A lot of bug fixes and small updates

The first update this year is quite unspectacular. There were some bug fixes and a lot of smaller updates across the while site to reflect some developments since we started with the Strandgames initiative. So perhaps just take a walk around and (re)discover. As always many thanks to all contributors who gave notice about misses and bugs on the pages!

Other news: If you are going to visit the VCFE in Munich this year, you get a chance to attend a highly interesting session about the data structures of Magnetic Scrolls's games by Thomas Dettbarn of dMagnetic fame.

And there is one more thing: If you are into Sci-Fi and you are looking for an exceptional good read, you might want to take a look at


Now you probably wonder why I am recommending a book here. I leave it up to you to find out why it is here. But be sure: I am not the author - this is way above my skills. And this is not an affiliate link to earn money, just a normal link to a book, that I really, really liked - written by someone special with a deep relation to Magnetic Scrolls!

Magnetic for Sinclair QL

Tobias Fröschle has released his new port of Magnetic for the Sinclair QL and derivates. For the first time you can enjoy the beautiful pictures of The Pawn on your QL and even better, now you can play all the Magnetic Scrolls games on your QL!



All the details are to be found in Tobias' github repository: QL-Magnetic

The Magnetic Scrolls Memorial - 25th anniversary

What started as a retro page about classic games is slowly becoming retro itself...

25 years ago, the Magnetic Scrolls Memorial was born and amazingly it has survived all those years. I cannot remember the exact launch date, but walking through old notices and backups, it most probably went public on April 1st 1997. In the beginning the MSM was small, only about 3 MB in size - which was a lot of webspace in 1997. But the site grew over time and what started as a tiny collection of facts about the Magnetic Scrolls games turned into a large collection of information, scans, magazine articles, and more.

But the best about the MSM is that it brought me in touch with so many great people. People who helped with materials, information, webspace and much more. People who loved to delve in retro gaming memories like I do. And most notably many of the former Magnetic Scrolls staff, extremely nice and open people.

If you visited the MSM before, you probably noticed that updates of the site have been scarce. But for the very best reason! In 2017 the Strandgames project started. It still feels like a dream. We not only started with preserving the games, but went on to remaster the games. After the spectacular rescue of the original game sources, I got the incredible opportunity to work on the games with the original development tools and code with the original sources. It is surely the best thing that can happen for someone with my obsession for these incredibly great games. We already remastered The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves, and Jinxter. The work on Fish! had started as well, but Covid19 has messed things up a lot for quite some time, so development on Fish! Resurfaced came almost to an halt, but things are slowly getting back into order, so work on Fish! was resumed and this is which almost all of my free time in put into now. Plus, we are not only remastering the old games, but creating new stuff a well! The first game using the new Strands engine for interactive fiction is going live in the SpringThing festival in a couple of days.

So, updates for the MSM will be coming, especially as there is a lot of new information about the techniques of the games, and some errors to be corrected. But it will probably a while before those updates will appear here, because the priority for now is to remaster the remaining games.

I want to send a BIG thank you to all who followed along all those years and I want to send a heartily welcome to the new visitors yet to come.

I am very much looking forward to the next 25 years of the MSM!

New dMagnetic 0.28

Thomas Dettbarn is constantly improving dMagnetic and turning his interpreter into a real gem for retro gaming enthusiasts.

Besides the Magnetic story files, dMagnetic can now read the game data from various original game disks formats. Today he just released version 0.28 which supports the MS-DOS, C-64, Spectrum128, Spectrum+3, Archimedes, and Amstrad CPC disk images!

All the details are on Thomas' page: dMagnetic

dMagnetic

Thomas Dettbarn has released a new interpreter for the Magnetic Scrolls games with some unique features like an ANSI renderer for the game graphics. The interpreter is still under heavy development, but making tremendous progess with each new version. It can already run all the games and recently introduced support for a graphical user interface based on glk.

All the details are on Thomas' page: dMagnetic

Jinxter - Revived

Jinxter is back in the 2019 Remastered edition!


We worked hard to make it more enjoyable than ever!

• The user interface from the Pawn and Guild remasters got additional improvements plus
• New images
• Ambient sounds
• and as usual many changes under the hood to remove dead ends, bugs,...

