Addams Family Amiga: The Backgrounds Edition - OCS and AGA Amigas, now with restored backgrounds!
EAB member DJ Mike has announced a major breakthrough for Amiga owners, revealing a heavily modified "Backgrounds Edition" of Ocean's classic 1992 tie-in game, The Addams Family. This project rectifies a decades-old disappointment. When the original game launched across multiple platforms in the 16-bit era, the Amiga port notoriously lacked the detailed background artwork present on rival systems. Prompted by a discussion on the English Amiga Board (EAB) forums, DJ Mike reverse-engineered the game's code, discovering a startling secret: the original developers actually programmed the backgrounds to render, but the code ultimately ignored and overwrote them before they could reach the screen.
Comparisons of the original system versions
Addams Family Amiga: The Backgrounds Edition
Overcoming the technical limits of the hardware required massive code restructuring and meticulous memory management. The developer discovered that the original team intended to implement parallax scrolling running at half-speed. However, because standard OCS Amiga chipsets max out their 32-colour bitplanes on the foreground action, a true dual-playfield effect was impossible without causing severe visual lag. To maintain smooth performance on standard OCS machines, the new version locks the restored backgrounds to scroll at the same speed as the level. Meanwhile, AGA-powered machines like the Amiga 1200 and 4000 get the premium experience; by leveraging 32-bit FMODE graphics and storing 32 distinct copies of the background in memory simultaneously, the game pushes the 2MB Chip RAM limit to deliver flawless, intended half-speed parallax scrolling.
Really is a massive improvement.. I guess they didn't have time to come up with a solution they liked for the original release. I wonder how much work it'd take to add the extra weapons etc from the SNES version, too..
Somehow when this came out originally I had no idea about the other platform versions, and how it was supposed to have backgrounds .. so its nice but also a bit strange seeing them now
Well, that's a huge improvement. Bravo to the people who have done this!
Note: the above is the new AGA version. Looking at the original OCS version, it seems absurd to me that SOME kind of parallax could not have been implemented in the original design - even if it was just a 2-colour abstract pattern like in OCS James Pond 2 etc. There are tons of games similar to this one on the OCS Amiga that have a parallax background.
For a start, 5 bit planes (32 colours) are not at all necessary for the foreground graphics. That could easily have been 16 colours with very little visual difference. This would open several possibilities for a simple parallax background.
Note: this is in no way directed at the people involved in this remaster. Nor, in fact, am I criticising the original version - it is, in fact, a very accomplished title as it is. I'm purely addressing the parallax issue - and am convinced that with the time and expertise, a parallax effect of some kind could have been accomplished on the OCS version.
Quite possibly 16 colours would have been fine, but the game uses quite a dynamic palette for everything on screen. Would have meant squashing colours or recolouring certain objects in the scene to use same colours as the rest of the level. Certainly doable, but it would have looked much less vibrant.
Wow, that is a massive (and unexpected) improvement! Now, on ECS/OCS you can't really have 16 color parallax cause if you use 16 color sprites you end up with only 4, which are not enough to cover the whole screen, unless you heavily limit the horizontal resolution. On AGA that's defintely possible. That being said, it is a huge improvement as is, kudos to dj mike!
The game is already using sprites for Gomez to achieve 50fps scroll. In OCS he uses 6 of the 8 sprites (2x2 attached sprites for Gomez, 1x2 attached for the Fez). That could be squashed to 4 because AGA can have wider sprites, but not enough to make 16 colour backgrounds workable in sprites.
Thanks a lot to DJ Mike!
ReplyDeleteI've been playing the WHDLoad beta and works like a charm with the new silky smooth scrolling backgrounds!
Really is a massive improvement.. I guess they didn't have time to come up with a solution they liked for the original release. I wonder how much work it'd take to add the extra weapons etc from the SNES version, too..
ReplyDeleteSomehow when this came out originally I had no idea about the other platform versions, and how it was supposed to have backgrounds .. so its nice but also a bit strange seeing them now
ReplyDeleteGreat One !!! Superb restoration !!!
ReplyDeleteWell, that's a huge improvement. Bravo to the people who have done this!
ReplyDeleteNote: the above is the new AGA version. Looking at the original OCS version, it seems absurd to me that SOME kind of parallax could not have been implemented in the original design - even if it was just a 2-colour abstract pattern like in OCS James Pond 2 etc. There are tons of games similar to this one on the OCS Amiga that have a parallax background.
For a start, 5 bit planes (32 colours) are not at all necessary for the foreground graphics. That could easily have been 16 colours with very little visual difference. This would open several possibilities for a simple parallax background.
Note: this is in no way directed at the people involved in this remaster. Nor, in fact, am I criticising the original version - it is, in fact, a very accomplished title as it is. I'm purely addressing the parallax issue - and am convinced that with the time and expertise, a parallax effect of some kind could have been accomplished on the OCS version.
Quite possibly 16 colours would have been fine, but the game uses quite a dynamic palette for everything on screen. Would have meant squashing colours or recolouring certain objects in the scene to use same colours as the rest of the level. Certainly doable, but it would have looked much less vibrant.
DeleteThis looks incredible - excellent work and thank you!
ReplyDeleteWow, that is a massive (and unexpected) improvement!
ReplyDeleteNow, on ECS/OCS you can't really have 16 color parallax cause if you use 16 color sprites you end up with only 4, which are not enough to cover the whole screen, unless you heavily limit the horizontal resolution. On AGA that's defintely possible. That being said, it is a huge improvement as is, kudos to dj mike!
The game is already using sprites for Gomez to achieve 50fps scroll. In OCS he uses 6 of the 8 sprites (2x2 attached sprites for Gomez, 1x2 attached for the Fez). That could be squashed to 4 because AGA can have wider sprites, but not enough to make 16 colour backgrounds workable in sprites.
Delete