Yea that's certainly it. Wonder why the mouse jump button is so much quicker than the keyboard. 🤷

So I had sort of theorized about trying to restart runs until you could get one with a small hill right before the starting point to speed yourself up. But the new run uses the jump button to somehow get some serious speed starting. When verifying the run, I went into the game and try to do something similar. It does appear that sometimes when using the jump mechanic, you'll pick up a lot of speed, while others you won't. I'm not sure what causes this, so I was wondering if anyone might have an idea about how to control this speeding up happening with the jumping. It also appears that if you right before a rock, you also jump further and pick some up some speed. On Shalom, clearly this could only be done in the first and last segment of the race as their is no room to try to jump further when actually dodging flags.

Done. And wow that lag is bad. You can literally see the lemmings slow down as more come on the screen. I honestly don't think I've seen I've seen that much lag in a game on any console.

"So I would advise dropping the IGT as a criterion/marker on runs straight away, in order that newcomers will easily understand that RTA and lag are just as much to be optimised as the actual route."

I can do this, but it would involve me erasing the IGT's from your run. If you are cool with that, I can do it it and make IGT invisible from the Full-Game Run perspective.

Presumably the PAL version would lag less, but you'd be running at 5/6th's the speed. Very unlikely that there is that much lag that could be reduced to offset the lower frame rate. That being said, PAL at 50 fps might be useful for IL runs, since it shouldn't really have any effect on IGT.

Hmm, that is interesting. On all the various ports, usually the developers changed things, for instance, the max number of lemmings appearing on the screen. In general, this was done to match the limitations of the hardware the game was being ported to. Looks like SMS is set to limit max lemmings at 20, like the ZX Spectrum does, so that's pretty crazy it starts to lag once more than 14 lemmings are on the board. Given that those sort of gaps would wildly change your strategy depending on what the best sort of time is, I'd be willing to separate IGT/RTA times on the leaderboards for ports where something like that would make a difference. I can only imagine trying to RTA the game where you'd constantly have to be trying to keep less than 14 lemmings on screen during the level, on each level, and also scrolling as often as possible to reduce lag when lemmings are actually on the screen.

I mainly split IGT/RTA up for full game/individual level runs to help better account for small differences in the DOS port as far as certain pauses and glitches go, but the juggling the number of visible lemmings on screen at any given moment really adds a whole different level to the mix.

Sure you aren’t just using pause more often? That could result in longer rta’s and shorter igt’s.

Either of those would be fine for use.

It's hard me to imagine that world. In the US the story is so much more linked with IBM and DOS, with NES being the only game console I had actually heard of from birth to the Genesis/SNES came out. I didn't know what a SMS was until I was an adult. Of course, I am but one American. There's a whole European/Japan computer realm out there I hope to dig into at some time.

As far other glitches you may be trying to find and utilize, you can try ask at https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?board=2.0 as well. I keep a speedrunning topic open over there as well, but there are a lot of non-speedrunners who know a great deal about this game and keep active lists of things discovered. It's possible someone may have some useful info.

Use to be a space for Japanese names of a given game, but people didn't put in the right characters, so it was taken away.

Generally speaking, you can have times with no milliseconds on the board, and then use the millsecond option specifically for instances of settling ties, particularly on WR runs. If other people submit times with milliseconds, you can just remove the milliseconds from their run when they submit and just stipulate in the rules not to put milliseconds unless specifically for the purposes of breaking a tie.

Just let me know. Yeah, it's shorter than some of the games I have run in the past, but it's a particularly taxing run even for how short it is. Just lots of memorization and execution, with large time losses for missing them. I didn't know the SMS was more popular than NES in Europe. I had a NES/Genesis/N64 growing up, but I never even knew lemmings was ported to those systems until much later, but I had the DOS version from a very young age.

That glitch is also very cool, and I could see how if it's reliable in terms of execution how that could save minutes over the entirety of the run, particularly on any level were bashers are pretty essential.

Thinking about it, I could possibly add groupings in the IL menu relatively easy. SMS 1-15, and so fourth if it's really desired. That at least wouldn't require a complete reworking of the back end for full game runs. Yeah, I can see how trying to switch from Fun/Tricky in the same night would complicate things.

