We need to talk about Spiffy.

[aleksoctop]

Hey guys,

I was playing the Ultimate Talkie of Secret of Monkey Island and CTRL-P'd to see the Spiffy's 'EGA based on scan', which most closely resembles what Spiffy actually looked like.

But because it's me, I was thinking of spending a few hours to clean that sprite up, because it's made just by taking the screen that's floating around on google images and with a reduced palette. But that makes it look blurry and actually not accurate to screens printed on backs of boxes which have entirely different color, more consistent with the Scumm Bar screen preceding it. Right now it's about 70% accurate. I aim to get it pixel perfect, maybe 98% accurate with reference to White Label Monkey Island back of box. There's actually a lot of detail in the scan that gets lost in processing but is totally perceivable by eye, but will take a bit of elbow grease, pixel by pixel. I think it needs to be done for the game's preservation's sake.

Thing is- if I'm going to do this, it only really makes sense to do if it can be implemented. I know people have made patches to do this kinda thing, but I'm fairly clueless to where to start. What tool might help swap the in-game graphics with new ones sourced from a to-be-made PNG? Can anyone point me in the wrong direction? Would anyone be even interested in this?

Cheers

[Praetorian]

Hey guys,

I was playing the Ultimate Talkie of Secret of Monkey Island and CTRL-P'd to see the Spiffy's 'EGA based on scan', which most closely resembles what Spiffy actually looked like.

But because it's me, I was thinking of spending a few hours to clean that sprite up, because it's made just by taking the screen that's floating around on google images and with a reduced palette. But that makes it look blurry and actually not accurate to screens printed on backs of boxes which have entirely different color, more consistent with the Scumm Bar screen preceding it. Right now it's about 70% accurate. I aim to get it pixel perfect, maybe 98% accurate with reference to White Label Monkey Island back of box. There's actually a lot of detail in the scan that gets lost in processing but is totally perceivable by eye, but will take a bit of elbow grease, pixel by pixel. I think it needs to be done for the game's preservation's sake.

Thing is- if I'm going to do this, it only really makes sense to do if it can be implemented. I know people have made patches to do this kinda thing, but I'm fairly clueless to where to start. What tool might help swap the in-game graphics with new ones sourced from a to-be-made PNG? Can anyone point me in the wrong direction? Would anyone be even interested in this?

Cheers

You could try to get in contact with LogicDeLuxe who did the work on Ultimate Talkie of Secret of Monkey Island and added the current Spiffy closeup; he is a member of the forum. He probably could help out with most of these questions, and maybe it would make sense to replace the Spiffy image in the Ultimate Talkie installer itself -- which is up to LogicDeLuxe of course.

It is possible to replace an existing "room" (a background image) in a SCUMM title -- the fan localizations do this for example. But you might have to search for the proper tools; to find (and optionally extract the original image), replace it, convert the new image to a format that the game "understands" , maybe repackage this image resource into the main game archive resource files, then test how it plays in-game -- rinse and repeat if necessary.

For standalone distribution, this should most likely be in the form of a simple binary patch -- again same as fan made translations basically.

[aleksoctop]

Thank you for your reply! Encouragement enough to get started. I will post a proof of concept here soonish, then will reach out to LogicDeLuxe. Please stay tuned!

[rzil]

Cool idea, thank you for doing that.

For injecting the modified Spiffy close-up,
You can try this tool: https://github.com/BLooperZ/nutcracker
Which is able to modify the backgrounds and rebuild game resources.

Feel free to contact me for further help.

[aleksoctop]

Hey folks,

just wanted to check in that I've started and I'm in it for the long haul. I'm about 6% through the process in this pic, some 2 hours' work. I estimate that's about 30 more hours of work to go. Here I am partly through my first pass- which is to get closer (not quite done yet obviously) to the palette and to remove all artifacts left over from halftone print dithering.

My process so far has been:
I reduced the full color scan to the correct size 320x200 and limited its palette to few colors. I believe there are two versions of Spiffy's image floating around, an EGA one where all the blues came from) and a VGA one (which colors from the scumm bar reflecting in Spiffy's nose and eyes).
I assume the VGA was basically an hand-interpolated EGA version, like other backgrounds, so I'm kind-of working up from EGA values manually (as I believe Mark Ferrari would've done). I'm finding pixels aligning as they do on the picture on the boxes, so I know I'm on the right track.

