Porting Lemmings In 36 Hours

An anonymous reader writes "Aaron Ardiri challenged himself to port his classic PalmOS version of Lemmings to the iPhone, Palm Pre, Mac, and Windows. The porting was done using his own dev environment, which creates native C versions of the game. He liveblogged the whole thing, and finished after only 36 hours with an iPhone version and a Palm Pre version awaiting submission, and free versions for Windows and Mac available on his site."

Comments

iPhone bandwagon

[JustinRLynn]

Pandering to the Apple fanboys like everyone else seems to be? Oh come on Aaron, would you jump off a cliff just because everyone else ... oh.

Re:iPhone bandwagon

[DamienRBlack]

If only I hadn't spent all my mod points making my friends dig and climb.

Re:iPhone bandwagon

[TubeSteak]

I think he's hosting the website on his iPhone.
I managed to grab the page after hitting F5 a few times
http://img713.imageshack.us/img713/8107/lemmings.png

Re:iPhone bandwagon

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a bad habit of bragging about my N900 -- WVGA screen, CortexA8 overclocked to 1.1GHz, and a touch-optimized Firefox derivative, it can do anything a laptop can do.

The above link has cured me.

(On second thought... does anyone's laptop actually handle that monster gracefully, either?)

Nice accomplishment!

[Junior J. Junior III]

See, this is what you can do with low level languages... IF you know your shit.

Re:Nice accomplishment!

[SpazmodeusG]

I'm getting old. I remember C being regarded as a high level language designed with portability in mind.

Re:Nice accomplishment!

[Junior J. Junior III]

Yeah, and it is, but it's still considered "low level" these days because it's awfully darn close to the metal. As compared to stuff like .NET or Java that runs on virtual machines or Common Language Runtimes.

Re:Nice accomplishment!

[phantomfive]

Exactly.....I used to spend a lot of time learning different languages, comparing them, trying to figure out what was best, using all the features.......then one day I realized it isn't the languages so much that make the difference, it's how you use it. I don't regret learning a ton of languages because you learn new techniques and ideas from each one, but as long as you can encapsulate stuff and be flexible, the language is ok. With macros and functions and libraries, I can write code just as flexibly and nearly as quickly in assembly as I can in a language like Perl or Ruby.

When the vast majority of your time writing code is taken up by debugging or refactoring, the language it's written in doesn't matter so much as the quality of the code that's written.

Re:Nice accomplishment!

[Lifyre]

Wrong as in factually incorrect or Wrong as in 350 pound man wearing a Sailor Moon costume?

(You're welcome for that lovely image too)

Re:Nice accomplishment!

[Anonymous Coward]

Eventually you reach the point where ... [you've] pretty much seen it all

That is so wrong on so many levels. The beginner thinks he knows everything. The well learned thinks he knows a lot. The expert knows that he knows nothing. This is true in programming as well. There are infinitely possible ways to design a language, and some are yet to come (though derived from current languages of course). There never EVER comes a point where one has seen it all.

Re:Nice accomplishment!

[TheRaven64]

Factually wrong. LLVM is a virtual machine in the sense of virtual architecture, not in the sense of virtual environment. Code for the iPhone is first compiled to LLVM intermediate representation (IR), which is machine code for a virtual architecture that has an infinite number of single-assignment registers and a structured (but simple) memory model. You can do various things with code in this form, but when you are targeting the iPhone, you generally run some optimisations, link a load of the modules together, run some more optimisations, and then compile the result to native code.

Describing LLVM as not unlike the JVM or CLR is like saying that Pascal is not unlike Smalltalk.

Copyright?

[PyroMosh]

Okay, so Lemmings isn't public domain. The owners may have turned a blind eye to DHTML Lemmings, and other small projects, but how do you expect to get approved for the Palm and Apple App Stores?

IIRC Psygnosis owns the rights to Lemmings. Also IIRC, Psygnosis is now owned by Sony. Unless Psygnosis was only the publisher for a third party I'm not aware of.

Good luck with that.

Re: Copyright?

[danielsfca2]

I doubt Apple look too closely for prior art and are more interested in counting the filthy

Oh, so today we're mad at Apple for dastardly approving apps that they should have rejected on the grounds of software look-and-feel... because that totally holds up in court, not to mention it's totally Apple's job to ensure that every app has no resemblance to any other software ever published. Got it!

I'm glad you posted, because I think I missed that memo and was still cursing those Apple jerks for rejecting too many apps, because "All Apps Deserve To Be Approved" and "Apple Is Oppressing People With Their Walled Garden."

Re:Copyright?

[DreadPirateShawn]

IIRC Psygnosis owns the rights to Lemmings. Also IIRC, Psygnosis is now owned by Sony. Unless Psygnosis was only the publisher for a third party I'm not aware of.

Good luck with that.

Not a bad résumé tactic though, however you look at it. If I had an interviewee who ported a game for kicks in 36 hours, I'd certainly file that in the "pros" column..

Re:But can he actually publish his iPhone version?

[wampus]

Only if you are Adobe or someone else on Steve-O's shit list. They relaxed the rules to be even less consistent and harder to predict.

Re:Wrong language?

[Graff]

Didn't Apple have some anti-competitive rules that allowed only Objective-C to be used in programming for the iPhone?

Objective-C is C. Objective-C is a strict superset of C so there's no difference between C code and Objective-C except for the extensions that Objective-C has added.

Even if Objective-C didn't include all of C it would still be OK. Apple allows iOS apps to be written in Objective-C, C, and C++. These languages were chosen because they are supported under Apple's API for iOS.

The Game that Made DMA Design

[snap2grid]

One of my claims to fame is that I was working for DMA Design when they created the original Lemmings (Dundee, Scotland), released on Valentine's day 1992. I did some conversions of the Amiga graphics to the PC (EGA!) and Atari Lynx. In the victory screen, there's a pic of the developers including myself! Needless to say, a lot of what is written on the net isn't quite correct. Great to see that it's still well thought of and in fact it's even part of a museum exhibit in Dundee (McManus Galleries) (You *really* know you're old when your photo is in a museum!) You can find the history of Lemmings (and DMA) here. http://www.dmadesign.org/ and some of my musings from that time here http://www.stevehammond.org/

Looking forward to the Android port

[Spacelem]

It would be great if I could play my favourite game on my phone!

Re:No love for Lemmings 2?

[wjsteele]

The basic problem is that One person liked Lemmings first... then everybody else followed him!

Bill