[Guide] Running PC-98 Lemmings in Neko Project II

[Dullstar]

This information is largely adapted from this guide intended for Touhou.

Disclaimer: While I haven't noticed any issues with them, follow the download links at your own risk.

Note that a copy of Lemmings is not provided here. You will have to find that yourself.
The emulator: The Touhou guide recommends using the unofficial fmgen build, available here (scroll down until you find a file called "np2fmgen.7z" - 7zip is required to extract it): . Lemmings doesn't appear to use any features that benefit from this build over the official one, but relevant to Lemmings, there is a speedup function in the fmgen build. The audio emulation is noticeably better for some games in the fmgen build, but Lemmings seems to emulate plausibly well in both versions (I don't have real hardware to compare to at this time). The rest of the guide will assume the fmgen build, though much of it will work in the official build.

Configuring the emulator: There's multiple executable files in the fmgen build download. Multiple of them will probably work, but I'd suggest using np21nt.exe. The colors will look super wrong by default. You can improve this considerably by turning on Real Palettes (under the Screen menu). It doesn't seem to be perfect, though - I don't know if it's an emulation problem or if that's just how the PC-98 port is. Also, go to Emulate -> Configure, and set the multiplier next to the CPU selection. 32 should work okay, but if the performance seems bad, experiment with it a bit. I got bad performance when this was too low as well as when it was too high. Unlike DOSBox CPU cycles, however, I didn't seem to notice any immediate changes when messing with this - you'll probably need to reset to apply the changes.

Launching the game: You'll need to mount the disk image. If you've got a harddisk image, mount it as one of those (Harddisk -> IDE #0 or SASI #0 depending on build); if you've got a floppy disk image, you'll want to go to FDD1 -> Open (no guarantees they both exist). Then, go to Emulate -> Reset and it should start up. F12 should activate the mouse. If it doesn't, go to Device -> Mouse.

[The Tomato Watcher]

Even though the emulator download link is dead (and I'm genuinely not sure where I found it recently, sorry about that), I would like to add a few things on top of this based on my own experimentation:

The PC-98 version actually has its own fast-forward feature, so if you find the vanilla version of the emulator, you aren't at a disadvantage The reason this fast forward feature is so obscure (aside from the manual being both Japanese and unscanned) is probably that the fast forward key (that WOULD be one key to the right of P - the pause key - on an actual PC-98 keyboard) gets mapped to END in Neko Project II (which, depending on your keyboard, you may have to hold down Fn to even use!), and there is unfortunately no way to change that without using other software.

If you wish to use the in-game fast forward feature, x32 for the CPU multiplier isn't the best choice. Much like the Windows version, fast forward speed is, to an extent anyway, dependent on CPU speed; somewhere near x8 seems to be the sweet spot for me--even setting the multiplier as low as x4 has only a small impact on non-fast-forward performance--but you may crank it a little higher for a faster fast forward if you wish. Do NOT set the multiplier any lower than x4 unless you want guaranteed slowdown and possible crashes.

As for the colors, there is a setting called "Real palettes adjust"--frustratingly buried in a dialog box--that can fix the colors. Go to Screen -> Screen option... and the dialog box will appear. Select the Timing tab and slide "Real palettes adjust" to its minimum value of -32, and the colors will be completely correct.

One last thing: by default, the few voice samples in the game are downright ear-piercing and extremely unpleasant to hear. This is only because the emulator is not set up for accurate playback of samples through the PC Speaker or the PSG by default. This time, the setting is buried in the .INI file... which, by the way, only exists after opening the executable at least once. Search for the setting BEEP_PCM, which is set to 0 by default. Set it to 3, and the emulator will now use a different strategy for playing samples through the beeper and PSG, and the samples sound MUCH less bad as a result.