[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Many older computer users know what adventure games the excellent folks Magnetic Scrolls have produced some really good adventure games. (See THIS (if the link doesn’t work, THIS) for more info). If you want to play these really excellent games on your Windows Mobile (WM for short) device, I have some very good news for you: yes, they’re all playable – and not only under CPU-hungry and not-the-best-suited-for-the-Windows-Mobile-UI emulators, but also real interpreters.

You may have already heard of “Magnetic”, THE Magnetic Scrolls games interpreter. It, fortunately, also has a Windows Mobile port.

(another VGA shot; a QVGA one)

There are three main revisions of Magnetic: 1, 2 and 2.2. Of course, the higher, the better (see the three charts comparing them HERE for more info on the version differences if interested). For WM, fortunately, a port of the latest, 2.2 version is available; as with the desktop Windows. Note that there is another version called for WindowsCE-based Handheld Pro and 2000 devices: chiark’s MagnetiCE; you will NOT want to use it on your WM device because it uses H/PC menus even under Windows Mobile.

Installing the interpreter

Download it from here (linked from this IF-Archive page) (alternative, direct download here). Unzip MagneticWinCE.exe and transfer it anywhere on your handheld.

Note that the interpreter is only compatible with WM2003SE and newer operating systems. It doesn't seem to run under WM2003 (tested on my iPAQ 2210), let alone PPC2k2. I had no problems running it on my (several) WM2003SE+ devices; worked flawlessly even under WM6. It makes use of built-in keyboards and landscape modes without problems. It also supports command history (up/down cursor keys), which is very useful particularly if you want to, say, repeat “wait” many times.

Getting and installing the games

Fortunately, all compatible games are available online and you don’t need to do any conversion. Go HERE and go to the bottom, to the bottom-most Game Files chart. Download the “Story files” of all the games you’d like to enjoy. Unzip it to anywhere on your storage card. Make sure you only put it in a direct descendant (subdirectory) of the root of the card and not the second, third etc. one; this, unfortunately, also applies to the \My Documents directory on your card) or in the main storage, under a directory in \My Documents.

If you don't like this restriction because of the standard file selection dialog, you can fix the problem by getting Mad Programmer’s File Dialog Changer , the current WM5/WM6-compliant version of which is 1.66. Get it HERE. You'll also need GSGetfile.

I’ve often elaborated on the installation / usage of this really useful utility (see for example THIS). Just a quick recap (with WM6 screenshots): after transferring ARM\filedlgchg.cpl from filedlgchg.zip and ARMRel\gsgetfile.dll from gsgetfile-i.zip to \Windows on your mobile device, go to the new Settings / System / File Dialog Changer applet and just check in “Exchange Standard File Dialog”. This will make it possible to peek in anywhere in the file system as can be seen in here.

In addition to the (text-only) story, you may also want to download the image repository (see the “Graphics file” column for all the games you’d like to run). Title graphics and title music files are also downloadable (if present); you will need to separately watch / listen to them from a multimedia player and an image viewer. Hint files, on the other hand, are also handled by the interpreter engine; therefore, you will want to download them too if you do need hints.

Then, just start MagneticWinCE.exe, select File / Open and select the game to play.

The menu of the interpreter is pretty straightforward; in addition to the standard Open / Exit functionality, in Edit / Verb, you can select five predefined verbs to speed up input words. In Display, you can set the size of the images displayed (and whether they’re displayed at all).

The Palm OS Kronos emulator

If you have a Palm OS device, you may have heard of Kronos, an emulator for Magnetic Scrolls, Infocom-style ZMachine, and Scott Adams style adventure games. It’s very advanced: as opposed to the original Windows (and Windows Mobile) version, it supports automaps and popwords.

Unfortunately, it (as of the latest, 1.4.7 version) crashes the current version (1.0.025) of StyleTap, the Palm OS emulator for WM, in the 66% screen mode and, as can be seen in here, in 100% mode, on VGA devices, it uses a low-resolution display. However, if you can live with this (because don’t want to enjoy the images), running Kronos under StyleTap may be a good alternative.

Note that as far as QVGA (low-resolution) Windows Mobile devices are concerned, images are almost invisible on them; example screenshots here and here. However, if you don’t need images at all or can play in 66% mode on QVGA devices, the images are, then, correctly displayed (1 2).

Note that Kronos offers autoload/save features. This is missing from the WM version. The latter, however, supports saving and loading the game state (via the save/load commands) any time.