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

A recommendation to adventure fans with old floppy disks in the cabinet: During the last days I took some time to mess around with the disk2fdi tool. Disk2Fdi ist a tool for creating disk images with support for many old disk formats, even those that normally can not be read on PC hardware. And to make it short: It works amazingly. I did not only create images of Amiga disks successfully but also of Mac 400k disks. The image shows The Pawn for the Macintosh running in System 6 using the vMac Mini Emulator. For your reference: I used Disk2Fdi with a Pentium III, Asus P3B-F, Samsung SDF321B utilizing the onboard parallel chip.

(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:
Magnetic Scrolls' games have not been made freely available by the owners (Although I tried to find out, it is even unclear who holds the rights on the games now). Technically 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. The reason for making the interpreter files and the game related materials available here is to prevent the loss of the games. The games do not have any considerable commercial value anymore, and the technologies that Magnetic Scrolls developed for their games do - to my best knowledge - not generate any revenues through current products either. And since most of the games are available on widely accepted sites like World of Spectrum or the NVG CPC archive, I had the feeling that I am not giving away something "new". However, despite my personal view and intentions, please be aware of the situation and decide for yourself!

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.