All the details are at the Strand Games page: Jinxter Revived

Although we are in the finals steps for preparing Jinxter Revived, here is a small update before the year ends...

Unfortuantely, there are some sad news to begin with. A couple of weeks ago, John Molloy, who created the wonderfull Magnetic Scrolls music scores and co-created Fish!, lost his fight with cancer. Last year, John gifted us new music scores for the remasters of The Pawn and The Guild of Thieves. It is a big loss for all his family and friends, and for all Magnetic Scrolls fans. Wish he had more time...

There are only a couple of minor updates and corrections this time, most notably some corrections on the fact sheet about Magnetic Scrolls' development tool chain. Andrei Petrov has confirmed that Myth was also available for the Spectrum +3 and sent an image of the game disk. Thanks, Andrei!

Also a big thank you to Sebastian Berthet, who sent me scans of an adventure guide in French and the French version of the Corruption manual some months ago. Jinxter Revived had eaten up all my time, so the scans will have to wait until the next update. But I havn't forgotten about it, Sebastian!

The Guild of Thieves - Restored

The Guild of Thieves - Restored is also available for iOS now!

The iOS version has all the features from the desktop version and the Android version, including all the latest additions like the new icons.

Read more at The Guild of Thieves - Restored or visit the AppStore at The Guild of Thieves for iOS.

And... we are not done yet. Expect more soon!

The Guild of Thieves - Restored

Just in time for the 30th anniversary, The Guild of Thieves is back in the 2017 Remastered edition.



All the details are at the Strand Games page: The Guild of Thieves - Restored

The Pawn - Remastered

The Pawn - Remastered is now also available for iOS!

The iOS version has all the features from the desktop version and the Android version, including all the latest additions, like enhanced pictures, themeing,...

Read more at The Pawn - Remastered or visit the AppStore at The Pawn for iOS.

Restoring The Guild of Thieves has already started!

The Pawn - Remastered

The Pawn - Remastered is now also available for desktops: Windows, macOS, and Linux:

All the details are at the Strand Games page: The Pawn - Remastered

Strand Games is born...

It has been some time since the last update, but there was a good reason for this. There is incredible news. In the last months a new initiative emerged: Strand Games.

Strand Games was started by Hugh Steers - co-founder of Magnetic Scrolls and core developer. This initiative aims nothing less than preserving the works of Magnetic Scrolls, remastering the games to make them fun to play on modern devices and creating new adventures based on the Magnetic Scrolls technology and the follow-up Brahman.

The initiative is supported by members of the original Magnetic Scrolls team: Anita Sinclair, Ken Gordon, Rob Steggles, and Servan Keondjian. Besides as much as possible of Magnetic Scrolls' work will be preserved, restored from the original backups.

What does this mean? For the first time in over 25 years the games become officially available again. But there is much more. There will be remastered versions of the games that are tailored for mobile devices! The remastering adds many enhancements to the games to increase the play comfort and remove shortcomings of the original games while preserving the story line: touch interface, auto-mapping, multi-undo, auto-undeath, and much more...

A public beta version of The Pawn Remastered for Android is available in the Google Play Store:



Versions for Windows, macOS, Linux are in the works. An IOS version will follow soon after.
The Android version costs $0.99 and unfortunately Google charges you for betas, either. But of course, this includes the final version. This money is only used for the hosting costs, the developer fees (Apple) and for restoring the original Magnetic Scrolls source code (which will be made available!)

This journey has just begun...

Welcome to the all new (and not so new) Magnetic Scrolls Memorial!

After procrastinating for a very long time about modernizing the Memorial pages - say getting rid of the almost 20 years old mess of Dreamweaver template code, HTML inline formatting and horrible table cascades - I finally got around to rewriting the pages.

To the long term visitors much of the "new" Memorial will look familiar. So at first sight you might wonder, what took me so long. But while the overall site structure has only slightly changed and of course the content was preserved, every single page was rewritten by hand (almost 100 pages). The first thought was to rebuild the pages with a CMS - and there are some pretty cool CMS out there.

