Challenges board: How it works

[WillLem]

DOS is considered as the default

Why is this? Lemmings was originally written on and for the Amiga, I would have thought that would be seen as the standard. Plus, the DOS version is known for its many glitches and slight differences in physics.

Don't get me wrong, the DOS version is a classic and it's well-loved for good reason. I'm just wondering why it's seen as the default...

[grams88]

Good point there Willlem with the Amiga I think the amiga was the very first one to have lemmings and probably could be considered the default, maybe it might be the dos because a lot more people could probably access the game, I think with the amiga it was harder for the Americans  to get it working on the amiga and the atari st. (I could be wrong completely)

[Proxima]

The DOS version was the most familiar to the majority of active members, and even more importantly, it was the easiest version to share replays for, thanks to the existence of Lemmix players, which mimic DOS physics almost exactly.

(In fact, I believe the DOS version has a claim to be the joint original alongside Amiga; I don't know much about the development process so I'm just going by what I've read here. The DOS version is not notably more glitchy than others; it does have some bizarre unique glitches such as the nuke percentage glitch, but most glitches, such as sliding, stuck climber, steel digging etc. work on multiple versions.)

Finally, because we have a wealth of results collected over the years, there is no chance at all of switching over to another version as default, and especially not a version like the Amiga that doesn't offer convenient sharing of results.

[namida]

I believe it comes down to that the DOS and Amiga versions - as well as Atari ST, if I'm not mistaken - were all developed alongside each other. Amiga was the first to be ready for release, but this is more just a "how things ended up playing out" than anything else.

[WillLem]

It does seem likely that the game would have been released on multiple platforms at the same time, particularly DOS and Atari. However, I believe the game itself (or at least its graphical content) was developed using the Deluxe Paint animation program on the Amiga.

That said, the various reasons people have given seem perfectly reasonable as to why the DOS/Lemmix version has prevailed as standard for the community, particularly when it comes to sharing levels/replays. The only way I can share my Amiga playthroughs is by streaming and uploading videos to YouTube, which can be quite a cumbersome process. So yeah, I see why it's gone that way, for sure.

Still, it seems to me that someone could just as easily have had the idea of making an Amiga clone, in the same way that Lemmix is a DOS clone. Or has DOS always had level editing/replay sharing capability even before Lemmix?

[Proxima]

No, the vanilla DOS version doesn't have replay editing capability, and yes, it is pretty much a historical accident that things ended up as they are.

That said, regardless of how we got here, it's a done deal now, and I am not prepared even to consider an action that would involve abandoning the collection of results we have, so it's time to close this discussion.

[namida]

That said, regardless of how we got here, it's a done deal now, and I am not prepared even to consider an action that would involve abandoning the collection of results we have, so it's time to close this discussion.

^ It should be noted that this doesn't imply we couldn't additionally look for Amiga results too; simply that the existing DOS results would not in any way be considered "invalid" by doing so (nor is it likely that Amiga would, overall, become the new "primary" version for challenges).

[WillLem]

I am not prepared even to consider an action that would involve abandoning the collection of results we have

At no point did I suggest this.

It should be noted that this doesn't imply we couldn't additionally look for Amiga results too; simply that the existing DOS results would not in any way be considered "invalid" by doing so (nor is it likely that Amiga would, overall, become the new "primary" version for challenges).

Good to know that the Amiga platform can be considered for results.

I'm just curious as to why DOS was the platform of choice when making a clone engine, as opposed to Amiga. I am not suggesting that either is more valid than the other, or that the Amiga should have been the choice, or anything else that might be read into what I'm saying. I'm just genuinely interested in why DOS was chosen as the platform to clone.

[ccexplore]

Since PCs running DOS and Windows took off in a way that Amiga didn't, the DOS version of Lemmings ended up likely the most widely played, and certainly the one most easily obtained and installed nowadays, and even so stretching back years.  Remember that the community had been around (well not all the same people, though some definitely had been here all this time) for over a decade, and back 15 or so years ago if you don't actually have access to an Amiga computer, your success of running the Amiga version decently on whatever emulators were available at the time for PCs was probably not great.  (Well, maybe things were different in Great Britain and Amigas probably a little more common; I lived in USA.)  I'm certainly not the first person in this community and certainly not the first person to do challenges, but even at the time I started, when Lemmix hadn't even existed yet and there was really just maybe one or two challenge threads discussing free-formed challenges, challenge results were already primarily reported for DOS versions, because that was the version most people can actually play at the time.

As for development of Lemmix, I happened to have the most technical knowledge and tools available to reverse engineer the DOS game.  Remember this was more than a decade ago (in fact like 15 or so years).  At the time, I'm not sure I can even easily run the Amiga version given the state of emulation back at the time.  And I think Erik himself was most familiar with DOS Lemmings.  So for all those reasons, Lemmix also became based on DOS Lemmings, and of course its capabilities make doing challenge solutions easier and also enable better sharing of solutions than screenshots or videos (for the latter, remember that youtube hadn't existed 15 or so years ago).  Together with challenge enthusiasts like ClamSpammer, the challenges really started taking off with Lemmix being the primarily program used to discover and share solutions.

It had crossed my mind over the years to consider reverse engineering some of the other versions (primarily Amiga and Mac) and possibly get Lemmix to support them.  But it'd be a lot of work with relatively little demand, so hard to drum up motivation.  Actually, Amiga emulation had come a long way since, so in addition to being much easier now to run the Amiga version decently on your PC through emulation, you can now probably easily do savestates and even possibly input-recording-based movies on an emulator, which in some ways help fill in some of the tooling capabilities Lemmix offers.  Thus making it even less interesting to port Amiga mechanics over to Lemmix.

The Amiga, Atari and DOS versions are co-developed around the same time.  But yes, early prototyping of the game was done on the Amiga, as was the level editor they had in-house which as far as we know from Mike Dailly, was only ever an Amiga program.

People could start new challenge threads based on other versions like Amiga and keep another set of records, although I'd expect a relatively low level of participation for obvious reasons.