[HN Gopher] Apple ][ "Lemmings" Proof of Concept
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Apple ][ "Lemmings" Proof of Concept
Author : killittosaveit
Score : 204 points
Date : 2022-07-05 06:48 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.deater.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.deater.net)
| Lio wrote:
| 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.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| There was a port of it to the Archimedes.
| Lio wrote:
| Yes that's true but not in 1987 on the original Arm 2
| Archimedes.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Doom on an overclocked ARM250 from 1992, the first ARM system-
| on-a-chip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8301IoVqv4
|
| 7 MIPS at 12MHz rather than the ARM2's 4 MIPS at 8MHz:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ARM_processors
|
| Lemmings was released for the Archimedes in 1991:
| https://forums.jaspp.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=736&hilit=...
| rbanffy wrote:
| > 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)
| dhosek wrote:
| I still wish VMS had managed to survive the 90s. I still
| think its CLI has not been excelled (and there's something to
| be said for requiring commands to be registered rather than
| just treating any executable on the path as a command).
| dhosek wrote:
| And yes, I know about OpenVMS, but it's not really a player
| in any meaningful way.
| StillBored wrote:
| > The II was a dead end. The 65816 was not a nice ISA to
| program for.
|
| I mean you make this statement like its some kind of
| technical roadblock. Which might have seemed appropriate in
| the early 1980's but with a bit of digging would have been
| understood to be false.
|
| There have been various proposals for 32-bit 65816's, and it
| wouldn't have been any different than any of the other
| architectural extensions done to other processors (never mind
| the conversion from 6502->65816). Modal decoders (ex: Arm),
| prefix bytes (ex: amd64), virtual execution modes (ex:
| vm86/i386), etc all provide a method for building a new
| architecture while maintaining backwards compatibility with
| the old.
|
| This stuff is an economic or business decision. At Apple
| apparently it was a political/business decision, rather than
| anything technical. They could have (as the IIGS proved) just
| have created an mac like experience on the apple ][ line,
| while maintaining software compatibility. None of it would
| have been "pretty", but that is almost always the costs
| associated with evolving a technology stack. It took roughly
| a decade to evolve linux from a UP kernel to a SMP one
| without the BKL. In that time, and some of the results
| weren't what anyone would call pretty.
| alexisread wrote:
| You can get a measure of the performance from doom2 on an a4000
|
| https://youtu.be/jXo6BtmuZkc
|
| 12mhz arm2 on a vga monitor (so slower fps than composite).
|
| Some other impressive feats are tomb raider and quake on the
| GBA (16mhz arm7tdmi), halflife on the Falcon, and Dread on the
| St and Amiga.
|
| https://youtu.be/_GVSLcqGP7g https://youtu.be/R43k-p9XdIk
| https://youtu.be/WpwlZgQPCpk https://youtu.be/vj-GVCcd4yo
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Sorry for being off-topic but why "][" instead of "II"?
| dwrodri wrote:
| It was just a popular stylization of the roman numeral that
| stood out, and more accurately reflected the logo on the actual
| device:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_II_typical_configur...
| speps wrote:
| 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.
| partomniscient wrote:
| Because that's what the logo looked like:
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Smithsonian_National...
| News-Dog wrote:
| And followed by the Apple ][ _plus_
|
| I think you could purchase a kit with a replacement ROM and
| case face plate to convert the Apple ][ to an Apple ][ _plus_
|
| Edit Add;
|
| Integer BASIC : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_BASIC
|
| Applesoft BASIC :
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applesoft_BASIC
|
| Officially Woz : http://www.woz.org/letters/apple-basic/
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| ...and followed by the //e which only used that string on
| boot-up if you had the enhanced chipset installed.
| joezydeco wrote:
| It's kind of a fun shibboleth for those of us that hacked on
| the systems back in the day. The ROM used ][ instead of II
| and we used that string when we discussed the computer
| online. I still type it that way just out of pride.
|
| It's kind of like C64 hackers that say KERNAL instead of
| "kernel" since that's what Commodore docs called it.
| dhosek wrote:
| And for added fun, although ] and [ were in the ASCII
| subset that the Apple ][ used, they were _not_ on the
| keyboard. I remember writing a program in AppleSoft Basic
| that was a very limited word processor that used the ctrl
| key as shift and displayed uppercase using inverse (which
| was a bad choice because then the return key gave M as its
| output rather than a new line), and finding that I could
| get half the logo through the esc key.
| balls187 wrote:
| > those of us that hacked on the systems back in the day.
|
| Thanks for letting us stand on your shoulders :)
| marban wrote:
| ][ also appears first in the boot sequence
| drivers99 wrote:
| At some point it changed to // as in: Apple //e on the boot
| screen and the case.
| xbar wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| emsixteen wrote:
| Really cool, always loved Lemmings. Weird game.
| psyc wrote:
| 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.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| 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)
| rob74 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| kurupt213 wrote:
| Does Lemmings run on the IIgs?
| deater wrote:
| there was a fan-made IIgs version LemminGS made in 1996
|
| https://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/products/apple2gs/lemmings.html
| vardump wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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).
| vardump wrote:
| Note: Links to parts 2 and 3 didn't seem to exist anymore in
| that article. But they were easy to find just by changing the
| URL, so here they are:
|
| Part 2: https://codetapper.com/c64/diary-of-a-
| game/lemmings/the-maki...
|
| Part 3: https://codetapper.com/c64/diary-of-a-
| game/lemmings/the-maki...
| tda wrote:
| 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
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Anybody else notice that the in-game music is Pachelbel's Canon?
| brainwipe wrote:
| 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!
| balls187 wrote:
| First game I ever owned was Lemmings for the Amiga.
| jcadam wrote:
| I first played Lemmings on an Amiga 500. Connected to an old
| monochrome Apple monitor II :)
| masswerk wrote:
| BTW, there's also Lemmings for the PET by Jim Orlando, all
| PETSCII-graphics.
|
| Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6aA5Y1SRd0
|
| Homepage: https://jimbo.itch.io/petscii-lemmings-for-commodore-
| pet
|
| Online emulation:
| https://www.masswerk.at/pet/?prg=pzlmgs&ram=32k&rom=2&repeat...
|
| For more PET-ports by Jim Orlando, see
| https://www.masswerk.at/pet/prgs/#jim_orlando
| micheljansen wrote:
| This is incredibly impressive.
| lioeters wrote:
| My goodness, the whole site is a gem, an old-school "hacker" in
| the best sense of the word.
|
| http://www.deater.net/weave/
|
| Pages go back to 1996!
|
| http://www.deater.net/weave/whatsnew1996.html
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(page generated 2022-07-05 23:02 UTC)