Gamest, Arcadia and Neo Geo Freak complete sets donation

[JhonnyD]

Hello everybody, I’m the owner of Gamest, Arcadia and Neo Geo Freak complete sets. I would like to donate them in order to be scanned, preserved and made available to the general public.

 

Unfortunately this may provide some logistic problems. We’re talking about 10 big boxes, so shipping them from Italy to the US will be extremely expensive.

 

I tried to get in touch with the guys from Retroedicola (they scan and archive computer magazine both domestic and foreign) but so far we were not able to arrange a meeting.

 

Maybe some trusted member resident in central europe is willing to arrange something? Any other ideas?

[kitsunebi]

That's a tough one.  We don't have anyone contributing scans that lives in Europe, so far as I know.  It's possible that someone new seeing this post might step forward, but it would be a big risk on your part shipping off so many mags to someone without a proven track record of releasing scans.

To be honest, that's a ton of mags and ten tons of work.  I personally wouldn't ever take on that many donated mags even if they were shipped to me for free simply because there's no way I'd ever be able to scan and edit them all.  And while I've seen other people around here accept large donations before, the only person I've ever seen follow through and actually scan and release donations of that size is Kiwiarcader over at Kiwis.World.  However, he's preparing to close his site and retire, so he won't be an option, either.

As I said, that's a tough one...

[Phillyman]

I would love to accept them, but my wife would divorce me and probably end up with half my existing magazine collection in the process Even if they could be shipped to me, they would be in my storage unit for at least a year or so before I could get around to them. I don't know of anyone who can scan that huge of a collection in any reasonable time, and honestly in the 10+ years I have been doing this, I have seen people come in with such energy and vigor and dreams of kicking ass.....only for them to straight up disappear from existence after a year.

So unfortunately I can't vouch for anyone that I would trust with such a huge undertaking.

 

[kitsunebi]

I think since this would be a huge monetary expense anyway, if you really want to see them scanned and released your best bet is to pay to have them scanned, as well.

Not by us, but by a professional service like http://1dollarscan.com/

They could scan most of those magazines for $2-3 each, and trust me, for the time it would take any of US to do it, that's a huge bargain.

[Ethereal Dragonz]

Oh man, that would be quite a donation. Unfortunately I do not live in Europe, but I hope someone steps forward.

I actually have a couple issues of Gamest and Arcadia coming up for scanning, but that's all I own.

[MigJmz]

USA here

Having complete sets would be nice but no one will put in the work unfortunately.

[kitsunebi]

3 hours ago, MigJmz said:

Having complete sets would be nice but no one will put in the work unfortunately.

You ain't kidding.  We're talking about over 500 magazines.  At a conservative estimate of 5 hours apiece for debinding, scanning, editing and releasing, we're talking over 2,500 man hours of labor.  No one is going to take on that kind of work.  Anyone offering to accept these mags will basically just be taking them for their own private collections.

Again, the only way I see these getting scanned is to pay a scanning service to do it.  It wouldn't be cheap ($3 each is still a whopping $1,500), but it would be a hell of a lot cheaper than paying someone USA minimum wage to do it ($18,125).

As Phillyman said, there's no one in the English-language scanning world that could take this project on.  Anyone who says otherwise is allowing the prospect of laying hands on that mile-high stack of magazines to cloud their judgement.  I'd say if you can't find some reliably superhuman scanner in Europe (I'm not familiar with the scene, but I kind of doubt such a person exists anywhere), the best option would be for you to try to find a way to raise money to pay for the mags to be scanned.  It might be worth looking into whether or not there are any scanning services similar to 1dollarscan which are based in Europe somewhere.

[Hoagie]

You should try to contact the website OldGamesItalia

They have a section with old Italian magazines, maybe they can help you.

[KiwiArcader]

God, I'd LOVE them but the shipping would be horrendous and I have my hands full currently with 100 Dreamcast Official (Japan) mags along with a similar number of Computer Games: Strategy Plus issues needing to be scanned. 

Arcadia and Gamest are a couple of mags I try and find just for the excellent artwork even though I can't read a word of the lingo. I have 54 PDF issues of Arcadia I obtained from Underground Gamer before they disappeared and they really are brilliant.

Hopefully someone will ensure these are scanned......

Question: How many issues of Arcadia are there? If we have scans of 54 issues scanned maybe it would be more practical to separate the three titles and see if different people can take on scanning a specific magazine? Then potentially it might be a case of only needing to send 100 issues of Arcadia to be scanned.

Edited December 20, 2018 by KiwiArcader
Added a question

[Ethereal Dragonz]

1 hour ago, KiwiArcader said:

Question: How many issues of Arcadia are there?

I think the magazine ended on issue 168 in 2015. I have issue 65 that I will put up at some point.