However, the Memorial uses quite a bunch of different page layouts which had to be rebuilt with the CMS and after it took me so long to get rid of the Dreamweaver leftovers I was really loath to surrender to the next system. Eventually I decided to go without a CMS and code by hand (and the help of a great free framework called Groundwork CSS). The design of the site surely ever was and still is quite colourful and not in line with mainstream designs, but it is an oldskool page about oldskool stuff. Using a slick buisness design just did not feel right to me. So here it is...

But there is even more: The pages should be fully responsive now. The fonts should better adapt to the different devices, so general readability should be better. Many, many things were fixed and many minor or major additions are scattered all over the site.

Hope, you enjoy the new Memorial pages. Please let me know if you encounter problems. Surely there are things to be fixed in the weeks to come, but now that the site is in a maintanable state again, fixing problems and adding new materials should be much easier than before.

Small note to Magnetic Scripts users: Unfortunatley the mail activation routine for the server repository accounts had a nasty bug which prevented the activation under certain conditions. Sorry for the trouble. I didn't know about the problem until today. If you tried to register for a save game repository and were not able to complete the activation with the activation mail, please register and activate once more. I hope, it is fixed now!

A real update to the site and Magnetic Scripts will follow soon. Stay tuned.

Real life has interfered, so the next major update of Magnetic Scripts will have to wait some more time. But just in case you have no idea what to do with all the free time over the winter holidays, I decided to push at least a small update to Magnetic Scripts, that fixes some of the bugs found so far:

• Fixed max allowed same game number (now 100).
• Myth hints fixed plus lot of minor fixes
• And even some minimal enhancements: New loader screen, optimized "more" tablet handling, tested against ios9 Safari and MS Edge browser

A real update with some new features will follow next year. Stay tuned.

This update brings to your enjoyment...

• Several new adventure guides. As I finally got my grips onto a french package there is also the first adventure guide in french language included.
• The german and french game packages included translations or summaries of game manuals in the respective language. Added the german and french manuals for Jinxter, and the german manual for The Guild of Thieves.

The following update will most probably focus on the next version of Magnetic Scripts... my todo list grew up to 50 entries, so it seems it gets time to work on it. Besides I will start with some under the hood work on the pages (e.g. getting rid of the Dreamweaver chains from the past and cleaning up the huge CSS/non-CSS mess). This might lead to some inconsistencies in the layout and appearance from time to time, but I plan to work steadily on it instead of the big overhaul that never gets finished.

This update only brings a bunch of smaller additions and fixes:

• Added version numbers for the PCW releases of The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves and Jinxter.
• The fact sheet was complemeted accordingly, together with some other minor additions.
• Link to Anita Sinclair's profile page at the British Bridge Union.
• The direct play button on the game pages link to Magnetic Scripts now.
• Cleaned up the links section and added a couple of new links (that should have been added long ago)
• Added a handful of solutions, taken from scans by Howard Feldman from mocagh.org with kind permission.

30th anniversary of The Pawn

In 1985 the era of Magnetic Scrolls began with the release of QL-Pawn. To celebrate the anniversary this update adds two new opportunities to dive into the worlds of Magnetic Scrolls:


The Magnetic Scripts engine runs Magnetic Scrolls games directly in the browser. It is a port of Niclas Karlsson's great Magnetic interpreter to HTML5 and Javascript and has almost all features of the native Magnetic versions. Some highlights:

• Saving an restoring games is supported. With most of the current browsers you even get a persistent storage, so your save games are stored across game sessions.
• Save game files from Magnetic Scripts can be used with native interpreters.
• Optional save game storage on the Magnetic Scrolls Memorial server. Sync your save games across different clients.
• Supports HTML Fullscreen mode.
• Pictures and music are supported. On desktop machines, the Wonderland music is real Midi playback. Pictures can be scaled at runtime.
• Integrated hint system based on the original hints from the manuals.
• The classic games support both the Amiga 16bit graphics and the C64 8bit graphics.
• Pure HTML and Javascript: No Java or Flash required!

Note: Magnetic Scripts uses current HTML and Javascript inventions, so you need a recent browser! The Magnetic Scripts starting page contains various compatibility notes and configuration hints. Click the Magnetic Scripts logo to get started now!


There is even more Javascript. For the first time you can try out the original QL-Pawn yourself. Click the logo for heading over to the QL-Pawn page and give it a try.

Note: The QL-Pawn demo requires a recent and especially a fast browser. Please read the demo notes!