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Magnentic Scrolls tapes rescued

Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2017 6:19 am
by Ralf R.
An interesting article, unfortunately in german, perhaps Google can help.

https://www.golem.de/news/magnetic-scro ... 28648.html

Re: Magnentic Scrolls tapes rescued

Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2017 6:33 am
by tofro
Here https://strandgames.com/blog/magnetic-scrolls-listing is obviously a picture of a piece of source code for the QL version of "The Pawn".

Tobias

Re: Magnentic Scrolls tapes rescued

Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2017 7:50 am
by vanpeebles
Looks in real good condition too! I wonder if they will scan it?

Re: Magnentic Scrolls tapes rescued

Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2017 8:25 am
by Ralf R.
Still I like to know, what kind of OS they have written, which upset QDOS to run The Pawn. And why they have done it.

As far as I know, there is just one cracked version from an italian guy. Unfortunately, he has compiled his loader program with Supercharge.

Re: Magnentic Scrolls tapes rescued

Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2017 9:32 am
by tofro
Ralf R. wrote:Still I like to know, what kind of OS they have written, which upset QDOS to run The Pawn. And why they have done it.

As far as I know, there is just one cracked version from an italian guy. Unfortunately, he has compiled his loader program with Supercharge.
The few lines one can see in the listing definitely show some definitive hints towards plain old QDOS. And apparently, we're in the middle of the game here, not in some sort of loader or anything

Tobias

Re: Magnentic Scrolls tapes rescued

Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2017 4:18 pm
by Ralf R.
vanpeebles wrote:Looks in real good condition too! I wonder if they will scan it?
I fear, the word "tapes" in the article mean MDV as there were nothing else in these days.

Re: Magnentic Scrolls tapes rescued

Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2017 4:30 pm
by tofro
"Tapes" refer to backup tapes of a DEC MicroVAX that they used for cross-development (most probably also for the QL - DEC VAXes were used in the early 80ies as cross-development machines for Motorola - and a lot of other - machines in the early days of the 68000 - Psion did pretty much the same do develop the QL office suite. If you wanted to support multiple target architectures, it was much cheaper to buy a cross compiler/assembler for the VAX than to develop directly on the target).

Later, they apparently dumped the VAX and used Sun workstations for development.

These "tapes" are "quite a bit more professional" media than Microdrives and probably hold several hundred megabytes of data.

Tobias

And BTW: While I was there, I just downloaded - out of curiosity and nostalgia - the remastered version of The Pawn for my Mac for the huge expense of 1,70GBP. They also have Windows and Linux versions.


EDIT: Just changed the above to bold - I think the fact that The Pawn is again available for modern computers after 35 years (as a bargain) has earned to not being lost somewhere in the middle of the conversation.

Re: Magnentic Scrolls tapes rescued

Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2017 6:15 pm
by Ralf R.
It is soooo wonderful, that someone is not able to write everything, instead just wanted to upset someone else. Nearly the same in every forum.

Re: Magnentic Scrolls tapes rescued

Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2017 11:15 am
by tofro
Ralf R. wrote:It is soooo wonderful, that someone is not able to write everything, instead just wanted to upset someone else. Nearly the same in every forum.
Ralf,
I'm not sure what you're up to. In case you feel insulted by anything written by me, please be more specific, as there was no intention whatsoever to do that.

Tobias

Re: Magnentic Scrolls tapes rescued

Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2017 12:22 pm
by robheaton
tofro wrote: Ralf,
I'm not sure what you're up to. In case you feel insulted by anything written by me, please be more specific, as there was no intention whatsoever to do that.
Tobias
I'm afraid Ralf has closed his forum account.