Did anyone create an archive torrent of the Underground Gamer magazines? I haven't seen that anywhere.

[JhonnyD]

Thanks for the input, I'll think a little about it, maybe some scanning service will end up being the solution, but not here in Italy, services are far more expensive than 1dollarscan

Do you think some kind of fundraising for shipment/scanning would be possible?

[kitsunebi]

4 hours ago, Ethereal Dragonz said:

Did anyone create an archive torrent of the Underground Gamer magazines? I haven't seen that anywhere.

I don't know of any torrents, but all 54 issues are available for direct download at kiwisworld.  Anyone who cares about gaming mags who hasn't donated to that site to become a member is not only doing a disservice to a bunch of people dedicated to enriching this hobby, they're also denying themselves access to a MASSIVE collection of mags you won't find anywhere else.  Act fast, though - the site may be closing soon.

EDIT: Oops, misspoke.  Looks like only 18 issues are available at kiwisworld (though placeholders are up for the rest).  So the question is: hey, Kiwi!  Where are those other issues?!

[kitsunebi]

4 minutes ago, JhonnyD said:

Do you think some kind of fundraising for shipment/scanning would be possible?

Anything's possible, but I think that you would have to organize that yourself.  It's difficult enough to raise enough money here to pay for servers and seedboxes and whatnot to keep the site running, and something like this would require more funds than we normally receive.

Given the nature of the magazines, appealing to arcade game enthusiasts in some forum dedicated to such a thing might be worth attempting.  The problem arises though - suppose you raise SOME money, but not enough to pay for everything.  Then you're faced with either covering the difference yourself (which could be substantial), or trying to refund a bunch of different people their donations.

[JhonnyD]

yep, that's a big IF

 

Anyway the magazines are not going anywhere soon as they're stored safely

I'll see if I can arrange something with the guys at http://www.retroedicola.com/ They even set up a club that you can visit http://www.retroedicola.com/index.php?pid=dove%20siamo

 

Let's say I donate to them, they scan and publish the mags, can I submit them to this site even I've not scannes them myself?

[kitsunebi]

1 minute ago, JhonnyD said:

Let's say I donate to them, they scan and publish the mags, can I submit them to this site even I've not scannes them myself?

Typically, no.  If you have permission from them to do so (and that permission could somehow be directly conveyed to us) it might be possible, though.  But whether they're uploaded to this site, that site, or a site like archive.org that anyone can upload to, the only thing that matters is making the scans available somewhere.

[JhonnyD]

In the end I might consider to scan something myself, going for destructive debinding and and adf scanner shouldn’t take much time, but I absolutely don’t have time for the editing part.

do you think some volunteer will step up? When it’s time maybe I’ll try to ask someone on neo-geo.com and arcade otaku

[kitsunebi]

1 minute ago, JhonnyD said:

Ido you think some volunteer will step up? When it’s time maybe I’ll try to ask someone on neo-geo.com and arcade otaku

In a word, no.  You might get some offers, but most of those would be from people who have never edited a magazine scan before and don't realize how much time is involved.  For every person who has ever contributed a scanned/edited mag, we've had a dozen people announce their intentions to scan and edit mags, usually with great enthusiasm and aplomb...and then are never heard from again.  I imagine you could find someone willing to edit some of the mags, but you certainly will not find anyone that would be able to edit the entire collection unless they can somehow afford to quit their job and work on editing magazines full time every day for the next year or two.  And remember that pretty much everyone currently contributing scans probably already has more mags in their possession waiting to be scanned than they know what to do with (I know I do), so it would be pretty difficult finding anyone willing to devote all of their attention to this project anyway.

We've had our own experience in this area, so I'm not just speaking out of pessimism.  We actually have a collection of scanned, unedited mags on our site that are available to anyone willing to edit them, and most of those have been sitting untouched for a year or more. Likewise, a former scanner on our site uploaded a collection of unedited scans to archive.org asking for people to edit them, and several years later, a grand total of 2 issues have been edited for our site (to be fair, KiwiArcader also edited several others for kiwisworld - but many issues still remain untouched all this time later.)

I personally would love to become just a scanner and let someone else take care of edits, but past experience has proved that most raw scans released into the wild tend to remain unedited.

TLDR: People are lazy.

[kitsunebi]

28 minutes ago, JhonnyD said:

In the end I might consider to scan something myself, going for destructive debinding and and adf scanner shouldn’t take much time, but I absolutely don’t have time for the editing part.

I think no matter what, it will still take a while to scan a collection of that size.  It takes me about an hour to debind and scan a mag using an ADF scanner.  ADF scanners scan pretty quickly, it's true - but all it takes is a stray dust particle to float onto the glass and every page scanned thereafter will have a colored streak running the entire length of the page.  So usually, most of of the "scanning time" is actually time spent checking the scan results, cleaning the scanner glass, and re-scanning affected pages.  Sure, you could just run all of the pages through and not worry about getting clean scans, but if you're planning on editing them, there isn't much point unless you actually want them to look good, and nothing says "crap scan" like a bunch of scan lines on every page.

