Magnetic Scrolls masterpieces remastered for the Spectrum Next

[Stefan123]

I'm happy to announce that the illustrated text adventure games The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves and Jinxter from Magnetic Scrolls are now freely available for the Spectrum Next. These games are officially remastered versions by Strand Games. The remastered versions contain playability improvements, bug fixes and, for Jinxter, additional graphics.

More information about the games at Strand Games:
https://strandgames.com/projects/zxnext

The games are also represented on the Spectrum Next Games site:
https://www.spectrumnextgames.uk/adventures

The source code is available in Strand Games' GitLab repository:
https://gitlab.com/strandgames/brahman/ ... t_magnetic

Corruption, Fish and Myth from Magnetic Scrolls are also available for the Spectrum Next using the original game story files. These games will be released more officially later on when the remastered versions are done. However, if you're interested, they are available to download from the GitLab repository mentioned above.

Wonderland, the last game from Magnetic Scrolls, is currently being ported to the Spectrum Next and will be available at a later date.

Strand Games hope you will enjoy these classical masterpieces on your Spectrum Next

[Daren]

Brilliant, thanks for these!

[Mad Fritz]

Just: WOW!
Thanks a lot...

[Morkin]

These look great..!

Am still waiting for someone to donate their Next to me, but I suspect it isn't going to happen..!

[Pegaz]

You can wait for the second kickstarter, but don't hold your breath...

[akeley]

I'm waiting either for Next KS or Next core for my MiSTer. The gfx looks ace in this version.

[Stefan123]

New version of the remastered Magnetic Scrolls games

Version 1.1.0 of The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves and Jinxter have been released. This version dramatically reduces the loading time of the game story file. Previously, it took about 7 seconds to load a game from an SD card, now it loads in half a second. So if you have previously downloaded the remastered Magnetic Scrolls games, make sure to download the latest version to benefit from the ultra fast loading times Here are the download links:

The Pawn:
https://gitlab.com/strandgames/brahman/ ... d/pawn.zip

The Guild of Thieves:
https://gitlab.com/strandgames/brahman/ ... /guild.zip

Jinxter:
https://gitlab.com/strandgames/brahman/ ... inxter.zip

Technical stuff for the curious ones:
A remastered game story file (.prg) is actually an AmigaOS object file containing the Motorola 68K game code and the game's dictionary. In addition to this, it also contains a quite large symbol table and relocation information. Only a handful of the symbols are actually used by the Magnetic interpreter and the relocation information is not used at all. The symbol table is designed in such a way that it must be traversed in its whole to find the needed symbols and to advance to the next part of the file and this takes some time on a Spectrum Next. However, if the game story file is trimmed in advance so that all unused symbols are removed, its loading time is significantly reduced. While we're at it, we might as well remove the relocation information since it's not needed.

[stupidget]

Has anybody managed to get these working on ZEsarUX? I can load the game and a tune plays, but as soon as I press a key the machine resets back to a 48k screen.

[Stefan123]

Has anybody managed to get these working on ZEsarUX? I can load the game and a tune plays, but as soon as I press a key the machine resets back to a 48k screen.

Are you using Windows? There is a script for running the games in ZEsarUX (run_zesarux.bat) included in the game download ZIPs. Have you tried this script? If you're not on Windows or are not using this script, please post your command-line for invoking ZEsarUX and we will make it work for you

Note that the AY intro music is played a bit choppy in ZEsarUX. I don't know the reason for this.

I don't want to recommend one emulator over the other but the games do currently run more smoothly in the CSpect emulator compared to ZEsarUX.

[Pegaz]

I can confirm this, on Cspect, the games work extremely well.

[stupidget]

Has anybody managed to get these working on ZEsarUX? I can load the game and a tune plays, but as soon as I press a key the machine resets back to a 48k screen.

Are you using Windows? There is a script for running the games in ZEsarUX (run_zesarux.bat) included in the game download ZIPs. Have you tried this script? If you're not on Windows or are not using this script, please post your command-line for invoking ZEsarUX and we will make it work for you

Note that the AY intro music is played a bit choppy in ZEsarUX. I don't know the reason for this.

I don't want to recommend one emulator over the other but the games do currently run more smoothly in the CSpect emulator compared to ZEsarUX.

I’m using a MAC but now that I’ve got a working tbblue.mmc file I’ll try it in Cspect. Cheers

[Stefan123]

Are you using Windows? There is a script for running the games in ZEsarUX (run_zesarux.bat) included in the game download ZIPs. Have you tried this script? If you're not on Windows or are not using this script, please post your command-line for invoking ZEsarUX and we will make it work for you

Note that the AY intro music is played a bit choppy in ZEsarUX. I don't know the reason for this.

I don't want to recommend one emulator over the other but the games do currently run more smoothly in the CSpect emulator compared to ZEsarUX.

I’m using a MAC but now that I’ve got a working tbblue.mmc file I’ll try it in Cspect. Cheers

Note that both CSpect and ZEsarUX supports two modes: Either running from an SD card file system image containing NextZXOS and everything or emulating the ESXDOS API on top of the host file system. The second approach works fine if your program takes over the machine and only uses ESXDOS without calling any NextZXOS APIs. The Magnetic Scrolls games work in both modes. For ease of use, the included scripts run_cspect.bat and run_zesarux.bat use the second mode where the emulators emulate the ESXDOS API on top of the host file system.

[Stefan123]

A new version of the Magnetic Scrolls games have been released. In this version, the font has been better adapted for the Timex hi-res mode and is now easier to read and kinder to your eyes. Have a look and see The location image transitions have also been made smoother.

If you have played the games earlier and have saved game positions, you can easily transfer them to the new game versions by copying the *.SAV files from the old game folders to the new ones.

Here are the download links:

The Pawn:
https://gitlab.com/strandgames/brahman/ ... d/pawn.zip

The Guild of Thieves:
https://gitlab.com/strandgames/brahman/ ... /guild.zip

Jinxter:
https://gitlab.com/strandgames/brahman/ ... inxter.zip

Corruption:
https://gitlab.com/strandgames/brahman/ ... orrupt.zip

Fish:
https://gitlab.com/strandgames/brahman/ ... d/fish.zip

Myth:
https://gitlab.com/strandgames/brahman/ ... d/myth.zip