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Twoflower
Registered: Jan 2002
Posts: 434 |
Graphics from the Magnetic Scrolls games?
Do any of you folks know of demos containing the images from the Magnetic Scrolls titles - The Pawn, Guild of Thieves, Jinxter, Myth, Corruption and Fish? I seem to remember a demo containing all the images from The Pawn, but I can't seem to locate it.
Whatever the case is, those images are very impressionistic and some of them are really well-pixeled and deserves to be preserved in another media than those games.
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Twoflower
Registered: Jan 2002
Posts: 434 |
The C-64 images are definitly not wired, they are pixeled or "painted" from sketches. According to interviews, Geoff Quilley seems to have been a sort of an art-director, making the sketches for the locations - the graphicians then worked from there. Bob Stevenson have probably not made all the graphics for the 8-bit versions of The Pawn. To quote Anita Sinclair:
"All our artists work initially on the ST", Anita explains, "because that was the second version of The Pawn that we did, after the text-only QL version. At that time the Amiga was just a twinkle in someone's eye, and we already had the ST and a copy of Neo so we just got on with it and it's worked perfectly well - so why change it? [...] "Ideally, two artists would be involved in producing the 60 or so original ST screens that would make up a typical adventure, but this can increase to four or five because of the pressure of deadlines. The artists are called in and talked through the game, and they choose for themselves which locations they want to illustrate.
(Quote from the article The Arts That Spell Adventure found on The Magnetic Scrolls Chronicles)
As pointed out in the last post, the 8-bit versions (or atleast the C-64 and the Amstrad versions) are identical save for the one or two omitted colors in the Amstrad version (they've been replaced with a grid) which sort of supports the NEO-paint + Atari idea. A quite interesting fact is that the four bottommost pixels are omitted on the C-64, while only two are omitted on the Amstrad and the full char is shown on the Atari XE - this indicates that the entire char of graphics might be included on the C-64 disks. I dare to say that the images are very much made with the C-64 limitations in mind though - lines and colors are often perfectly aligned with the chargrid, although with colorclashes here and there. |
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Schlobo
Account closed
Registered: Nov 2010
Posts: 8 |
Sorry for this late straggler, but is everyone aware that if you press 'C' in the TRIAD cracktro to the Guild of Thieves, you get to see a slide show of all the game graphics? This also works with other Magnetic Scrolls adventures if you foist their boot disk on the running cracktro before pressing 'C' (colours in The Pawn are broken though; Jinxter works fine).
I remember doing this 23 years ago with a taste of forbidden fruit on my tongue...
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Acidchild
Registered: Jan 2002
Posts: 464 |
oh, someone said cracktro...c64-scene-police !!!!! |
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Schlobo
Account closed
Registered: Nov 2010
Posts: 8 |
Sorry again for inadvertently violating etiquette. What exactly is the taboo placed upon, the word or the thing?
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Acidchild
Registered: Jan 2002
Posts: 464 |
well, on c64 it's not called cracktro like on amiga, but crack intro. i've got no problem with that at all, but there are people around, who really dislike that word on c64 :) |
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The Ignorance
Registered: Apr 2006
Posts: 85 |
Who called me? |
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Twoflower
Registered: Jan 2002
Posts: 434 |
Oh, I did.
Hmm, had no idea that Mr.Z's trick on The Guild of Thieves worked on the other Magnetic Scrolls titles. That's nice to know. Will certainly check that out.
I still find it strange that the images are sth like 18,5 char high on the C-64 (320X148) while the images on the Atari 8-bit and Amstrad is somewhat bigger. Is that odd half-char just not displayed by the displayer or have they cropped it in this quite unusual manner? |
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WVL
Registered: Mar 2002
Posts: 886 |
Hey 2f,
I did a quick check since I'm bored at work :
The extra 4 lines are there (at least in The Pawn), but they're just not being displayed. |
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enthusi
Registered: May 2004
Posts: 675 |
maybe some cheap rastersplit? Haven't checked the code though but I witnessed similar oddities in some cheapo games... |
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WVL
Registered: Mar 2002
Posts: 886 |
If you write #$d2 to $138d in The Pawn, it will show you all the gfx (+ 4 crap lines below that).
Better :
while playing, write #$ce to $138d, exit monitor. Then write #$07 to $138c. Now all the gfx are fine, except for the command-box, which is cut off a bit..
You can also do it in one go : write #$ce to $138d and #$03 to $138c. It's bit weird code, because they wanted to be able to scroll images. $138d is something like the final scrollvalue (total visible pixels), and $138c is something like the current y-scroll value ($d011).
I think it wouldnt be a problem to fix that text box aswell and have a version that shows all the gfx fine. |
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