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Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

Is Lemmings for sale anywhere these days?

GOG may release it if enough folks vote for it. They specialize in releasing out-of-print games bundled inside of a DOSBox installation:

https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/lemmings

I personally own an old DOS CD-ROM that still works in DOSBox (so you could always go that route until then via ebay etc)

>"If Lemmings was put on sale on GOG for $0.99, I would definitely buy it."

There goes the industry. That'd hardly recoup GOG's costs in licencing it. Is there any way out of this "race-to-free" mentality people have?

> Even if it was $4.99 or $6.99, I would definitely think about it.

Seems like you forgot to include the part that didn't support your complaint.

Fair enough, although that does imply that a higher price would be less likely to result in a purchase

That's generally how it goes with things that cost money

>That'd hardly recoup GOG's costs in licencing it. //

Really? Doesn't that just mean that the company selling the license are charging too much?

GOG: Hey, you know that IP you've got locked away earning no money, how about we give you 50¢ every time we sell a copy?

GameProducer: You mean that stuff I made 20 years ago and already earned massive amounts of money on? The IP that's useless for new games. The games holding it that will only be sold to people reminiscing and won't compete against the current titles were selling?

GOG: Yeah ...

GP: No, thanks, I don't like money.

If the cost of licensing to the licensor then it would be possible to do that kind of transaction. Unfortunately it takes time + energy/bandwidth + money to put these kinds of deals together.

50 centers for every copy sold (which would leave 49 cents to cover platform costs, transaction costs, production, marketing etc) is great if you sell a few million units but if you sell a few thousand...

Is it actually that expensive to license a game that's out-of-print? I would've thought they weren't expecting to make make money off of it, so anything is better than nothing.

If Sony own the rights to it why would they let people profit for free instead of doing nothing just in case a great idea comes along got a new Lemmings product?

Doesn't letting people reminisce and share those products with friends/children/whoever mean that the Lemmings brand retains more worth and is more likely to be successfully resurrected?

Logically I'd say yes, but big companies don't really work that way.

GOG have quite a lot of stuff already that they sell at that price point in sales.

I still have my boxed PC copy: one 3.5" and two 5.25" disks.

Not lemmings, but if your after a good, free clone: http://pingus.seul.org/welcome.html

Download links don't seem to work

https://github.com/Pingus/downloads

Maybe on ebay?

I'd try to find and play the Amiga version, if at all possible. That was the state of the art gaming machine in its day, so I would be surprised if Lemmings made for any other platform was anywhere near as good.

I think there are some Amiga emulators around, if you don't have the hardware.

Lemmings for the Acorn Archimedes was at least as good, if not better: https://youtu.be/ApPGPSH_k7I

The Archimedes had a better CPU, which enabled better graphics. But I never used an Amiga, so I don't know if the videos on YouTube are at the real resolution.

(For those unaware: this is Acorn as in Acorn RISC Machines, an earlier name of Advanced RISC Machines, i.e. ARM.)

Does anyone know if the Raspberry Pi will run the Archimedes port of Lemmings?

The Raspberry Pi capably runs the RISC OS operating system natively on its ARM processor, in many ways it could be considered to be the spiritual successor of the Archimedes.

I know the hardware has changed in ways that trip up games, so it's not a guarantee that Lemmings would work. I found some information here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=32036&p=2...

I can now confirm! Lemmings [0] is available for download for RISC OS [1], and with ADFFS [2], and a bit of fiddling if you only have a Raspberry Pi 3 to hand [3] (earlier versions don't need the fiddling), it runs fine, with perfect sound, graphics etc!

I'm very pleased :-D

[0] http://forums.jaspp.org.uk:9000/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=9...

[1] https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi

[2] http://forums.jaspp.org.uk:9000/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=3... and http://forums.jaspp.org.uk:9000/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=31...

[3] https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=91&t=1401...

It looks like it works [1].

It's from the "Archimedes Software Preservation Project" [2]. I must get in touch, since a few years ago I imaged most of my Acorn floppy discs, but I haven't done much with them. If the Raspberry Pi makes it very easy, that's great.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nE03GMDK4RA

[2] http://forums.jaspp.org.uk:9000/forum/index.php maybe?

That was the only version of Lemmings I'd ever played until I tried the SNES version many years later. I discovered I'd been spoiled by the Acorn.

Anyone going to school in the UK during the 90s will probably have encountered an Acorn.

The Amiga version was the only one with a split-screen, two-player mode using two mice. Using a joystick or keyboard just didn't compare.

I guess you might be able to emulate that these days by talking directly to two USB mice and bypassing the OS' input layer.

X11 supports multiple cursors supposedly. Windows also does but I've only ever seen that with glovePIE.

I remember old game Settlers (also called Serf City in some regions) that allowed a coop splitscreen with two mice.

Superb game.

The Nintendo DS homebrew port is a port of the Amiga version from what I can tell, with perfectly translated touch controls and the same soundtrack (as in sounds the same, uses the same MOD files)

The Amiga version had the best sound of all platforms that got Lemmings. Period. That's the definitive version for me. The Two player mode with 2 mice was incredibly fun!

I'll again argue that the Acorn Archimedes version is better. The instruments seem cleaner that the Amiga version.

https://youtu.be/ApPGPSH_k7I

Acorn hardware used log encoded samples, while nearly everything else used linear. The simple mod players in games tended not to do any conversion and instead used preconverted mods (which were then a pig to pay in anything else). So it's possible that the Arc mods for Lemmings had been converted from a higher bit rate source, rather than just using copies of the Amiga ones.

Whether an 8-bit log samples sounds better than an 8-bit linear sample when it's not processed through YouTube, I have no idea...

Side by side comparisons! Via Youtube, alas, but:

Acorn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwXthGJfHLc

Amiga (emulated): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT6vxY9p7yg

The Amiga's way brighter, but that's probably because it's emulated (and so is a digital recording). But it's pretty obvious that at least some of the tracks on the Arc are recompositions --- One Way Or Another is missing a lot of instruments, Mind the Step is a different pitch, Awesome is a different composition entirely...

The Amiga had a hardware mixer with four channels (with fixed stereo positions). The Acorn had a more strictly powerful CPU but had no hardware mixer. Maybe they had to reduce the number of channels to allow for this? But I was pretty sure the Lemmings mods were classic 4-channel anyway (one channel per Amiga hardware channel).

I think the Archimedes did have 4 or 8 'native' channels for audio.

From memory the MOD files included with Lemmings on the Archimedes were 3-channel, possibly leaving one free for sound effects.

I wonder if it was disk space. Lemmings for Archimedes fitted on an 800K floppy; did the Amiga version span to two 720K floppies? Losing a load of samples would certainly be a way to drop the space requirements.

The Amiga disk format held 880K. The original version of Lemmings was a 2 disk release with an animated intro, but later (cheaper or pack-in) versions shipped on 1 disk with the intro removed.

What struck me was the different instruments -- the Acorn instruments in the first track sound much more like a real xylophone and bass guitar. Or maybe it's meant to be a piano, but it's less synthy.

I have early memories of my parents staying up all night playing Lemmings (on Acorn), and I played it a lot myself once I was old enough, so I'm probably in no position to judge.

Nope.

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