Chances are you would’ve heard of The Addams Family, either by watching it at the Cinema or playing it at home on a computer or console. Well, if you played the 1992 Amiga version however, compared to say, the Atari ST, Mega Drive or SNES, it was one of the only versions that had no background detail at all for most of the game, just pure blackness. Well as a complete surprise to myself, it looks as if DJ Mike with the help of some EAB members are remaking the Amiga version of The Addams Family with those missing backgrounds. As one person puts it “the game is nearly finished, I tested all the levels using infinite energy and all the backgrounds are perfect and everything is fine”
According to dlfrsilver in regards to why there were no backgrounds in the Amiga version. “The amiga version already had the backgrounds, but the parallax was deactivated or removed and the background graphics were hidden behind the main foreground.” And according to squirminator2k who did further research, “it came down to wanting the smoother graphics, but also because the background layer didn’t actually scroll – i.e. it was a fixed, static layer – players of an early demo build that featured the backdrops complained that it was difficult to figure out where Gomez was visually when he was in freefall. For these reasons, the backdrop layer was nix’d and we got a solid backdrop.”
In regards to this enhanced version when I asked via the EAB forums for more details, DJ Mike was happy to respond with. “I am merely enhancing the original game/restoring parts that were disabled by the developers before release. I know in the first few pages 12 years ago it was discovered that the graphics and maps for the game already includes the backgrounds. It was assumed that the code for drawing them was not present in the release build, but I discovered otherwise and that’s been the basis for my restoration efforts.”
UPDATE : Great news! Looking through the EAB forums (HERE), DJ Mike has released a brand new build with the following post. “This version adds full AGA parallax for a much smoother experience. For now it needs 2,048k chip + 256k fast, but the fast part is meant to be optional so I will make it so later (needs some further adjustments). WHDLoad needs extra memory anyway so it’s not like that’s critical for this phase. A lot more game code had to be adjusted/reworked to make this happen, so I may have missed something. I guess we’ll see. A few of the backgrounds (hallway, secret rooms, continue screen) have had to be recoloured as they were previously >8 colours, which doesn’t work with only 3 bitplanes available. I think they’re alright but I’m not the most discerning when it comes to colour.”
“I was able to upgrade to use FMODE 1 on AGA, which was very necessary because the extra 3 bitplanes really eats up the time the CPU/blitter can get on with redrawing. That meant finding enough chip memory for 32 permutations of the background too! In the end I was able to squash the main game into just 448k of chip, which just about got me enough memory. The play area is shifted 16 pixels to the right as a result so the additional pixel shift works without sacrificing sprites. That actually centres it nicely, but Gomez is no longer in the middle of the screen. Small trade off.I haven’t spent much time on OCS parallax except to remove Fixed mode (because it looked crap). For the time being the hallway background is also disabled in OCS because I haven’t finished reworking it for that yet and the previous super-janky fixed approach was taking too much flak but Enjoy!”
And that’s all there is to say so far, but for now here’s the latest beta to try via DJ Mike (link) and bugs or feedback to be posted through the EAB forums!
The post The Addams Family – An enhancement is in the works with backgrounds for the Amiga version [UPDATE] appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.