This is a problem I seem to be having, and an annoying one at that. Neither me, JM or Conway have been able to put a finger on it, so I was wondering if any of you lemming lovers could help.

Basically, the program tells me to insert a disc every time I try to play a pak. I have levelpak.dat in the folder, I have all the graphics files, so I honestly cannot think why it is happening. I recall having a similar problem when I tried it on my brother's PC. I never had this problem with my old Windows 98 (I'm on XP now), so it may be to do with the hardware, but it does the same with and without DOSbox. Lemedit and DOS Lemmings both seem to work perfectly.

Could anyone suggest why it's doing this? If I don't get it fixed, the Lemedit art competition can't go on!

Maybe a file or two is missing :-/

Don't think there is :-/

Oh well :(
Sorry but I have no idea what might be causing the problem :(

ccexplore might be able to fix the problem  :)

If you're playing the game under Dosbox, try mouting a CD Drive and see...

If that doesn't help, then I don't know! Wait for ccexplore.

Unless one of the files is corrupted, I'm not sure what's going on either, but I can put additional effort into figuring this out I suppose.

For now, you can e-mail me all the files you have up there in a zip file and I'll try to check and see whether they're identical to what I have.  Since you said it didn't work in either DOSBox or plain DOS, I tend to think this is not a hardware issue, as DOSBox emulates all the hardware that the DOS program running in it would see.

Nocdlem and Nocdlem2 should not need any CDs to be inserted.  However, I suppose there's no harm in trying.

I'm also trusting that you are running it in the EGA/VGA + "PC Compatible" mode (eg. no "High Performance" or whatever), correct?

Hmm, I just look more closely at the file listing screenshot you posted above, and noticed some inconsistencies.

First of all, why are most of the files shown with the Windows Media Player icon?   .DAT files shouldn't be something that Windows Media Player would handle.  But anyway, let's ignore that for now, since you said LemEdit does work, so maybe it's just Windows Media Player not being correctly set up.  That shouldn't affect us.

Second and more importantly, I noticed that your levelpak.dat file is shown in the screenshot as "levelpak.dat".  Notice that, even though there are other .DAT files like VGAGR0.dat or ADLIB.dat, they are simply listed as "VGAGR0" and "ADLIB", without the ending .dat.  This makes me suspect that you somehow got your levelpak file named as "levelpak.dat.dat", and Windows, when displaying the files, just uniformly truncated the .dat off all the files being displayed, but since levepak.dat.dat has two ".dat" you still see the other one.

To confirm, try this:  in DOSBox, go to the LemEdit directory, then type

dir lev*.*

and see what gets shown.  It should list levelpak.dat.  If you don't see levelpak.dat being listed, then you misnamed the file.  Go back to Windows and change it so in Windows it is shown as "levelpak", without the .DAT.  Then do the command above in DOSBox again to confirm that the name is correct.

Hey, that's something I hadn't noticed.  :P

Jazzem, you evidently have the extension hidden for known file types. You can turn this option off in Folder Options in Control Panel. Then you should notice that 'levelpak.dat' is actually 'levelpak.dat.dat', as Explore said. Just take the last .dat from the filename.

Duh! Why didn't i see that?  :o

YES!!!

It's working now, yes the problem was it being labelled as levelpak.dat.dat. I had always been used to calling it levelpak.dat since Windows 98 never made sure the name had .dat at the end. Thank you so much ccexplore!

To correct your Windows Media Player kind files, this is because you tried to open a .dat using this program, which I don't know why you did so.

Anyway, to correct this, you must go in any folder. Go into the menu: Tools -> Folder options. Then, go for the File types and look if there's something wrong.

Ok... I've done that, but what file should I make it run with?

Nothing! ;D

A .dat shouldn't be associated with any program or files.

Oh, err... <_< >_> *Runs*

How do you do that though? It seems I can only choose to run it with something from a list.

Just select the .dat file format into the list and click Delete. That's all!

The list is in alphabetical order, so it should in the extensions beginning with "D". Then, you'll see ".dat" and it will show you that this file is associated with Windows Media Player. Click on Delete and on OK, and you're done!

Good job the problems fixed  :)

I'm looking forward to playing your new levels Jazzem  ;)

Thank you :). They're no longer "sounds" anymore!

Oh, and speaking of my levels JM, could you email me back the one I sent you? I renamed my copy outside of lemedit without realising that Lemedit would be unable to read it :-[

Sure  :)

Thank you. Just to my hotmail please.

Level sent!

How strange... I still can't load it at all.

Doesn't matter, it didn't take me too long to do, and it wasn't perticularly brilliant.

You've been able to load it now have you?

Yeah, just as well too-It was impossible to complete!

I've been testing that level and I pretty much like the level  :)

Not managed to pass it yet

That's because it's impossible with five miners :P

I've changed it to six and I've changed the ledges for the bottom two lemmings.

May I try your level too? You can send it over MSN or to benjconway79@yahoo.co.uk. Or you can upload it. When will you upload it?

Impossible levels usually interest me. Can you put it in the file portal?

No problem! ^^

Actually, it is possible with five miners. I'd rather not send it out to be honest, since I know for definate that it's the final version of the level, and it is going to be in my levelpak. (My debut!)

I apologize, but you'll see it when I release my new pak!

I can't wait till I see your levelpak  :P

I can only hope I don't disappoint then ;)

I've started work on another level too. And considering I have both tommorow and Thursday off thanks to my school flooding (Ironically, I was actually ill today!) I should really get stuck into this.