Magnetic is an interpreter for the games written between 1985 and 1991 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.

Magnetic and magnetiX are released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
See the file COPYING that is included with this program for details.

Got something to say ? suggestions ? bug-reports ?

magnetiX@maczentrisch.de

How to get the latest version of magnetiX ?

download magnetiX (1.9 mb)
download source code (2.1 mb)

What are the system requirements to use magnetiX ?

Mac OS X.6 or later

( Mac OS X.4 and X.5 users can still download version 1.3 here )
( Mac OS X.3 users can still download version 1.2 here )

How to install games for magnetiX ?

You need several files to play the Magnetic Scrolls games (look at the list below).

A good source for these is :

http://msmemorial.if-legends.org/magnetic.htm

Download the files for the game(s) you want to play - uncompress them when necessary.

(start magnetiX)

Now just press the lower right button "Locate Game File Folder" to show magnetiX the folder where you put the files... DONE!

( There are still several standard locations where the game files can be installed:

1.) in the Application Support folder -
create either a folder "~/Library/Application Support/magnetiX/" or "/Library/Application Support/magnetiX/" and move the files there.

2.) inside the Application-Package -
Control-click magnetiX and choose "Show Package Contents" from the context menu.
Move the files into the directory: Contents/Resources/gamefiles/
This way you can move magnetiX to another computer without having to worry about the gamefiles.

In both cases you have to restart magnetiX. )

What about the random events ?

*** This is only important when you want to save your game as a text-script and not when saving and loading the standard way! ***

In most of the Magnetic Scrolls games there are a few random events. This can be a problem when you try to save a gaming-session as a script: When replaying this script the events might not be the same.
To avoid this you can seed the random-event-generator at the beginning of the gaming-session you want to save:

FAQ: I try to load a saved game, but it does not work: I always end up back at the start!

The older games (the NON-Magnetic Windows versions) do not update the status bar when loading a saved game.
Please try to load a saved game (double-clicking it is the easiest way) and then just type "look" + return.
Now you should see your progress.

FAQ: How can I use the Hints drawer? The game just says "Please enter hint :" and nothing else happens.

The advanced hint-system is a feature that was introduced with the Magnetic Windows games. So its only available in "Wonderland" and the three games from the Magnetic Scrolls Collection. (the Magnetic Windows versions of "The Guild of Thieves", "Corruption" and "Fish!")
The older games ask you to enter cryptic texts from the manual to get any hints.

Who made the original Magnetic interpreter ?

Niclas Karlsson <nkarlsso@abo.fi>
Development of the Magnetic interpreter.

David Kinder
Magnetic 2.x development, Windows, MS-DOS (32-bit) and Amiga ports.

Stefan Meier <stefan.meier@if-legends.org>
Magnetic 2.x development, JMagnetic Java port and the
Magnetic Scrolls Memorial web site.

Paul David Doherty <pdd@if-legends.org>
Magnetic 2.x development, story file extraction, help and testing.

History:

Version 1.4 2011/07/24		quick Lion-fixes:
	-	fixed optical issues with overlay scrollers and elastic scrolling
	-	double-clicking a saved game to launch magnetiX works again as expected
	-	other very minor fixes
Version 1.3 2009/06/08	-	updated magnetiX to use magnetic 2.3: Wonderland titlemusic and in-game sound scores are now supported (Thank you Stefan, for the quick help with the last "misbehaving" song!)
	-	other very minor fixes
Version 1.2 2006/09/28	-	magnetiX is now a universal binary
	-	simplified installation: it's now possible to use a user-defined game file folder
	-	other very minor fixes
Version 1.1.1 2005/10/09	-	fixed issues with the font-panel: changing the game font is more reliable
Version 1.1 2005/09/05	-	fixed a few consistency issues in the UI
	-	fixed a visual glitch when changing preferences
	-	fixed a visual glitch when resizing the game window
	-	finally fixed the small black artefacts in the first frame of some animations
	-	a few other small fixes
	-	it's now possible to export images with drag & drop
	-	moved the source to Xcode 2.1 in preparation for a future universal binary release (building this is possible already but totally untested)
Version 1.0.2 2005/05/21		small Tiger-fixes:
	-	it's possible again to double-click a saved game to launch magnetiX
	-	it's possible again to drag & drop a saved game to the magnetiX icon
Version 1.0.1 2004/12/16	-	in some situations magnetiX would not quit correctly (thanks, John)
	-	added another possible location for the gamefiles: "~/Library/Application Support/magnetiX/"
Version 1.0 2004/12/12	-	initial public release

Known Issues:

- unoptimized, inefficient and uncommented spaghetti-code ... I am sorry about this, but magnetiX is my first (cocoa)-app ever ... it can only get better over time! :-)