Magnetic: An interpreter for Magnetic Scrolls adventures Written by Niclas Karlsson Version 2.2 Magnetic is an interpreter for the games written between 1985 and 1991 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. Magnetic is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. See the file COPYING that is included with this program for details. - WHAT YOU NEED FOR PLAYING ----------------------------------------------- It is 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: (1) the story files; (2) the graphics files (optional); (3) the title pictures and music (optional); (4) the hint files (optional); (5) documentation from the original packages; (6) the Magnetic interpreter. The best source for this material is Stefan Meier's Magnetic Scrolls Memorial web page, which is part of the IF Legends site at http://www.if-legends.org/ - 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 Magnetic Scrolls Memorial site (see above). Magnetic has been successfully tested with story files created from Amstrad CPC, Acorn Archimedes, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, Spectrum and Spectrum +3 versions of the games. An alternative way to obtain the story files is to extract them from the original game files. Currently the Amiga, Atari ST, Apple Macintosh and Sinclair QL releases of the games are not supported. This is because the games were originally written in native machine code for Motorola 68000 based systems (which all the above computers are). When porting to other systems Magnetic Scrolls implemented a limited subset of 68000 machine code as an emulator on the target system; it is this limited subset which the Magnetic interpreter implements. Magnetic Scrolls also released versions for at least the Apple II and Atari XL. Currently, we have not developed any tools to extract the data from such versions, nor have we located all the versions for these machines. If you have an emulator image or an original version for one of these machines, please contact the Magnetic development team. - EXTRACTING STORY FILES FROM C64 VERSIONS -------------------------------- The Commodore 64 versions of the Magnetic Scrolls games can be extracted 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 on the Internet on numerous C64 web sites. 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 - EXTRACTING STORY FILES FROM MS-DOS VERSIONS ----------------------------- Story files can be created by extracting the data from both the original MS-DOS releases and the later "Magnetic Windows" releases of "Wonderland" and "The Magnetic Scrolls Collection, Volume 1". The latter of these comprised new versions of "The Guild of Thieves", "Corruption" and "Fish!". To convert these files to the interpreter's own format the XtractPC (for the original releases) or XtractMW (for the "Magnetic Windows" releases) programs, which are included with the 16-bit DOS version of the interpreter, must be used. Run XtractPC or XtractMW without any arguments to read a help screen. The syntax for XtractPC is: XtractPC game game.mag where "game" is the full path to the data files, minus any trailing numbers. For example, the data files for "The Pawn" are called "pawn1" to "pawn6". If these files are in a directory "c:\Games\Magnetic\Pawn", the command line might be: XtractPC c:\Games\Magnetic\Pawn\pawn Pawn.mag The syntax for XtractMW is: XtractMW game.rdf game.mag where "game.rdf" is the full path to the game's main rdf file ("all.rdf" for "Wonderland"; "corr.rdf", "fish.rdf" and "guild.rdf" for the games in "Collection Volume 1"). For example, for "Wonderland", the command line might be: XtractMW c:\Games\Magnetic\Wonder\all.rdf Wonder.mag - THE GRAPHICS FILES ------------------------------------------------------ The Magnetic Scrolls adventures were as well known for the quality of their graphics as of their text. The Magnetic interpreter supports graphics files (".gfx") which can be created from the Amiga releases. You'll probably want to download the graphics files from the Magnetic Scrolls Memorial site. The format of Magnetic's graphics files differs between the original and Magnetic Windows ("Wonderland" and "Collection Volume 1") releases, therefore a story file created from an original release cannot be used with a graphics file from a Magnetic Windows release, and vice versa. Included with the 16-bit DOS version of the the interpreter is GfxLink, a tool to build graphics files from the original Amiga releases of the Magnetic Scrolls games. To use GfxLink, supply as arguments the directory containing the Amiga files and the output graphics file name, e.g. GfxLink C:\UAE\Games\ThePawn Pawn.gfx The