[JhonnyD]

Thanks for the honest reply

Of course I'm not planning to do it overnight, I'm trying to wrap my head around the various options, giving the amount of time and money for equipment needed

For the moment I'll let sit it on the backburner for a while and think about it a little bit more

[KiwiArcader]

On 12/20/2018 at 9:48 PM, kitsunebi77 said:

EDIT: Oops, misspoke.  Looks like only 18 issues are available at kiwisworld (though placeholders are up for the rest).  So the question is: hey, Kiwi!  Where are those other issues?!

Being uploaded now. I hadn't realised the magazine had been discontinued until I saw this thread so had been applying a cut-off date on it. Seeing as it's defunct that rule no longer applies 

BTW... I was intending on closing the site down due to several reasons, one being a lack of people signing up as it seemed a lot of effort for keeping 60 - 70 people happy, the other being that I was getting the burn out feeling from trying to scan a mag or more a day. Since then I've slowed down scanning and am spending more time on real life activities and the time i am spending on the site spread between scanning mags or uploading member submissions. With more people donating to access the site and more leisure time I am feeling a lot happier now so I think it highly unlikely I will actually shut the site down.

Edited December 22, 2018 by KiwiArcader

[kitsunebi]

43 minutes ago, KiwiArcader said:

Being uploaded now. I hadn't realised the magazine had been discontinued until I saw this thread so had been applying a cut-off date on it. Seeing as it's defunct that rule no longer applies 

Yeah, even in Japan, keeping a magazine running that exclusively covers arcade games isn't really viable anymore.  There are still plenty of arcades around, but most of their floor space is devoted to UFO grabber machines, photo sticker booths, and rhythm games.  Traditional arcade-cabinet style games are becoming more and more rare.

46 minutes ago, KiwiArcader said:

Since then I've slowed down scanning and am spending more time on real life activities and the time i am spending on the site spread between scanning mags or uploading member submissions. With more people donating to access the site and more leisure time I am feeling a lot happier now so I think it highly unlikely I will actually shut the site down.

I'm pretty sure I recommended this course of action to you before.    Anyone in this hobby should do it only if and when they want to.  We aren't obligated to anyone and should never feel that we are.  We might release stuff slow as molasses around here, but we aren't losing any sleep over it.  And anyone who has any complaints is free to put their money where their mouth is and do it themselves.

[KiwiArcader]

Yeah, you did but when people have sent you mags for the site you, as in I, tend to feel obligated to get them out as soon as possible to justify their faith in sending them to me. I don't want to be like another member of a certain site who has received hundreds of mags from donators and yet only manages to push out a mag every couple of months and even then half of them are seemingly just reissues of previous mags he'd already put online. That kind of sucks in my book and is not how I want to be compared to.

Still, I am feeling a lot better for having time out and going to see a movie here and there and just doing non-site stuff so I've finally taken the path you told me too and it has been beneficial I have to admit.

[kitsunebi]

34 minutes ago, KiwiArcader said:

Yeah, you did but when people have sent you mags for the site you, as in I, tend to feel obligated to get them out as soon as possible to justify their faith in sending them to me. I don't want to be like another member of a certain site who has received hundreds of mags from donators and yet only manages to push out a mag every couple of months and even then half of them are seemingly just reissues of previous mags he'd already put online. That kind of sucks in my book and is not how I want to be compared to.

I know of whom you're referring, but to be fair, that sort of thing happens around here, as well.  Anyway, I consider the status of donations a contract of sorts between the donor and the recipient, and since these sorts of exchanges are usually arranged privately, it's up to those two parties to decide if things are being handled fairly.

As for myself, I've only taken donations a couple of times, once because of a strong personal interest in the donated mags, and once because the mags were being shipped from Japan, so I was the logical person to accept them, but I always make it clear that they won't get done in anything resembling speedy succession.  However, I have also promised that I will get them out eventually, and that I won't resume scanning other mags in my collection until the donated mags are complete.  So except for one issue I finally got around to editing which had already been debound and scanned before taking on any donations, every mag I've released over the past year has been a donated mag...and more than likely every mag I release next year will be as well.

[gingerbeardman]

On 12/18/2018 at 9:29 PM, kitsunebi77 said:

We don't have anyone contributing scans that lives in Europe, so far as I know. 

That's me! I am in the UK.

And I've been looking for GAMEST specifically. 

So I am happy accept your offer and work something out.

For GAMEST only right now, 274 magazines is a lot of work! But I am committed to it. I have already scanned issue 38 and am editing now.

Edited January 20, 2019 by gingerbeardman