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If you happened to play Ocean Software's 1992 port of The Addams Family for the Commodore Amiga back in the day, you'll know that it came with a pretty big compromise.
Namely, that the game lacked the detailed backgrounds seen elsewhere in the other versions (SNES, Atari ST, and Mega Drive), with most of the levels playing out against a black void.
Fortunately, though, it appears that fans have come to the rescue once again, with an EAB member named DJ Mike having now released a special "Backgrounds Edition" of the game (as reported by IndieRetroNews/SabermanRetroNews) that restores the missing backgrounds to OCS and AGA Amigas.
"A while back, spurred on by a thread on the EAB forums, I spent a lot of time disassembling the Amiga release," the project page reads. "And discovered that the backgrounds are actually rendered by the game, but then ignored (and overwritten). With some careful reworking of the code and memory management, I was able to re-enable them.
"As implemented, the devs were clearly aiming for parallax backgrounds that scrolled at half the speed of the level. But with only a single playfield, and with the game using the copper/bitplane DMA to scroll the level, this causes problems — the backgrounds are forced to move in sync with the level until the game can re-render them at a new position, meaning the 'parallax' is always lagging behind the player's movement, and ends up looking quite janky as a result."
In the new OCS version, DJ Mike has made a compromise to get this to work, stating, "Due to the game using 32 colours on OCS Amigas, it is not possible to have the backgrounds scroll independently in their own playfield." As a result, the backgrounds "scroll at the same speed as the level." The full parallax experience, however, is available to those playing on an A1200/4000, with the homebrew developer doing a lot of amazing work behind the scenes to improve performance.
"I have reworked a lot of the code for AGA," they wrote. "So the graphics are drawn in FMODE 1/32-bit mode for improved performance. Making the parallax scrolling work, while also retaining the 32 colour foreground, requires having 32 copies of the background in memory at any time, which meant a lot of very careful memory management — the game barely fits in the 2MB chip RAM available, but I got there!"
Upon hearing this amazing news, I contacted James Higgins, the original coder of the game (who I had previously interviewed briefly for our Sacred Spaces feature on Ocean Software). He gave us more insight into why the backgrounds were cut in the first place, before expressing an interest in checking the new version of the game out himself.
"We had some sprite priority issues that made me drop the drawing of the parallax layer on a regular A500," Higgins told me, "The Gomez sprite goes behind scenery - for example, the trellis in the Conservatory level. I think I switched foreground/background sprite strategically - but if there was a 'parallax' layer it would go behind the whole BG during the transition. This was ugly. On later HW A1200, etc., it might have been possible to interleave the player sprite between parallax layers - I don't recall (I can't remember if the HW was even available to me at the time). I should download an emulator and take a peek at what they did."
On itch.io, Higgins asked DJ Mike what he did about these sprite priority issues, to which DJ Mike responded, "I compromised and apply a stipple to the sprite instead, so it has a sort-of transparency which isn't the full hiding effect but removes the need for sprite priority, which as you note doesn't work if the backgrounds are in play."
In response, Higgins told Time Extension that this was a "good compromise," because it "shows the original issue clearly."
According to DJ Mike, "no LLM/AI was used in the development", and this is apparently "not the end of the road" for the project, with the Amiga fan also entertaining other improvements for the game.
You can grab the update here for free.