Magnetic: An interpreter for Magnetic Scrolls adventures Written by Niclas Karlsson Version 1.0 Magnetic is an interpreter for the games written between 1985 and 1990 by Magnetic Scrolls, a text adventure producer based in London, England. Although they only produced seven games they have acquired legendary status for text adventures of as good quality as Infocom accompanied by exceptional graphics. - WHAT YOU NEED FOR PLAYING ----------------------------------------------- It is formally illegal to play Magnetic Scrolls games if you do not own the original packages. Their games, sadly enough, have been unavailable for years, and your only choice may be downloading them from the Internet. Having said this, you should get hold of the following ingredients: (1) the story files; (2) the graphics files (optional); (3) the title pictures (optional); (4) documentation from the original packages; (5) the Magnetic interpreter. The best source for this material is Stefan Meier's MS memorial at http://datura.jump.org/msmemorial - THE STORY FILES --------------------------------------------------------- The Magnetic Scrolls games as originally distributed were in a somewhat complex data format, different for most platforms. The interpreter uses its own story file format, to be identified by the file name extension ".mag". You can download all story files from the MS memorial site (see above). An alternative way to obtain the story files is to extract them from C64 disk images (i.e. files representing the contents of the games released for the Commodore 64). These files are identified by having a file name ending with ".d64". Disk images for "The Pawn", "The Guild of Thieves", "Corruption", "Jinxter" and "Fish" can be found at ftp://ftp.arnold.hiof.no To convert these files to the interpreter's own format, the Xtract64 program must be used. Run the program without any arguments to read a help screen describing its syntax. You'll find that Xtract64 is easy to use; for example, for "The Pawn", the command line might be Xtract64 pawn-1.d64 pawn-2.d64 pawn.mag - THE GRAPHICS FILES ------------------------------------------------------ The Magnetic Scrolls adventures were as well known for the quality of their graphics as of their text. The interpreter supports a single graphics file format (".gfx"), which is based on the graphics files released with the original Amiga version of the games. You'll probably want to download the graphics files from the MS memorial site. The Amiga release of Magnetic also contains a tool to build graphics files from the Amiga releases of the Magnetic Scrolls games. - THE TITLE SCREENS ------------------------------------------------------- The Amiga versions of the games featured colourful title screens which are now supported by DOS Magnetic. The title screens have been converted to ".png" format and should soon be available at the MS memorial site. - DOCUMENTATION FROM THE ORIGINAL PACKAGES -------------------------------- To prevent software pirates from spreading their programs, Magnetic Scrolls added a password protection to most of their games. Although the Xtract64 tool offers you to remove this type of protection while extracting the story file, most games still cannot be won without the original documentation which often contained vital clues. There are currently two web sites that offer a growing amount of scanned material from the original packages. The first one is the MS memorial site, the second is the Magnetic Scrolls Gallery by Rochus Boerner http://www.igd.fhg.de/~boerner/commodore/ms/mscrolls.html which also features numerous screen shots. - THE MAGNETIC INTERPRETER (DOS VERSION) ---------------------------------- As you are reading this text file you probably have the Magnetic interpreter already. Its most recent release can always be found at ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive which is a vast archive dedicated to text adventures ("interactive fiction"). Installation is easy. Beside the executable there are only a few font files that can either be stored in the current directory or in the same directory as the executable. Run the program without any arguments to view its help screen. As an example, to play "The Pawn" you would have to type magnetic pawn The interpreter would display the title screen "pawn.png", open both the story file "pawn.mag" and the graphics file "pawn.gfx" and, if successful, run the game. Magnetic supports command line editing and history to make typing more convenient. All the common editing keys work as you would expect. Other features can be activated via hot keys. Type Alt-H to get a list of all hot keys available. These include Alt-U to take back your last move and F1 to change the picture size. Finally, if the interpreter ever "hangs", try ctrl-break to exit. - CREDITS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Magnetic interpreter: Niclas Karlsson nkarlsso@ra.abo.fi DOS front end: Stefan Jokisch s.jokisch@avu.de Amiga & Win32 front ends: David Kinder davidk@monis.co.uk Help and testing: Paul David Doherty h0142kdd@rz.hu-berlin.de For comments and bug reports, our thanks go to Toine de Greef, Jacob Gunness, Kai Hesse, Stefan Meier and Miron Schmidt. Thanks to Rochus Boerner for the title screens.