Move the cursor around with the mouse and hover things to get a description. Click to either walk there, pick up items or perform some other action, depending on the situation and whether you have an item or the "hand" icon selected. Hint: The game has three different endings!
About
Originally made for Christmas 1996 by Philip Williams (who has kindly given me permission to publish this restoration here) in Klik & Play, here is my (hopefully) perfect Flash port (KNP => MMF 2 => Flash), 15 years later (2011) and with absurdly inflated file size. In my opinion, the game has a very special feeling to it and is definitely among my favorite amateur games of all time. In spite of the simple and somewhat sloppy graphics, I think it has a very high production value and everything about it feels like it has had a lot of thought put into it. If you, as I, happen to know the details about how it was made technically, that makes it even more amazing. Even the help file (.hlp format) was original and well done! It's a very hard game, however, so don't be surprised if you cannot beat it. You should play it for its wonderful atmosphere.
How it was restored
Nothing has been altered in any way from the original, except what was absolutely necessary to make the game build/run in Flash. For instance, the MIDIs had to be converted into huge files. Here follows a somewhat complete log of what I did:
Decided to convert "Freddie" to Flash as I had bought MMF 2 and the Flash exporter module (later refunded because they are trash). It was partially a test to see how seamlessly that would work.
Surprisingly still found the game at the original location, still live on the old website. This was the only step that went smoothly!
Realized that the installation program doesn't run on my Windows 7 64-bit system.
Set up a series of virtual machines using different virtualization software and Windows versions until I finally got Windows 98 set up with 256 colors.
Eventually got the installation files into the VM and installed it. Extracted the .gam file (the only reason this could be done was KNP's insane idea of distributing the project file with each game) and got it back to my system.
Opened the GAM in MMF 2 and tried building as Flash. Got tons of errors related to things such as "stop music", "play music", and discovered that the MMF KNP importer got confused from all the "cutscenes"; they were all blank frames and the images were gone and could not be restored in any way.
Went back into the VM and installed KNP (which also doesn't run on Windows 7, at least not 64-bit) to open the GAM in its native software. Naturally worked fine, but I realized that all the cutscene images were baked into the GAM but not extractable in any way due to being special "picture frames" which were dropped in later Klik products and don't convert properly.
Decided to "test" each image frame individually, switch to my main system, print screen, paste it into an image editor, crop to exactly 640x480 pixels, remove the cursor and then save the result on my system. Repeated for all screens.
Went back to my system and MMF 2 and opened all the empty frames with the corresponding names and added background images from the extracted images. The "events" had surprisingly still been preserved even though they didn't exist in the original GAM since it was a special "picture frame" and not an ordinary frame with an Event Editor. I guess they made the effort to convert these internal "events" but not the actual pictures!
Replaced all "stop music" with "stop samples". You see, Flash and the Flash exporter don't support MIDIs. "Music" in Klik traditionally refers to MIDI, and "samples" means anything else, such as WAV or OGG.
Extracted all of the original MIDIs from the project file and with lots of work managed to convert them into MP3 files. That was surprisingly difficult and the end result wasn't perfect. Especially one of the songs (Jingle Bells) sounded very bizarre at first, so I had to use a different "sound font" or "synth" for it. I would've preferred if all the songs sounded like they did on a 1990s era computer, with perhaps Sound Blaster 16, but... well... after all, I don't have all the time in the world to restore somebody else's work!
Realized that even though it uses MP3 eventually, MMF 2 doesn't support MP3 input (at least when using Flash) for "legal reasons". Had to convert all the MP3s into OGGs.
Finally could go through all the frames and remove the MIDI music and replace it with the OGGs.
It finally built without errors! ... but all of the cutscenes were blank! What the...?!
Turns out that all of those cutscene frames had bugged out in some bizarre fashion when importing and translating the GAM. It had put an invisible and untouchable object with a question mark icon which was not possible to delete, and which prevented anything from displaying at runtime. Sigh.
Had to create twice the amount of empty frames, then copy the images I had imported earlier into each of these new frames, and then copy the events individually from all of the broken frames, and their names, and then put them in the exact order they were located originally. Deleted the broken, useless frames.
Ran the app and realized that it had confused the frame numbers from all the moving around. Had to open the original, untouched GAM and then compare each frame's events related to switching frames and edited all the messed up referenced.
It finally ran but had some minor issues such as the hand graphic having the wrong "order" and thus being "underneath" other objects. Went through the game and fixed all of those.
Started playing the game and realized that the music didn't stick between frames in the cutscenes. Manually enabled this again.
Started playing the game and realized that this also made the "sample" music (OGG) never stop between frames when playing, so added an event on each frame (line 1) to stop all samples on start.
Suddenly found that none of the mouse movements would work, seemingly out of nowhere. Tried to debug this forever until I realized that a certain plug-in was somehow causing it, even though the very same thing works for a different project of mine. So eventually I had to revert to an earlier copy of the project file and simply not use the plug-in, which is a pretty crucial one IMO, although it happens to have no real value for this specific game in its presented form. Still, this took forever to figure out. Update: Discovered that the plug-in (which stretches the screen if run "directly") could be used after all by disabling a strange special setting which is turned on by default.
Finally built the game and played through it (all three endings). It appears to work pretty much exactly like the original, with only very minor glitches, some of which I'm unsure whether they were part of the original or introduced by me.
I probably wouldn't have gone through all this trouble if I knew just how much work it was going to take, but here it is, so enjoy it, and link all your friends to this page around Christmas!
Short address to this page: http://kimmoa.se/freddie Published sometime in late 2011. Last updated in late 2011.
