I'm aware of Rich's excellent site, thank you. In fact, Rich was the one who helped me source an NTSC Sinclair QL, which was much appreciated. A gentleman at my Website, Armchair Arcade, apparently found out the story regarding the Pawn (not sure where he got the info from):
" Basically Pawn was written first for QL, then the QL died a horrid death. The quickest way to get the game on other machines was to write a 68k QL emulator, which became the "game driver" for Magnetic Scrolls. The version of Pawn or any other Mag Scrolls game (pre Wonderland) basically was a 68k cpu emulator that ran QL compiled code on the pc/st/apple etc. The first game released by Magnetic Scrolls was QL-Pawn, the originate version 1.o of the later so popular The Pawn. QL-Pawn came on two micro drives that were enclosed within a micro drive wallet that was badged by Sinclair Research. A sleeve was also produced for the wallet along with an instruction booklet containing a short narrative to introduce the adventure. The game was text only, but it already had the powerful parser which was one of the basics for the success of Magnetic Scrolls. QL-Pawn also was the only Magnetic Scrolls game that was produced for the ill fated QL. All the ports of QL-Pawn, then called "The Pawn" had version numbers 2.0 or higher. Released: 1985 Distributed by: Firebird / Rainbird Story: Rob Steggles Graphics: Geoff Quilley Programming: ? Packaging: There are two different packages known, which can roughly be separated into "small banner" and "large banner" cover. The small banner version seem to be the early releases and are rarer than the large banner packages. Goodies authoring: A Tale of Kerovnia by Georgina Sinclair Package contents: A tale of Kerovnia (there exist at least two versions of this novella. The second issue states "Version II" on the front page), The Pawn Guide (platform dependent), The Pawn Game play, The Pawn poster, Addendum, Disc, At least the early Atari ST versions contained a "STOP PRESS" indicating a minor bug in the online hint system (all ciphered answers must be terminated with CO) Platforms: Amiga, Apple2, Archimedes, Atari ST, Atari XL/XE, Commodore 128/ 64, Macintosh, MS-Dos, Schneider CPC, Sinclair QL, Spectrum 128K, Spectrum +3 Known versions: 1.0 (QL-Pawn) 2.0 (Atari ST) 2.2 (Amiga) 2.3 (Archimedes, Atari XL, C64, MS-DOS, Schneider CPC, Spectrum 128k) 2.4 (Spectrum +3) Version unknown: Macintosh Addendum: The beautiful graphics were created with "Neochrome" on Atari ST. ====== Major parts of the games were implemented with a tool called FRED. Mainly Fred was a data entry tool which was used to store the descriptions of objects, rooms and NPCs and describe the properties of each object (e.g. weight, movable, burnable, container,...). Each object had a 14 byte descriptor block. For The Pawn Fred 23 was used, the later games were done with Fred 23junior, which were both developed by Hugh Steers. In several games magazines (e.g. the german Happy Computer) FRED was incorrectly denoted as a "language". * Eventually this game code was compiled into an intermediate code called ELTHAM (Extra Low Tech Highly Ambiguous Methodology or alternativly Extra Low Tech Highly Ambiguous Metacode). * The ELTHAM code implemented a subset of the 68000 machine code. It was executed "natively" on ST, Amiga, QL, Macintosh and emulated on the other systems. The virtual machine used up to 64k. On 8 bit machines they used virtual memory mechanisms. On the C64 non-active pages were held on the floppy disc. Only "read-only" pages were swapped. " It's too bad there's no master list of commercial games. I'd really like to see/run something that actually pushes the original hardware (though mine is expanded), but I doubt that that something exists. ================================= Bill Loguidice, Managing Director Armchair Arcade, Inc. http://www.armchairarcade.com A PC Magazine Top 100 Website ================================= -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dilwyn Jones Sent: Monday, October 15, 2007 2:12 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Ql-Users] Commercial QL Games > Hey all. Is there a master list somewhere of commercial QL games > released? > Someone mentioned that the Magnetic Scrolls stuff was available for > the QL, which I never realized. I have only a few entertainment > applications and they're not necessarily of the highest quality. I think there was a program called The Pawn from them, which was released way back in the early days of the QL (1985???). It's not commercially available, but some of the traders (e.g. Rich Mellor at RWAP Services) may be able to source a second user copy for you. Rich does have a few commercial games for the QL, and there are plenty in PD too. Trouble is, many are fairly old, and either need a little bit of hacking to work on modern systems, or the other option is often to use an unexpanded QL or QL with early ROM if you wan to play games. Try to find out the game's requirements, try it on your current QL hardware, if it fails to run, try an old QL ROM such as JM or JS and if necessary, run without RAM expansion. Some of the very early games were written in position dependent code. If they were designed ot load intot he 128K RAM, they may well fail to run on higher memory. Some of the early games had a rudimentary copy-protection which relied on a 'fingerprint' number recorded onto the mdv cartridge - these games usually asked you to make a working copy of the master, then it was run with the working copy in mdv1_ and the master copy in mdv2_. Failure to detect the master caused the game to stop. The reaosn for doing it this way was that you could make reasonable backup copies, and it didn't matter if the master got slightly damaged, the fingerprint (which I think was a "random" number applied during formatting of the cartridge) was detectable as long as the master wasn't completely destroyed. Might be worth visiting Rich Mellor's website at www.rwapsoftware.co.ik to see what he has to offer. -- Dilwyn Jones _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
