MS-DOS Story Files

Story files can be created by extracting the data from both the original MS-DOS releases and the later "Magnetic Windows" releases of "Wonderland" and "The Magnetic Scrolls Collection, Volume 1". The latter of these comprised new versions of "The Guild of Thieves", "Corruption" and "Fish!".

To convert these files to the interpreter's own format the XtractPC (for the original releases) or XtractMW (for the "Magnetic Windows" releases) programs, which are included with this interpreter, must be used. XtractPC and XtractMW are Win32 console programs, so must be run from an MS-DOS prompt under Windows. Run XtractPC or XtractMW without any arguments to read a help screen.

The syntax for XtractPC is:

    XtractPC game game.mag

where "game" is the full path to the data files, minus any trailing numbers. For example, the data files for "The Pawn" are called "pawn1" to "pawn6". If these files are in a directory "c:\Games\Magnetic\Pawn", the command line might be:

    XtractPC c:\Games\Magnetic\Pawn\pawn Pawn.mag

The syntax for XtractMW is:

    XtractMW game.rdf game.mag

where "game.rdf" is the full path to the game’s main rdf file ("all.rdf" for "Wonderland"; "corr.rdf", "fish.rdf" and "guild.rdf" for the games in "Collection Volume 1"). For example, for "Wonderland", the command line might be:

    XtractMW c:\Games\Magnetic\Wonder\all.rdf Wonder.mag