Once I complete the first pass (without background first, because hand-dithering the gradient background is much easier), I'll divide the Spiffy sprite into smaller sections and will do my best to match each section individually until I can't tell a difference between the sprite and the Spiffy on the boxes.
I even have a VGA SOMI box on the way to make sure I'm not missing anything that might've gotten lost in the scanning process (That's an EGA spiffy, which actually may help to rebuild the EGA Spiffy first then add on. There's enough info in that image to be able to get a 99% correct image made.

Working on this in my free time, so will post next post when I've got the first pass done, likely toward the end of the week.

Cheers and please let me know what you think.

[aleksoctop]

"Later in the week" as if I could stay away that long.
This is abouts my "first pass". From here on I'll divvy it up and try to get each bit right.
After that I'll use other gradients in the game to try to estimate the number of colors to interpolate in the background...shooting for a vga look.
In hindsight I think I'm interpreting a bit of the EGA a bit much, but we'll see...If all goes well, I may attempt other versions, like a purely EGA version, or maybe Spiffy with a bone in closeup? Open to ideas.
Let me know what you think.

[LogicDeLuxe]

I think it needs to be done for the game's preservation's sake.

More like box art preservation. Someone involved in the game mentioned that the closeup never was in the game, and it was just a joke to the box art. I think it was Ron Gilbert, but I'm not 100% sure. Obviously, that was changed with the SE, but there it was a hack in the exe instead of a proper SCUMM implementation. And it's not in classic mode either.

You could try to get in contact with LogicDeLuxe who did the work on Ultimate Talkie of Secret of Monkey Island and added the current Spiffy closeup

The EGA scan and script was part of a fan dub. The project was canceled when the SE was annouced, and I took the EGA scan from there.
I did the VGA-Spiffy, though, but not the encoding. I don't have the tool for that.
I guess, no one bothered much with the EGA scan, as it doesn't really fit the vga style anyway. I just kept it in for completeness' sake, but choose to display VGA-Spiffy by default.

[aleksoctop]

LogicDeLuxe! Thanks for replying sir. And thanks for adding Spiffy to the game!

...and it was just a joke to the box art.

It's likely been discussed more than once, but I watched a very long Ron Gilbert interview just the other day where he says they had to cut Spiffy out because it wouldn't fit on the floppy, but when they added Spiffy to the back of the box, he thought it was hilarious that it's advertised and not even in the game. So as far as I can tell it wasn't just a joke on the box, it was meant to be in the game and for whatever reason never got reimplemented, like the other few closeups that were cut in the final, some of which have been reimplemented.

I'll do more research on Scumm implementation then, see what I can find about the encoding. Thank you!

[LogicDeLuxe]

he thought it was hilarious that it's advertised and not even in the game.

That's what I meant by joke. Of course, when the EGA Spiffy was drawn, it was meant to be in the game. But when they realized that things have to be cut due to disk limitations, they didn't bother to actually put that in the game anymore, but used it as box art instead.

It could have been in here. And in case it wasn't, it is a very interesting video anyways:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikaqus5_QIg

[aleksoctop]

It could have been in here. And in case it wasn't, it is a very interesting video anyways:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikaqus5_QIg

That's the interview! What a treat it was, and really helps paint a better idea of what the development was like. Especially liked Mark Ferrari's bit.
The joke gets funnier with newer re-releases including the image too. I thought most SOMI boxes had it but not quite it seems.

I made kind-of a big, hilarious rookie mistake. I made the sprite too big.
EDIT: Ok, now I'm thinking it's NOT a mistake. It seems there was art made big, because the line in the middle of the nose could only be one pixel. I feel like there's too much detail in the sprite to be 320x144. But I'll hopefully get to confirm it in a few days....anyway...

Hopefully that won't be that much of an issue though, if I scale down nearest neighbor so I don't get extra interpolated colors, THEN i can start matching up sector by sector. It looks like I'll only need to scale down about a bit, since in the screen on the box, the talk menu isn't cutting off Spiffy's chest. Something like this is what I imagined the sprite would end up looking like in VGA.

Does anyone know of any versions of Secret of Monkey Island show graphics in the full 320x200 res or do they all always constrain the visuals to the 320x144 field?

[LogicDeLuxe]

Something like this is what I imagined the sprite would end up looking like in VGA.

