

	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;
	(3) documentation from the original packages;
	(4) the Magnetic interpreter.


- 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". It is planned to make all story files
    available on Stefan Meier's web pages (see below).

    At present the only 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. The
    graphics files used by Magnetic can be obtained from the Internet,
    at Paul David Doherty's web page:

	http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/inside/angl/people/pdd/advent.html

    The Amiga release of Magnetic also contains a tool to build graphics
    files from the Amiga releases of the Magnetic Scrolls games.


- DOCUMENTATION FROM THE ORIGINAL PACKAGES --------------------------------

    To prevent software pirates from spreading their programs, Magnetic
    Scrolls added a password protection to most of their games. Luckily,
    Xtract64 offers you to remove this type of protection. However, most
    games still cannot be won without the original documentation since
    it 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 Stefan Meier's Magnetic Scrolls Memorial

	http://www.rat.de/stworld/magscrolls/memorial.htm

    His pages will probably move to a different site in the near future.
    Watch PDD's adventure page (see above) or the following page for an
    updated link. The second web site is the Magnetic Scrolls Gallery by
    Rochus Boerner

	http://www.igd.fhg.de/~boerner/commodore/ms/mscrolls.html

    which also features scanned material and many 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 see its help screen. As an example, to play "The Pawn"
    you would have to type

	Magnetic pawn

    The interpreter would 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 front end:		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.
