Lemmings font and green/brown background tile

[0xdeadbeef]

Since I had such great success when requesting the special levels graphics, I just try this one  more time:

Has anybody by chance extracted the font used by the Amiga (and/or maybe the VGA) version of lemmings?

I'm also looking for the background tiles used in the level description screens. The Amiga version had green tiles, the VGA version seems to have brown tiles. I'd take both.

And if we're at it: not as urgent, but indeed having all the menu gfx from the VGA/Amiga version (sound/difficulty settings etc) would be nice as well.

I mean, I could rip all of this from screenshots or probably from the VGA version DAT files, but in case someone could provide me with this stuff, I would greatly appreciate it.

[ccexplore]

Has anybody by chance extracted the font used by the Amiga (and/or maybe the VGA) version of lemmings?<snip>

Sorry, no luck from me this time.  

Also, do you really need to imitate the original down to this level of details?  I mean, making sure the level-playing parts of the game is as authentic as possible makes sense, since you spend most of your time on that.  I'm less convinced about the need to re-imitate the game's main menu UIs.  And does the Windows version of Lemmings even have the same menu graphics and fonts as DOS/Amiga?

And in the end, my guess is that you wouldn't even be able to get the game mechanics down to the same level of exactness as you could with the graphics, so you aren't going to make everything exactly the same even if they look the same.

[ccexplore]

I mean, making sure the level-playing parts of the game is as authentic as possible makes sense, since you spend most of your time on that.

To be clear, the last part should read "since the player spends most of their time there".  That's of course not to say that 0xdeadbeef won't be spending a lot of time coding that part too.  

[0xdeadbeef]

Compared to the need to get all the gfx, sound effects and levels, the font etc. is of course not as important for the "lemmings experience".
The again, IMHO the windows version somehow lacks the typical lemmings feeling because of some details like this.
So if I have the chance, I'd like to recreate as much of the original fun as possible.

[Mindless]

I mean, I could rip all of this from screenshots or probably from the VGA version DAT files, but in case someone could provide me with this stuff, I would greatly appreciate it.

I don't have the palette information, if I did I could add saving to bitmaps to my tool, making ripping alot easier...  

As for the Amiga, I'll take a look at it, but I can't promise anything... I think it uses the same compression method as the DOS game, but I may very well be wrong.

[ccexplore]

I don't have the palette information, if I did I could add saving to bitmaps to my tool, making ripping alot easier... &#A0;

Oh, if you have the means to to saving to bitmaps, then ripping should be straightforward.  As for the palette, I suggest the following approach:

1) replace one of the 4 bpp bitmaps with a block of same-color pixels.  Or if you feel fancy, change the graphics to include all 16 colors at least once.  (Shouldn't be hard, changing just 8 bytes should do the trick.)

2) screencap in DOSBox

3) In Windows Paint, use the "color picker" to find out what color it is

4) Repeat for remaining 14 colors.

[Mindless]

http://it.travisbsd.org/lemmings/_misc/gxplr.zip
changes:
  no longer loads palettes from groundxo.dat
  loads palettes from gxplr.pal
  exports bitmaps
  added grumpy personality*

*This is very dirty (as opposed to clean) code, for some reason it will NOT save bitmaps with filenames less than 4 character.  There may be more bugs and to get them all out would require a complete rewrite, something I've not time for right now.

Edit: bug replaced by another bug: now it randomly decides to not save a bitmap  X_X so if it doesn't save the first time, try again.

Edit: all bugs replaced by a lack of eof checking, which is odd since that code is in no way related to the bitmap saving code, I think it may be a compiler bug, but I cannot reproduce it in any other code...

[ccexplore]

This is universally regarded as shitty, but still, you might find some use for it:

http://eng-forum.lemmingswelt.de/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=news;action=display;num=1125768276

It's a topic on an apparently abandoned Java Lemmings clone called "jLemmings".  It's open source (GPL).

The graphics bundled in are horrible, but the game design allows you to replace the graphics easily, or so it says.  The game mechanics also needs some work apparently, but at least it is supposedly good enough that you can play a level without, like, crashing after the first second or something.

So maybe if you start off from this, you can save yourself some time.  Or not.  :-/

[Mindless]

This is universally regarded as shitty...

[ccexplore]

As for the Amiga, I'll take a look at it, but I can't promise anything... I think it uses the same compression method as the DOS game, but I may very well be wrong.

The compression is probably the same, in fact, it turns out the Lemmings compression scheme is somewhat reminicent of an apparently popular Amiga scheme called "Powerpacker" or something.  Not identical, but similar especially in how it has several types of reference chunks for different lengths/offset widths.  The fact that the header has big-endian fields also suggests an Amiga origin.

However, I think your problem would be in extracting the graphics once you decompress the data.  I don't know anything about the Amiga's graphics hardware, but it's quite likely that it doesn't use the planar bitmap memory organization that the PC's EGA/VGA uses.  So before you have a chance to extract anything from the Amiga version you'll first need to learn how its video framebuffer is organized.

As for the green/brown background, I have to check, but I would think it's probably just the same background pattern using different palettes.  So maybe all you have to do is to get the colors off a screenshot in WinUAE.

