Lemmings- Mac version 8000x better than DOS

I just played through the first 26 or so levels in Lemmings. The original. Yeah, from 1991.  I feel kind of bad for all the people who played it on a machine running DOS, though..

Since I don’t keep any early-90’s x86 machines around (well, not ready to use anyway), I was playing the game in DOSBox – in fact, a DOSBox wrapper so it would behave similarly to a native OS X app that you just double-click.  Nice and convenient.

Playing the game via DOSBox was sort of bittersweet, though: the quality of the DOS version of Lemmings is surprisingly bad!  Even when enabling the more “advanced” settings,  the sound and music quality is still a mere fraction of that which you get when playing the Mac OS version of the game.  Until now, I had only ever played the game on Mac OS.

Compare the following two screenshots:

Pretty much sums it up.  First off you can notice that the Mac version has double the resolution.  Then there’s the color palette – probably ~16 colors in DOS vs. 256 colors in Mac OS.  It’s really noticeable when comparing the “nuke” button:

I noticed this pretty much right away since I used to love nuking the lemmings when I played this in school years ago.

Even worse, though? The sound is just horrible!  Then again, I found this constantly when visiting friends’ houses when I was younger.  Hell, I still remember when one buddy of mine got a sound card as a birthday gift. I was pretty shocked – “Your computer doesn’t HAVE SOUND???” …  Wow, he could play WarCraft 1 with [non-PC-speaker] sound for the first time…

But seriously, compare the DOS music (top) with the Macintosh music (bottom), for example.

DOS:
Mac OS:

I mean, neither sound amazing, but at least the Mac one doesn’t sound like it’s shredding my speakers.

Anyway, I would like to think that maybe the DOS version I’ve been playing is some “first version” that was later improved with some kind of update.  I know that has happened with some games in the past – quickest example I can think of offhand would be the Quake runtime for Win95, I guess.

Regardless I’m reminded to be glad that I grew up using Macs.  The contrast between the two platforms is still really surprising, even in regards to current offerings on the “PC” and Mac platforms.

Oh, it’s worth noting that the Amiga version also looks very nice, completely on par with the Macintosh version.  The funny thing is that Lemmings was released for Amiga first, yet the Amiga version still retained top quality even when compared to the versions ported to other platforms (which were released up to 1-2 years later).

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Tags: dos, games, mac, retro gaming