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". You can download all story files from the Magnetic Scrolls Memorial site.

JMagnetic has been successfully tested with story files created from Amstrad CPC, Acorn Archimedes, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, Spectrum and Spectrum +3 versions of the games. An alternative way to obtain the story files is to extract them from the original game files, however the extraction tools have not been ported to Java yet. If you wish to extract the story files yourself, please refer to one of the system dependend ports.

Currently the Amiga, Atari ST, Apple Macintosh and Sinclair QL releases of the games are not supported. This is because the games were originally written in native machine code for Motorola 68000 based systems (which all the above computers are). When porting to other systems Magnetic Scrolls implemented a limited subset of 68000 machine code as an emulator on the target system; it is this limited subset which the JMagnetic interpreter implements.

Magnetic Scrolls also released versions for at least the Apple II and Atari XL. Currently, we have not developed any tools to extract the data from such versions, nor have we located all the versions for these machines. If you have an emulator image or an original version for one of these machines, please contact the Magnetic development team.