel mechanics to it. (player would get timeline view allowing freely jumping through time, and time machine object that lemmings can enter to travel back and forth)
[+] psyc|3 years ago|reply
I have fond memories of playing it a lot as a teenager. I became even more fond of it after I figured out that the developer created Grand Theft Auto about 5 years later.
[+] jcadam|3 years ago|reply
I first played Lemmings on an Amiga 500. Connected to an old monochrome Apple monitor II :)
[+] anonymousiam|3 years ago|reply
Anybody else notice that the in-game music is Pachelbel's Canon?
[+] RuggedPineapple|3 years ago|reply
The original soundtrack for Lemmings was a bunch of midi remakes of pop songs. With a few weeks til release they realized what the composer had turned in and the legal issues behind it and turned the project over to a different composer and just said 'fix this' basically. With such a short amount of time left original compositions were out of the question so the idea was reworked from well known pop hits to (mostly) well known out of copyright music. I say mostly because a couple on there actually WERE copyrighted pop music but seemed like they had been around much longer. 'How Much Is That Doggy in the Window' being probably the most prominent example, having been written (and a radio hit) in the 50s but people assume is just an old kids song thats been around forever.
[+] thrdbndndn|3 years ago|reply
Sorry for being off-topic but why "][" instead of "II"?
[+] marban|3 years ago|reply
][ also appears first in the boot sequence
[+] speps|3 years ago|reply
The front plate of the Apple 2 had it designed like "][", a more compact "II" I guess. Look for Apple 2 logo pictures online for an idea of what it looked like.