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

[sol_hsa]

\o/

[ZX_Tsugi]

Great news! I've been looking forward to this for some time. Indeed, I bought Jinxter in 1989 for the Amstrad PC1512, but as it only had 512K it didn't show any graphics.

With regard to Wonderland, on that same PC1512, the memory was eaten up very quickly, even when not displaying graphics and the map, etc. Have any such problems arisen on the Next port so far, or have you found a way to mitigate them?

Thank you for all your hard work.

[SevenFFF]

The Next is fast enough to load layer 2 graphics on demand from the SD, and even do full motion video (a FMV demo using the streaming API has been done a few years ago).

I’m not sure if Stefan is doing that here, but it’s certainly a possible technique when people start running out of RAM.

[varmfskii]

With the streaming interface. Using the "normal" file interface, loading a Layer 2 file takes a noticeable amount of time. (You gotta try to be fast to be fast )

[dave18]

Fantastic. I never played any of these the first time around, is there a recommended order?

Thanks

Dave

[Stefan123]

Great news! I've been looking forward to this for some time. Indeed, I bought Jinxter in 1989 for the Amstrad PC1512, but as it only had 512K it didn't show any graphics.

With regard to Wonderland, on that same PC1512, the memory was eaten up very quickly, even when not displaying graphics and the map, etc. Have any such problems arisen on the Next port so far, or have you found a way to mitigate them?

Thank you for all your hard work.

I have not had any problems with Wonderland on the Next so far. Wonderland will use the same UI as the other Magnetic Scrolls games on the Next. It will not use the Magnetic Window windowing system used in the original version of Wonderland. Magnetic Window was a full-featured cross-platform windowing system comparable to Windows 3.1 and I would guess it was a very tight fit for the Amstrad PC1512 with only 512 KB of RAM.

The main challenge with Wonderland for the Next is getting the animation support in place. Wonderland has images for almost all locations in the game and many of those images are animated.

[Stefan123]

The Next is fast enough to load layer 2 graphics on demand from the SD, and even do full motion video (a FMV demo using the streaming API has been done a few years ago).

I’m not sure if Stefan is doing that here, but it’s certainly a possible technique when people start running out of RAM.

The layer 2 location images in the Magnetic Scrolls games for the Next are loaded dynamically from the SD card. The images are 256 x 136 pixels and can be loaded pretty quickly.

[Stefan123]

Fantastic. I never played any of these the first time around, is there a recommended order?

Thanks

Dave

The games are independent of each other and can be played in any order. The only connection is that The Pawn and The Guild of Thieves take place in the same world, Kerovnia. If you want to play the games in some kind of order, chronological order seems logical

This is the chronological order of the games:

The Pawn
The Guild of Thieves
Jinxter
Corruption
Fish
Myth
Wonderland (not yet released)

[dave18]

@Stefan123 thanks