Addams Family port/remake?

[vulture]

At the time of its release (1992) I'd hazard a guess that it was primarily developed for the Amiga rather than the ST. I can only assume the backgrounds were left out, because of time restrictions, ie some bugs existed with them enabled and they really had no time to fix them til deadline.

[Retro1234]

I cant really remember how I put the backgrounds in but before I totaly forget - On the selection screen - the level with all the doors I think I used the ST background data exactly and wrote a little program to combine the two maps foreground and background, on this level the Sprite doesnt appear behind the tiles but some tiles arnt displayed because they dont flip on the amiga version with this data.

On the other level I looked at the ST background but it only uses a tiny bit of the background for its parallax, so I ripped the background from the Snes version, the map data is stored in exactly the same basic format but the Tile set is in a different order so I traced it and then combined the the foreground and background map.

[vulture]

I retested the game on winuae with the fps indicator and it's indeed a full frame game at both pal and ntsc.

[Shatterhand]

Originally Posted by vulture

I retested the game on winuae with the fps indicator and it's indeed a full frame game at both pal and ntsc.

The main sprite and scroll are at 50fps, the enemies are not.

I am right now running both the Amiga and SNES version side by side on real hardware (Amiga version booted from .adf using a Gotek on an unexpanded A600).

The Amiga version has overall smaller graphics (and it's not full screen), the sound effects aren't as clear as in the SNES version, and the enemies move in a much more jerky way than on the SNES version. It's really very glaring, TBH I don't think the enemies are even updating at 25 fps but at 17 fps. And then the Amiga version has no backgrounds and it's lacking 2 itens.

But yeah, music is way better on Amiga.

Which really makes me wonder even more... there's no way the enemies would be moving that jerkily if they were just erasing and them blitting them again. Like Galahad said, and as people said there's a 16x16 black tile covering the real background, it really feels like they are saving and restoring background when enemies move. So none of this "We removed background to make it run at 1 frame" shit makes any sense.

I *really* wonder what the hell happened here.

EDIT: Honestly, even from Youtube this is very easy to notice

Amiga version:
[ Show youtube player ]

SNES version:
[ Show youtube player ]

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

Like Galahad said, and as people said there's a 16x16 black tile covering the real background, it really feels like they are saving and restoring background when enemies move. So none of this "We removed background to make it run at 1 frame" shit makes any sense.

I *really* wonder what the hell happened here.

It might be crazy and maybe tested already, but what if someone erases the black in the block? do anything shows up?
[EDIT]did some backtrack, at the end what i wrote fuggeddaboutit [/EDIT]

[Retro1234]

The black tiles dont cover anything there is no background, the tiles could be any colour blue,green etc The background would have to be added to each level.
If you didnt add the blank tile every update the previous graphics wouldnt be cleared on the wrap around etc. basicly the background is just black but could be any static tile like most games.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

The black tiles dont cover anything there is no background, the tiles could be any colour blue,green etc The background would have to be added to each level.
If you didnt add the blank tile every update the previous graphics wouldnt be cleared on the wrap around etc. basicly the background is just black but could be any static tile like most games.

The dualplayfield tiles are hidden behind ! Check the topic on the forum where someone did a test under winuae, making appearing the background tiles

You'll see they are here, only not clipped to the amiga hardware.

[Retro1234]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

The dualplayfield tiles are hidden behind ! Check the topic on the forum where someone did a test under winuae, making appearing the background tiles

You'll see they are here, only not clipped to the amiga hardware.

Who was this person? They must be very clever and handsome

[Shatterhand]

Is it really Dual Playfield though?

If you didnt add the blank tile every update the previous graphics wouldnt be cleared on the wrap around etc.

I don't think you need to update EVERY tile, just the ones that are going to "enter the screen" on the wrap around.

And since the enemies never clash with the foreground, with a black background there's no need to save/redraw background at all. This would make sense if enemies were also upadting at 50fps, but they aren't.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Who was this person? They must be very clever and handsome

Basically stop doing auto-advertising please

check here again :

http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=937730&postcount=50

I have personally checked with maptapper the tiles ingame, all the time for the dualplayfield are here ! It's just that it's not wired inside the game code !

[Shatterhand]

I was just wondering if it was indeed Dual Playfield or just a single playfield with no parallax.

