I'm trying to rewrite Lemmings in Java at the moment. So far I extracted all the graphics of the windows version and can load and display all levels of the original game and "Oh No!".

However, the windows version contains some levels which appear to be  empty, because the graphics sets are missing:

LVL0001.LVL -   What an AWESOME level
LVL0002.LVL -    MENACING
LVL0004.LVL -   A BeastII of a level
LVL0013.LVL -    A Beast of a level

These 4 levels are obviously tributes to Psygnosis Amiga games and so I guess they don't exist in the windows version, right?

Any chance someone could provide me with these 3 or 4 (dunno if Beast and BeastII share a gfx set) sets???
I'd also take some Amiga data files and try to figure out  myself how the data is stored. However from what I can tell, the Amiga disks seem to be in some special format and don't have the wish to investigate into Amiga disk formats for this.
Maybe these levels were ported to some other version with more accessible format?
Any help would be appreciated...

Lucky you. I already have the bitmaps for the DOS version of the special graphics, extracted directly from the game and converted to Windows BMP format.  You can convert them yourself to whatever format you plan to use:

http://www.geocities.com/guestlevels/myvgaspec/original_vgaspec_bitmaps.zip

Although of course, you could probably have gotten something similar if you download an SNES/Genesis emulator and a suitable copy of the Lemmings ROM, then take screenshots.

And yes, those 4 levels are missing in the Windows version.

Note by the way that the special graphics level do not use tilesets.  The game really does store the entire terrain as one bitmap.

If you want terrain pieces, ask Ahribar, who has done some work trying to manually separate out the various pieces from the bitmap.

Hey, great, you saved my day :)
Thanks a lot!

I never liked the Menacing one, it was always a little too disturbing for my liking :P

I liked the beast of a level one though, what games are they from? Shadow of the beast by any chance?

You'll definitely have to tell us when it's completed.

"   * Fun: "A Beast of a Level" used the graphics from Shadow of the Beast.
   * Tricky: "MENACING!!!" used the graphics from Menace.
   * Taxing: "What an AWESOME Level" was based on Awesome.
   * Mayhem: "A Beast II of a Level" was taken from Shadow of the Beast 2."

Yes; I don't know whether it will help you, but you're welcome to use these if you want them!

http://www.geocities.com/zarathustra47/Special-Graphics.bmp

I've separated out all the pieces and drawn in the missing parts where they went behind each other or off the screen. (The big tree was a hell of a lot of work, but I think I did a good job!) Fun 22 is missing, though, as it proved too difficult.

And the metal blocks are for Cheapo level-design purpose; the original special graphics levels don't have metal.

Hey, nice work...
However I would have to recreate the level then as the original "special" levels don't include any terrain information - and it wouldn't fit anyway to your tileset.
Guess the recreation (object id, coordinates, draw mode for each drawn terrain tile) of the levels based on these tiles would be quite a hazzle and I have so much left do to get the basic game to work.
It's worth a thought in terms of smaller game size but for the moment, the "simple" level images are the easier way for me.

BTW: in the "normal" levels, the first color index is invisible ("no brick") color used for the lemmings collision check. in both, the full gfx as well as in the tiles, the holes in the "trunk" of the beast2 gfx use index0.
Can anybody remember if a lemming could actually dig down to such a trunk hole (in case there were any digging lemmings which I had to check) and then fall down?
Or is this maybe a conversion bug and the black parts inside the trunk were "solid" (not index 0)?

I also wonder if the stars in Amazing were really "solid", such as a lemming could walk/stand on them!?

Those graphic sets look good. I wished you could edit them in Lemedit.

In "A BeastII of a Level", the black (invisible) areas are pure black areas and are treated as a lack of terrain.

In "What an AWESOME level" (which is I guess what you meant by "Amazing"), the stars are treated as terrain.

Any colored pixel is a terrain pixel. If you use a color very close to black that isn't pure black, it would be treated as terrain (but the holes in BeastII are pure black).

Some levels in Lemmings that use crystal graphics have pure black terrain.

Not a conversion bug, they really are trunk holes void of terrain pixels.


Yes they are.