Magnetic Scrolls Collection Vol. 2?
As has already been mentioned in earlier posts, The Guild of Thieves, Corruption and Fish! were released as the "Magnetic Scrolls Collection Vol. 1". These releases featured a new windowed user interface (based on the one from Wonderland, I believe), as well as some additional illustrations and animations. But I've also come across the following rumor in a Magnetic Scrolls Fact Sheet:
A second "Collection" with the other three classics (The Pawn, Jinxter, Myth) running under the new Magnetic Windows system was in the making. The implementation was mainly done by Paul Findley while the management was done by Ken Gordon. Since the development of The Legacy had already started and Ken worked at Microprose in Tetbury while Paul was working in London, the management was not all that easy. So the second collection never got completely finished although it was well underway.
Does anyone know if this rumor is true and, if so, if any of it still remains to this day? It would be particularly interesting if there were additional illustrations for these games as well.
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Since I wrote the fact sheet, I can confirm that this is true indeed and not a rumor
I must confess I didn't think about the images when I was told the story of Collection 2, so I am afraid, but I do not know if animated pictures were planed or even in the works.
Concerning the remains... I think the most recent stuff we got from the backups so far was dated from 1991 or so. Since the Collection 2 dev must have been later, I would suspect that there is nothing, yet.
It might have been useful if some of this (ie a collection 2) had been done. As far as all the backup recoveries are concerned, there was no material found for this.
We have recovered source codes for all the games from the tapes. The collection editions can be spotted because they contain additional code to notify the UI of certain events.
There is definitely none of these codes in, for example, The Pawn. So if any of these versions had been started they were kept on other development machines, probably long lost.
In any case, the collection editions didn't have any game story changes (AFAIK), possibly bug fixes. So the main change for collections was to rebase the code into the Magnetic Windows environment.
I like to think that our remastering project is doing something similar, but for modern devices. For example, we're definitely going to have the collection 1 animations working.
Ah well, I was mostly curious given the additional pictures (not necessarily animated) that were made for the first collection. Of course, having the source code for all the released games is the important bit. Even assuming that this does not include The Legacy: Realm of Terror.
(Though now that you mentioned story changes, I have this annoyingly vague memory of reading an old article - I forget where - that claimed that some bits were cut from Jinxter, presumably for space, and that this would explain why a puzzle involving a saddle wasn't clued any better.)
There usually is the gems you find on the wibbly wobbly web, but you don't bookmark them, and a couple of years down the line you're looking for the same article, but they've vanished into the Great Bit Bucket...
In this case the article, if it did exist outside of my imagination, would have been in a paper magazine some time in the late eighties.
I remember when I was searching for Commodore User here in Italy to read "Into the valley"..
The only reason i can imagine bits of story cut were due to memory limits. People today forget that memory was quite scarce then. For example engineering time was often spent reducing memory as apposed to writing new code. Back then, working and debugged code was sometimes thrown away to be replaced by a new untested but importantly smaller version.
If any story bits were removed from Jinxter they will definitely still be in the source code (because you didn't just delete the code only remove it from the build).
Something to look into. If this turns out to be true at all, I'll make special effort to reinstate any missing bits!