It is worth noting, that they decided to have a different artist redraw all the closeups for the VGA version to be more photo-realistic. Hence they have a somewhat different style indeed. Also the VGA closeups in the SCUMM bar all have shades of orange in the background, so I did the same for the VGA Spiffy.
Most likely, they would also have redrawn Spiffy from scratch, if it was in the game. It might have ended up a bit closer to the EGA picture we have, though.

Does anyone know of any versions of Secret of Monkey Island show graphics in the full 320x200 res or do they all always constrain the visuals to the 320x144 field?

The resolutions in EGA, VGA and enhanced CD are all the same, so no version differences. But the rooms in itself have different heights.
The closeup of the navigator and the closeup with Guybrush and Elaine together are full screen with the dialog selection superimposed. Also the intro sequence uses a full screen picture with the credits superimposed. And the island overviews are full screen, too. The 320x144 limitations on most screens is not technical, but most likely a decision due to disk space limitations. Full screen images remained the exception until Sam & Max, but they are present in most of the SCUMM games occasionally.

Also keep in mind, that pixels aren't square in those resolutions, which is a somewhat controversial matter on its own: viewtopic.php?t=14460

[OmerMor]

Very nice work aleksoctop! This is a cool project...
Have you considered contacting the Video Game History Foundation? Since they were able to obtain the game assets, it's possible they even have the original Spiffy image.

[LogicDeLuxe]

Since they were able to obtain the game assets, it's possible they even have the original Spiffy image.

Any chance, that stuff could just be released to the public, like John Romero did it with old Doom stuff (editors, raw scans, alpha and beta versions, unused content etc.). For historical interest only, of course. I'm sure, some of us would love to dig in those archives.

[aleksoctop]

Have you considered contacting the Video Game History Foundation? Since they were able to obtain the game assets, it's possible they even have the original Spiffy image.

Excellent idea! At your advice I've reached out to them to see if there's anything they might have that'd aid either a faithful recreation of the image. Let's see what they say! Who knows.

I'm hoping the physical SOMI box will help get the image even more accurate. Pehaps the foundation will help. I revise my opinion, I'm now not so sure there was a VGA version of this image released, but I can't be sure. But I want to see if we can get to the bottom of this.
Once we have a decently accurate version of the image, or EGA image, I'm thinking of at least two additional versions: a) Spiffy but with orange background, and b) Spiffy but with a bone in his mouth like the tiny sprite does. The SE image is just such a different style, but no doubt the revision to add the bone was motivated right.

Regarding the scaling, being a point of debate, we're also foregoing the fact that CRTs have you set up heigh/width/position/curvature/tilt etc of the image, so nobody's image of scumm games would likely look the same. Fingers crossed the Video Game History Foundation replies and sheds some light on this.

[aleksoctop]

Well well, we have a response from the Video Game History Foundation!

There are no remnants of Spiffy in the source repository that we had access to and, in fact, there is nothing in the code suggesting that it was ever displayed in-game (believe me, this is the first thing I looked for). The source is very, very good about commenting out cut features instead of deleting the code, and there is absolutely nothing in here for cutting to another scene when talking to Spiffy. I believe the art on the back of the box was a doctored Deluxe Paint file that was never used in-game, which also explains why it is full screen rather than leaving room for dialogue responses.

If you saw our article, there are similar Steve Purcell electronic portraits for the early Elaine Marley and Captain Smirk, and both of those were full-screen images as well with zero code remnants. I believe Spiffy was from that same period of artistic exploration, and that these portraits were never production-used assets. I talked to Ron briefly about this and he confirmed that there was a period early in production where the art team was essentially doodling and exploring, rather than making art for the coders to use. The art repo where these portraits came from is unfortunately incomplete as whoever made the repo was unable to rip all of the physical floppy disks, my hunch is that Spiffy is on one of the un-ripped ones...wherever they are.

I think you did a great job here but I would not call this historical preservation, as I do not believe Spiffy was ever in-game. It's a cool "what-if" feature that I'm glad to see made real, but in my opinion this is revising history rather than preserving it, unless some additional evidence emerges to prove me wrong!

So there's the mystery solved. It was always a Deluxe Paint image and it was probably never in the game. The Arf-arf text should've been a giveaway. At least I didn't accidentally make a higher-res image than the original.

So how do you guys feel about this? What direction would you like it to go? Should I make my best attempt at producing a with-dialogue sized versions? In some way I feel a little invalidated knowing the image was likely never in-game, but the SE added the close-up, maybe it makes sense to update it?