Out of curiosity, what made you decide to go with running the SMS version of the game?

Alright Any% and No Ring Out is up. I'll look into doing a 100% category if anyone manages to do one.

I try to predominantly use the left paddle. Right paddle, at least anecdotally, seems to have more potential to end up in a few places that you don't particularly want it to go. With the left paddle, you are more likely to hit the button that counts up to 1000. That's particularly useful, especially when you are struggling to get the ball stuck in the 1000 point passage. I don't have great advice for it to be honest. IMO, it might be worth putting the ball through the top left passage (and reset any points the button has accumulated) in order to increase your chances of getting stuck up there. I tend to prefer trying to get it stuck in the passage through the bottom, if only for the sake of keeping the ball moving to allow me to take more paddle shots.

That's a great intro you got there. If you can do that consistently enough to get the bonus frequently enough, you are bound to get a great bounce up there eventually. Without the bonus, I've seen 30k points accumulated on series of bounces, and naturally if something like that occured post bonus, you could be looking at 60k-70k points in something like a minute or so.

I wouldn't be surprised if it were the case the fastest IGT IL time would actually be slower. In the MS-DOS this is absolutely the case, since the player can pause to 1.) release the first lemming right as the IGT timer starts, as opposed to letting the intro to a given level and more importantly 2.) can also change release rate before IGT timer starts. Assuming this can't be done with perfect accuracy, there will always a tiny bit of RTA loss when pausing and preparing these things. IGT is definitely not necessary; like I said, it's more just convenience given that measuring multiple minute timeframes is a heavy load, the lack of interest in IGT runs, and the proliferation of tiny differences that occur on each given port of game including various.

The RTA start time is good... for SMS, pressing 2 on Level One Screen. For the purposes of verifying, I generally use the first frame the colors change in the fade out. It's literally the only verifiable moment player control has been established. Outside the Fun/Tricky/etc. delineations, I don't have any particular plans to make smaller segments of multi-level runs. The main reason being that different ports can have different number of levels. It would be difficult to make something that was consistent. (Most ports stick with the normal 30 levels per difficulty, but someone are missing a couple levels effectively making like 28 levels, while NES has 25, etc.) The one exception I will probably make into this in the future is when including the arcade prototype, since there has been some interest expressed on a major Lemming forum for such an option. That will likely be it's own set of categories and misc categories for sections of game play.

So, for the multi-level runs, RTA is ranked above IGT, which invalidates some strategies, such as presetting the release rate on a pause, or using the pause glitch in DOS to adjust the first release start directly at IGT starting. But for IL runs, IGT is used for simplicity reasons. It's easier to verify, given that their isn't a great RTA starting and ending point. RTA starting at the first frame the beginning screen fades and the first frame on the ending level in which the Lemming Counter hits zero, or the first frame the level fade out can be determined in the event the escape button is used (for DOS mostly). IGT as far as multi-level runs is only available because it's needed for the IL runs. It's not particularly needed for full runs, and requires a lot of additional work for runners when submitting.

I agree it for the Fun levels it wouldn't be too difficult a pull off a ridiculously optimized run. Tricky could probably be done too. To do it on Mayhem seems like it would be mind shattering. Then again, if someone put in the time to do, and managed to get through 20 runs of the game, I imagine that might be a best position to do so, so long as they have good notes. Especially given that certain maps get reused, it can be pretty difficult to quickly recall all the important details of 30 straight levels fast enough to ensure optimal strats are being used each level, but good note taking could probably ease that burden to a large extent. Just having the percentages down for a necessary win in your notes alleviates a lot of the cognitive stress of trying to remember so many numbers.

That would be great. At some point I will likely be willing to add the IL runs from people's full game runs so that the IL board starts getting filled up, since I realize it's a bit of a pain to upload 30 individual videos. That being said though, if it was played immensely enough, I'd imagine that the best times would eventually be IL runs just from grinding the level over and over.

Thanks a bunch for verifying that. I will put together a category for you as a basic Any%, as well as No Count Out. This may take a day or two, as I will need to do a little reworking of the board to accommodate the new subcategories.

Sorry for delayed response; it was the holidays.

I believe I acquired the game here: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/lemmings-16x

Let me know if you have other issues with getting it working in DOSBox.