With Dual Playfield you still don't need to save/redraw background if enemies are at a different playfield

[Cedric]

If you want to see what Amiga version would/could be with background, you just have to use the Genesis/Megadrive version and that's exactly it (graphically speaking...).

[Shatterhand]

I just played the Mega-Drive version. Indeed it looks a lot like the Amiga version, but the enemies are moving smoothly here too. While the music is based on the Amiga version (the MD version came out a lot later, and it was ported by Flying Edge), the sound overall is inferior on every possible way.

I also felt the controls were a little more slippery, or maybe I was just sucking badly

Now the Mega-Drive has 16 colors for the foreground and 16 colors for the backgrounds, while still have more 32 colors for the sprites (the MD has four 16 colors palettes, and sprites can use any of them). If the Amiga version is indeed using dual playfield, I don't think it would look as colorful as the Mega Drive version.

[vulture]

Yes, I know what you mean and I can see it. Could it be jerkiness comes not from a lower update frequency, but rather less animation frames?

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

The main sprite and scroll are at 50fps, the enemies are not.

I am right now running both the Amiga and SNES version side by side on real hardware (Amiga version booted from .adf using a Gotek on an unexpanded A600).

The Amiga version has overall smaller graphics (and it's not full screen), the sound effects aren't as clear as in the SNES version, and the enemies move in a much more jerky way than on the SNES version. It's really very glaring, TBH I don't think the enemies aren't even updating at 25 fps but at 17 fps. And then the Amiga version has no backgrounds and it's lacking 2 itens.

But yeah, music is way better on Amiga.

Which really makes me wonder even more... there's no way the enemies would be moving that jerkily if they were just erasing and them blitting them again. Like Galahad said, and as people said there's a 16x16 black tile covering the real background, it really feels like they are saving and restoring background when enemies move. So none of this "We removed background to make it run at 1 frame" shit makes any sense.

I *really* wonder what the hell happened here.

EDIT: Honestly, even from Youtube this is very easy to notice

Amiga version:
[ Show youtube player ]

SNES version:
[ Show youtube player ]

[Shatterhand]

No.. I didn't stop to notice, but I think the number of animation frames is the same. It's just that the game is updating the enemies less frequently than everything else. When you run both games side by side, it's clear the enemies on the Amiga version are "jumping around" instead of smoothly moving through the screen.

This is done in a lot of Amiga games... you have scroll and main sprite (which is usually a HW sprite) updating at 50 fps, but then you have enemies (which are usually BOBs and take more time to draw) updating at 25 fps. This gives you an illusion of everything updating at 50 fps while doing what's possible with the blitter/cpu.

When you begin to notice it, it also gives you a strange feeling of HW sprite being superimposed over everything else

[vulture]

Yes, that's a common technique. Effective, but not perfect of course.

[dlfrsilver]

i have rechecked : basically, the Amiga version has totally been borked up. The ST version works without any advanced graphic chip, it's faster, this only with the poor 68000 clocked 1 mhz higher than one the Amiga.

the ex ocean guys more or less told me that the reason for this was..... It was more entertaining technically to make the whole thing work on ST than on Amiga, and that they prefered the ST.....

I think you get the picture here.....

[roondar]

I've checked the game using the WinUAE visual DMA debugger and it is doing very strange things. Just standing motionless on any screen without any enemies has crazy amounts of Blitter use, something like 50-70% of a frame.

Despite Adam clearly being a hardware sprite.

It's incredibly wasteful. Even if Adam was drawn as a bob with complete restore, it would not take nearly that much time. No idea what they do with all that Blitter time (didn't look at the code), but there you have it.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by roondar

I've checked the game using the WinUAE visual DMA debugger and it is doing very strange things. Just standing motionless on any screen without any enemies has crazy amounts of Blitter use, something like 50-70% of a frame.

Despite Adam clearly being a hardware sprite.

It's incredibly wasteful. Even if Adam was drawn as a bob with complete restore, it would not take nearly that much time. No idea what they do with all that Blitter time (didn't look at the code), but there you have it.

yes, i'm sure they worked back on the first Amiga code version, which was all but not finished, and they did it quick'n'fast from the release.

[Retro1234]

Its still alot better than the Atari ST version.

Maybe someone will put the static backgrounds in one day