graphics files needed for "Wonderland" and the games in "Collection Volume 1" are somewhat different from those produced by GfxLink; instead GfxLink2 must be used. Firstly, you need an Amiga hard-drive installation of the game, and during installation must have selected the option to expand the compacted graphics files. If you choose this option, two extra files ("user.rsc" and "user.rdf") are created by the installer. Then to use GfxLink2, supply as an argument the full path to the "user.rsc" file, e.g. GfxLink2 C:\UAE\Games\Wonder\user.rsc If GfxLink2 detects "Wonderland", the file "wonder.gfx" will be created; if "Collection Volume 1" is detected, the files "corrupt.gfx", "fish.gfx" and "guild.gfx" will be created. - THE HINT FILES ---------------------------------------------------------- The Magnetic Windows releases of the Magnetic Scrolls adventures ("Wonderland" and "Collection Volume 1") come with online hints, which can be accessed by entering "hint", "hints" or "help" at the input prompt. The Magnetic interpreter supports these hints by looking for a file with the same name as the story file, but with the extension ".hnt". The hint files can be obtained from Stefan Meier's Magnetic Scrolls Memorial site. - THE TITLE SCREENS ------------------------------------------------------- The Amiga versions of some of the games (as well as the MS-DOS and Archimedes versions of "Wonderland") featured colourful title screens, and some Amiga versions also featured title music. Magnetic supports these title pictures and music, the files for which can be obtained from the Magnetic Scrolls Memorial web page. The title files should have the same name as the game file, except that the picture files must end in ".png" and the music files in ".mp3". - 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 extraction programs (Xtract64, etc.) offer you the chance 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. Stefan Meier's Magnetic Scrolls Memorial web page offers a growing amount of scanned material from the original packages. Further material is also available from the Magnetic Scrolls Gallery by Rochus Boerner (now maintained by David Sinclair) http://www.webpan.com/dsinclair/ms/mscrolls.html - THE MAGNETIC INTERPRETER (32-BIT DOS VERSION) --------------------------- As you are reading this text file you have the Magnetic interpreter already. Its most recent release can always be found at http://www.ifarchive.org/ 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 "Fish!" you would have to type magnetic fish The interpreter would display the title screen "fish.png", open the story file "fish.mag", the graphics file "fish.gfx", the hint file "fish.hnt" (if the game supports hints) and, if successful, run the game. If Magnetic is being run in MS-DOS under Windows 95, 98 or ME, long file names can be used. The graphics and hint files can optionally be specified as second and third arguments on the command line. 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, which are: Alt-C show copyright and license info Alt-D output screen dump Alt-H help Alt-P playback on Alt-R recording on/off Alt-S seed random numbers Alt-T transcription on/off Alt-U undo last turn Alt-X exit game When a Magnetic Windows game is started, graphics are not initially visible. To turn the graphics on, enter the command "graphics on" at the input prompt. Magnetic makes use of the Allegro game library for graphics, sound and keyboard input. Among other things, the "Allegro.cfg" configuration file which comes with Magnetic can be used to tell Magnetic which sound card you have and what keyboard layout you have. Using keyboard layouts other than the standard US one also requires the file "keyboard.dat", which should also be included with Magnetic. - CREDITS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Niclas Karlsson Development of the Magnetic interpreter. David Kinder Magnetic 2.x development, Windows, MS-DOS (32-bit) and Amiga ports. Stefan Meier Magnetic 2.x development, JMagnetic Java port and the Magnetic Scrolls Memorial web site. Paul David Doherty Magnetic 2.x development, story file extraction, help and testing. Stefan Jokisch MS-DOS (16-bit) port. Torbjörn Andersson Unix/Gtk port. Simon Baldwin Glk port. Rochus Boerner Title screen pictures. For comments and bug reports, our thanks go to Toine de Greef, Jacob Gunness, Kai Hesse and Miron Schmidt. Dos32 Magnetic uses the following libraries: Allegro by Shawn Hargreaves and others. libamp by Tomislav Uzelac and Ove Kaaven. libpng by Guy Eric Schalnat, Andreas Dilger, Glenn Randers-Pehrson and others. zlib by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler.