WHAT´S NEW?
August 2012
Quickly following the update last week... oops, it felt like it was last week, but time really flies these days :-) Anyway, here are some small news to the pages:The Guild of Thieves Solution book is complete now (Thanks Stewart!)
The Magnetic page provides some new releases (ok, new to this site, probably not so new in the rest of world)
Minor additions to the Facts, Collection, and The Legacy pages.
October 2010
This small update after a longer break brings the next emulation guide - this time featuring the old Macs. Besides, you will find some more photos and the Amstrad CPC adventure guides of The Guild of Thieves and Jinxter.May 2010
The May update mainly brings changes under the hood. The pages got a new navigation menu. This menu is another great piece of work by Stu Nichols from CSSPlay. Stu has kindly given permission to use his menu on the MSM pages. He's really doing amazing things with CSS...Besides I replaced the toolbox for image display. The author of floatbox has switched to a much more restrictive license with his current release and since this seems to block my update path to newer floatbox versions, I decided to look for an alternative. Fortunately, there is a great replacement called Multibox by Samuel Birch which is available under an open license. The new library should be active on all pages. If you find any errors, please let me know.
But there is even some new content: Some more photos, the Guild of Thieves adventure guide for the Spectrum +3, and a new emulation guide for Apple2.
April 2010 Update II
This small intermediate update brings some more corrections to the fact sheet (Thanks Maddes!), some more photos and the Jinxter adventure guide for PC.Luca Donaggio has ported Magnetic 2.3 to Maemo5. You can find the ports on the Magnetic page or directly on Luca's website here.
April 2010
This small update brings some corrections to the fact sheet and the start for a small series of guides on setting up emulators to play the original versions of the Magnetic Scrolls games. You find the first guides on the How to play the games today page.Probably the highlight this time is the Official Secrets Solution Book for Fish!. Some of the pages were badly aged, especially page 1 was almost unreadable. For preserving the original layout, I kept the page in the document and appended an additional page with the text. It was quite hard to read everything, but it should be complete.
February 2010
It's update time again. There are some more photos of disk images and the Guild of Thieves adventure guide for the Macintosh available now. The highlight this time is the Official Secrets Solution Book for Guild of Thieves. Unfortunately the introductory page seems to be missing in my copy but all the hints and maps are there. You find the book on the Guild of Thieves page.If you still own original packages of Sinclair QL software, there might be good news for you. Thanks to the efforts of Rich Mellor, several old QL software packages can be run on emulators now. To my delight, one of the updated packages is QL-Pawn, so it is indeed possible to run the original version of The Pawn with a QL emulator - to be honest, I had given up hope to see this one alive some day. Rich offers updates for quite a few packages - though you must have an original package and give proof. You find him over here: RWAP software
Eventually, here is a screenshot of emulated QL-Pawn:
January 2010
Happy New Year to everybody!The first small update this year brings a couple of new magazine articles and some new photos of game disks (Thanks to Wolfgang for the photo of Myth for Amiga!)
October 2009
Here is the next update after the summer break. Had to get used to several new tools after I decided to buy a Mac instead of a new Windows PC (and I really love it!), but everything should be back to normal now...Finally the game pages are all converted to CSS (however the old HTML articles and the guestbook are still to be converted but they will follow silently during the next updates). With the reworked game pages there is also a lot of new and enhanced stuff available like new scans and photos of the game box contents, some new articles, and a lot of minor tweaks...
June 2009
Jan Schliemann has upgraded his Magnetic port for MacOS X to Magnetic 2.3 including support for the Wonderland ingame music scores. magnetiX 1.3 is available on Jan's magnetiX page and the Magnetic page.The Mac Quicktime runtime is very sensible to inconsistencies in the Midi data. Since the original game data contain some garbage bytes we enhanced the extraction tools to remove these garbage bytes and created a new Wonderland sound file. Where applicable the download packages contain the new sound file now. Since this issue seems only to occur when using Quicktime so far, you can stick with the old file when not running magnetiX. However if you downloaded Wonderland games files earlier and want to use magnetix, you should get the sound data again. Here is the new sound file in a separate download.
Jarek has upgraded Torbjörn Andersson's GTK port to Magnetic 2.3 and created a package for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty). Jarek's packages are available on the Magnetic page, too. Note: The Jaunty package can also be installed on Debian Lenny, but you need to install the latest GTK package from "testing" repository.
May 2009
Converted more pages to CSS. With the conversion some images were replaced with better ones like the box shot of QL-Pawn. The overall look should be slightly better on Safari now, too, but still I didn't find a good solution to the "bold font display" problem. It gets better if you set the font rendering preference to "standard".A first - still quite rough - version of the new page for The Legacy is there. I had omitted this all over the years, because I personally always ever associated the name Magnetic Scrolls with the text adventures. However, The Legacy was surely part of the Magnetic Scrolls' history, so here it is...
April 2009 (Update II)
My first hard landing in the world of CSS. The look is a little bit different now, but I hope the problems with the menu bar are gone.April 2009
Short note in between: It seems that from time to time the upper menu bar is not displayed correctly with Firefox (doesn't seem to happen in other browsers). As I do not have a quick fix for it, a workaround is just to reload the page. Normally it is displayed correctly then. Sorry, will try to fix it during the next days.Here is the next small update after a longer break.
A new release of JMagnetic is available here. The changes include some minor fixes and mostly Look&Feel work for different platforms.
Another Magnetic Scrolls fan called nGfx has created a great piece of tribute to Magnetic Scrolls' Jinxter: Dreamworld.
The fact sheet got some small updates on the Magnetic Scrolls Collection Vol. 2.
Perhaps you have already noticed that the Memorial pages have a new navigation menu. Special thanks are sent to Stu Nichols from CSSPlay for allowing me to use one of his many great CSS menues.
Meanwhile, I have started to replace the table layout of the pages with CSS to make the pages leaner and better accessible for handicapped people. So far, only a handful of pages were rewritten and since the site got quite large over the last 12 years, it will take time until everything is done. So bear with me if you face mangled pages from time to time.
The next big thank you goes to Maddes Bücher. Maddes has donated four large boxes with old magazines, some of them containing new articles and reviews. These will appear with the next updates.
November 2008 (Update II)
Ok, it still wasn't the end. A bunch of about 30 new reviews is available in the Articles & Reviews section (Sorry, couldn't resist. It is so much fun digging through the old magazines, just could't stop it.).November 2008
More than 40 new reviews are available in the Articles & Reviews section (now 99% of the articles I got over the time are there).A new fact sheet with a lot of minor corrections is online (Thanks to Matthias Bücher for digging out).
Matthias has also donated a picture of the MS-DOS disk of Myth, now available on the Myth page.
October 2008 (Update II)
25 additional reviews are available in the Articles & Reviews section! Partially these are scans of older reviews in HTML format. With the next updates I will try to add scans of the original articles where available.Added the two-piece box variant of Wonderland to the game page and the fact sheet.
October 2008
7 new reviews are available in the Articles & Reviews section! Since the amount of reviews is growing steadily, I added the platform of the review to the list (where applicable).For an easier start with the Magnetic/JMagnetic interpreter I added additional download archives that combine all game files into one archive.
September 2008 (Update II)
12 new reviews are available in the Articles & Reviews section! A lot more to come...September 2008
Magnetic 2.3 is here!A new Magnetic version is available which adds support for the Wonderland in-game music scores. Magnetic 2.3 binaries are available for Amiga, Dos (16 & 32 bit), Windows, and Java on the Magnetic page. Please refer to the documentation of the particular port for details on the sound support. So far the Java and the Windows versions support all Magnetic features.
There is also an updated Wonderland music package available which contains the title music and a new snd file for the interpreter.
July 2008 (Update III)
Added the missing Amstrad PCW versions to the game pages and the fact sheet. Thanks to Jonathan Holmes for notifying!July 2008 (Update II)
Replaced the Wonderland music file with a new one that does not use ID3v2 tags and thus is more compatible to existing Magnetic ports, i.e. Magnetic for Windows can use this new file without modification now.July 2008
An updated version of JMagnetic 2 is available here. The probably most notable change is that the title music of Wonderland is supported now. The accompanying music file is available on the Magnetic page in the download section. Additionally there finds an alternative version of the Corruption title music that was taken from the Archimedes version and uses some slightly different instruments (Thanks to Peter Verdi of Magnetic Scrolls Chronicles for pointing me towards it). Please note: Whether the Wonderland title music is supported by the various Magnetic ports depends on the specific implementation. Some will support it out of the box, some will require an update.The fact sheet contains some additional information about the differences between Rainbird and Inter-Mediates boxes.
A short warning: "The maintainer" (he, she, it ?) of the new Magnetic Scrolls website pretended to be Anita Sinclair when I mailed them about their rip offs from this site. Whoever is behind the site is definitely NOT Anita Sinclair. Unfortunately I do not have the slightest idea who is maintaining the site since "they" seem to be very eager to hide. Either way this behaviour is absolutely disgusting and it is probably a good idea to stay cynical about everything you hear from "them".
June 2008 (Status update)
Although it is still unclear who is behind the new Magnetic Scrolls site and ripping the materials off this site, I brought all downloads back online. We will see what happens during the next days...April 2008 (Update III)
A recent article tells a nice anecdote of the Infocom/Magnetic Scrolls history. It seems that in late 1988 Infocom discussed an option of handing over the development of the sequel to Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to Magnetic Scrolls.Since the author himself was not affiliated to Infocom and he puzzled the story together from old Infocom internal mails there is probably much guessing in it, although the core seems to be true. Sadly, the author chose an unfortunate way of exposing his information to the public as he did not try to check the validity of his story back with the people involved (raising a controverse discussion, see the comments). Since some of them do not appear in a good light in the article they are understandbly uneager to dig up the whole story now. Anyway, left alone the personal feelings involved it is a very tempting story and it would have been great to see what emerges from the collaboration of the two best adventure games companies at that time.
But there is even more...
- I added some misses in the listings of the known release versions.
- A new version of the fact sheet is online, coming with a lot of minor changes...
- The Magnetic Scrolls Chronicles site is launched! Peter has also kindly donated images of the Wonderland and Collection CD-Rom releases! The images are available on the Wonderland and Collection pages.
- I got the chance to test JMagnetic2 on Leopard and couldn't resist to take a screenshot.
- Appended the size of the game boxes to the game pages and the fact sheet
(click to enlarge)
April 2008 (Update II)
The soon reopening Magnetic Scrolls Chronicles have a new home at http://www.mschronicles.com.Looking foward to the launch!
April 2008
Reworked the QL-Pawn page a little bit. For the fans of retrogaming there is a PDF of the booklet available that was shipped with QL-Pawn. This time the game with new and updated material is Jinxter. Plus the poster of The Pawn is available on the game page now.I tried to add some information about the availabilty of the game releases to the game pages. The scale is explained here. So far, this is just a try. If it prooves useless, it will be removed with a future update. Let me know whether you think this makes any sense.
Am updated version of the fact sheet is available. The main additions are some notes on the game releases from the Inter-Mediates era.
Peter Verdi has informed me that the Magnetic Scrolls Chronicles web site will reopen soon. Very nice to see that the site is coming back!
March 2008 (intermediate update)
I found some backups of the Magnetic Scrolls Memorial taken shortly after the launch about 11 years ago. If you like to take a step into the history of these pages you find the links on the new About page.Chris Forman from Ye Olde Infocomme Shoppe has kindly permitted to include his photos of QL-Pawn with this site (refer to QL-Pawn page). Images of the "The Pawn" disk for the C64 and the Atari ST disk of Myth have been added to the game pages.
The original music scores of The Pawn, Jinxter, Corruption, and Fish! have been added to the game pages. The files are in Delitracker custom format (use Deliplayer, UADE or similiar tools to play) and originate from Exotica.
March 2008
The next game with new and updated material is Wonderland. An image of the The Pawn disk for the Amstrad CPC 6128 was added. If you have a Java 1.5+ Runtime installed and properly configured Java Webstart you can play all the games online now. The online games (also work offline after the first start) are based on a modified version of JMagnetic that is highly reduced in size and limited to the basic functions. The download size for the games varies between 800k and 1.1M. The online version is intended for short gaming in between or for getting sneak previews of the games. Please consider this online option experimental. While the normal JMagnetic interpreter seems to be pretty stable, the modified version is roughly tested. For normal game play I strongly recommend one of the various ports of the Magnetic interpreter or the full JMagnetic. To start a game use either the "Play now" button on the respective game page or the overview page here.An important note:
February 2008
With the first update in 2008 I started to replace some of the over 10 years old scans of package contents and also added some items that were missing so far like the gameplay guides or the technical manuals.The first two games with new and renewed material are The Pawn and Myth. Where applicable the old images have been replaced by PDF documents of higher quality.
December 2007
A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all Magnetic Scrolls Fans!This small update brings two new Myth reviews (in the Articles and reviews section), a screenshot of JMagnetic 2 running on Solaris 10 and several minor corrections.
October 2007
JMagnetic 2 is available.JMagnetic 2 is a full Java port of the Magnetic interpreter. It supports all features of Magnetic 2.2 and comes with a new user interface, a comfortable installer, a new online help and many minor enhancements.
JMagnetic 2 can be downloaded here.
September 2007
Andreas Scherrer has kindly donated three excellent PDf files: The Corruption organizer pages, the Myth Solution book, and the complete Wonderland manual. All files can be found on the respective game pages.Additionally there are three new Wonderland reviews available in the articles and reviews section.
August 2007
After a four year break many pages of the site have been updated. A list of all changes would be too long, so I suggest that you take your walk around. The most notable changes are probably the updated Magnetic section and a bunch of new reviews in the Articles and reviews section.The Memorial pages have moved to a new server. The old pages stay online (but will not be updated anymore) until the if-legends move is complete. You should update your bookmarks to http://msmemorial.if-legends.org as the new base URL.
A note on contacting me: The spam pest has rendered my email accounts on the old if-legends server almost useless (with sometimes 5000 spam mails per month). So, for the contact address please check the link in the menu. From time to time I might close old mail accounts and open new ones, so if you get an error about non-deliverable mails just check back whether I might have switched to a different mail address.
Old news are archived here...