[0xdeadbeef]

About Amiga version:
As far as I remember, the Amiga had "Bitplanes", where for a 4Bit color mode, you would have 4 Bitplanes of the size of your images.
Then again, it's not sure that they stored the images in this format.
The most popular gfx format on the Amiga btw. was IFF-ILBM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILBM), but probably they didn't use this either, since it contained the whole palette and I would guess, the palette ist stored separately like in the windows version.

About DOS version:
Has anybody ever considered that the DOS version might use the same format internally as the win95 version (SPR files)? Just asking, since I investigated the SPR format lately.

And about jLemmings:
Well, I wasn't aware of this "rival" before I read about it in the other thread. I must admit, I'm still quite far away from a working game and don't even have the lemmings themselves in yet (maybe I'll start today with this task - at least it's well prepared).
Then again, my version at least is not as ugly:
http://home.arcor.de/0xdeadbeef/menacing.png
http://home.arcor.de/0xdeadbeef/escher.png

[ccexplore]

About Amiga version:
As far as I remember, the Amiga had "Bitplanes", where for a 4Bit color mode, you would have 4 Bitplanes of the size of your images.

Hmm, so maybe the format's the same after all.

For old systems like Amiga and DOS, games generally choose to store images in a format close to how the hardware handles it.  Simplifies programming etc.

About DOS version:
Has anybody ever considered that the DOS version might use the same format internally as the win95 version (SPR files)? Just asking, since I investigated the SPR format lately.

No, because Mindless and I already decoded the DOS version before and while you were doing the Win95.  The DOS format doesn't use the SPR format, for good reasons, since with DOS you get to directly mess with hardware, so as stated above, the closer your bitmap format is to the hardware, the easier.

With Windows, it's a different story.

Nice thought though, but no, they are different.

And about jLemmings:
Well, I wasn't aware of this "rival" before I read about it in the other thread.

You are rather generous in calling it your "rival".  jLemmings hasn't exactly garnered rave reviews......  

[Mindless]

About Amiga version:
As far as I remember, the Amiga had "Bitplanes", where for a 4Bit color mode, you would have 4 Bitplanes of the size of your images.
Then again, it's not sure that they stored the images in this format.
The most popular gfx format on the Amiga btw. was IFF-ILBM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILBM), but probably they didn't use this either, since it contained the whole palette and I would guess, the palette ist stored separately like in the windows version.

The Psygnosis logo seems to be in ILBM format... I don't know about the others.  Here's the first few bytes of the 'Psygnosis' file:

Code Select Expand

FORM  K+ILBMBMHD
Here's all the files ripped from the Lemmings disks and the HD Amiga executable, so you can load these up in Workbench and play the game w/o any loading time.
http://it.travisbsd.org/lemmings/_misc/LemmingsAmigaHD.zip

@0xdeadbeef: BTW, those screenshots look awesome, the only thing I'd change is making the level preview box wider so that it is proportional with the level.

[0xdeadbeef]

@0xdeadbeef: BTW, those screenshots look awesome, the only thing I'd change is making the level preview box wider so that it is proportional with the level.

Well, it's just a quick first layout trial. Indeed, the level preview is monochrome in all original versions (only kind of in the win95 version) though I'm not 100% sure if I will go for that. Benefit would be that the lemmings pixels would be more visible... Maybe I will calculate a gray value for each RGB pixel. We shall see.
Furthermore my preview box misses the animated objects at the moment because it is based on the terrain+fixed objects background image. So e.g. the entrance is missing.
I will have to fix this though it includes lot's of work for small benefit

About the proportions: I don't think that the preview window in any official version is proportional. The scrollable area in the original game is 1600x160 pixels, in mine it's 3200x320, so it's always 10:1. If you draw this with correct ratio, the preview will have either a terribly small height or a terribly big width.
E.g. my preview box is 200 pixels wide. Much more is not possible since I want to do a 640x400 fullscreen mode and the icon bar already takes 384 (32x12) pixels. Also I want to add two scroll buttons next to the preview box as in the amiga version.
So with 200 pixels width, the height with correct ratio would be 20, which is VERY small and looks awful. At the moment I use 64 pixels as height (1:3.125), though I must admit that it's a bit too much. The he next "modulo 0" divisor of 320 is 8, so I might go for that (40 pixels). Still, this is only 5:1 instead of 10:1...

[ccexplore]

Indeed, the level preview is monochrome in all original versions (only kind of in the win95 version)

This is a prime example of going overboard with imitating the original, IMHO.  (By the way, it's better called the "mini-map".  I usually reserve the term "level preview" for the one you see before the level is being played.)

Cheapo uses a full-color mini-map and as far as I know no one has complained.  (Well, maybe not yet.  Watch now as Mindless/Ahribar/Jazzem proves me wrong.)

Furthermore my preview box misses the animated objects at the moment because it is based on the terrain+fixed objects background image. So e.g. the entrance is missing.
I will have to fix this though it includes lot's of work for small benefit

Why would it be lots of work?  Just pick one animation frame out of the interactive object and you're done.  Actually, you can even have the interactive objects animated in the mini-map too!

I should note that the so-called "original" mini-map, you know the monochrome one, doesn't display the objects.  You should display the objects if you're going to make a full-color mini-map, and shouldn't if you're going to leave it monochrome.