KiwiArcader's Work In Progress

[Trickster]

42 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Yep, Kiwi's site isn't the best for social interaction between members.  But he doesn't have time to worry about that since he's too busy scanning magazines like a madman on fire.

Btw, you wouldn't happen to be the Australian Trickster from the Adventure Gamer would you?  If so, I love your blog (as one of the few PC game enthusiasts here).

Yes. I am that Trickster.  I'm actually working on a new project, for which I need to collate a lot of old PC and Amiga magazines. Sites like this one and Kiwi's are invaluable. But I still need MORE! 

[kitsunebi]

Awesome.  I tend to alternate between reading your blog and Chet's for about 10 minutes every night before I go to sleep.  I started both at the beginning and have been reading both for quite a while now, actually (reading all the comments on Chet's blog can be especially time-consuming).  I'm usually already in bed and reading from my phone, which is probably why I never post anything.

Sadly (for me) most of our members are primarily fans of video games rather than computer games, and as a primarily USA-oriented site, there probably isn't going to be a lot of Amiga love around here, but I've got several PC gaming mags on my upcoming scan list.  I don't scan anywhere remotely as fast as Kiwi, though, since 1) the process bores me to tears, and 2) my main interest is in completing our database and galleries, so that's what I spend (sometimes) hours per day doing instead.

Anyway, your new project sounds intriguing.  And anytime you want to wax poetic about Sierra or LucasArts, there'll be at least one person around here willing to listen.

[Hoagie]

I noticed a new issue of PC Format was uploaded. Thanks a lot !

By the way, have you ever heard about the Australian magazine PC Games Plus ? I saw their name several times in Point of Origin (the internal newsletter of Origin) but can't find anything about them.

http://www.wcnews.com/news/update/8236

http://www.wcnews.com/news/update/8432

 

5 hours ago, Trickster said:

Yes. I am that Trickster.  I'm actually working on a new project, for which I need to collate a lot of old PC and Amiga magazines. Sites like this one and Kiwi's are invaluable. But I still need MORE! 

As a computer games magazines addict, I'm curious to see that. What do you mean by MORE ? Magazines from other countries ?

[Trickster]

13 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Awesome.  I tend to alternate between reading your blog and Chet's for about 10 minutes every night before I go to sleep.  I started both at the beginning and have been reading both for quite a while now, actually (reading all the comments on Chet's blog can be especially time-consuming).  I'm usually already in bed and reading from my phone, which is probably why I never post anything.

Sadly (for me) most of our members are primarily fans of video games rather than computer games, and as a primarily USA-oriented site, there probably isn't going to be a lot of Amiga love around here, but I've got several PC gaming mags on my upcoming scan list.  I don't scan anywhere remotely as fast as Kiwi, though, since 1) the process bores me to tears, and 2) my main interest is in completing our database and galleries, so that's what I spend (sometimes) hours per day doing instead.

Anyway, your new project sounds intriguing.  And anytime you want to wax poetic about Sierra or LucasArts, there'll be at least one person around here willing to listen.

I'm still amazed at how many people recognise my name as I get involved in different parts of the retro gaming community. It makes all the effort I put into The Adventure Gamer totally worthwhile. It's disappointing to hear that this site isn't particularly focussed on UK / AU magazines, as that's definitely where my passion lies. I'm an Amiga and PC fanboy, and while I have a passing interest in consoles, I've never owned one.

I look forward to seeing what PC mags you have waiting in the wings. No pressure to scan them of course. You've made your feelings about the process very clear, and no-one could blame you for that.

I'm interested to know exactly what it is that you spend your time doing on the site. Where do you get the images from? Do you edit them in photoshop? Do you add information about the magazines? Where do you find it? Is it something you want help with or do you like owning it?

[Trickster]

8 hours ago, Hoagie said:

I noticed a new issue of PC Format was uploaded. Thanks a lot !

By the way, have you ever heard about the Australian magazine PC Games Plus ? I saw their name several times in Point of Origin (the internal newsletter of Origin) but can't find anything about them.

http://www.wcnews.com/news/update/8236

http://www.wcnews.com/news/update/8432

 

As a computer games magazines addict, I'm curious to see that. What do you mean by MORE ? Magazines from other countries ?

I've never heard of a magazine called PC Games Plus. I can see that it was around in the mid to late 90s, which is the time period I was buying pretty much any PC gaming magazine I could find in newsagents. Never saw it anywhere.

As for what I mean by MORE, I mean I need a lot more of very particular magazines. I want to complete my collections of 80s/90s GamesMaster, PC Zone, PC Gamer, Amiga Action, PC Powerplay, Hyper, Computer and Video Games, PC Format and Amiga User International magazines. I have most issues for many of these, but have struggled to find more than a handful for others (such as GamesMaster, PC Gamer UK, PC Format, PC Zone).

If anyone scans in issues I'm missing for any of these magazines, I'll donate the original cover price to Retromags. How about that for incentive!

Tricky 

[KiwiArcader]

Nintendo Dream issue 92 is now available thanks to Cuckooguy

[kitsunebi]

17 hours ago, Hoagie said:

By the way, have you ever heard about the Australian magazine PC Games Plus ? I saw their name several times in Point of Origin (the internal newsletter of Origin) but can't find anything about them.

PC Games Plus was published quarterly by Midnight Communications beginning in 1992.  I'm not sure how many issues were published, but this is the cover of the August 1994 issue.

[kitsunebi]

9 hours ago, Trickster said:

It's disappointing to hear that this site isn't particularly focussed on UK / AU magazines, as that's definitely where my passion lies. I'm an Amiga and PC fanboy, and while I have a passing interest in consoles, I've never owned one.

Well, since we don't have any scanners from the UK or Australia contributing anything to our site, we obviously aren't going to have a lot of those magazines lying around to be scanned.  It isn't that we wouldn't like to have more UK/AU mags, it's just that our scanners probably don't own any/many.  Since almost all of the people who contribute scans here are based in the US (or that other country to its north, the name of which eludes me,) most of our scans are of American mags.  I try to contribute Japanese mags since those are the easiest/cheapest for me to obtain.

I started gaming on a Commodore Vic 20, then PC (well, Tandy), and finally consoles (beginning with the NES), and continued playing on both consoles and PCs up until around 2005, after which I haven't touched a console and only rarely play anything on a PC.  But so far as nostalgia and passion go, even though I enjoyed both computer and console games in my youth, it's the PC games rather than the console games that still have any appeal to me.

9 hours ago, Trickster said:

I look forward to seeing what PC mags you have waiting in the wings. No pressure to scan them of course. You've made your feelings about the process very clear, and no-one could blame you for that.

These will all be coming first, since they were donated to me to be scanned by one of our members.

https://www.retromags.com/forums/topic/10237-kitsunebi77s-random-stuff/?do=findComment&comment=53594

9 hours ago, Trickster said:

I'm interested to know exactly what it is that you spend your time doing on the site. Where do you get the images from? Do you edit them in Photoshop? Do you add information about the magazines? Where do you find it? Is it something you want help with or do you like owning it?

What do I spend my time doing...  I scan mags from time to time.  In my head it seems like only one mag per month, but it's actually a bit more than that (I scanned 22 mags last year.)  But as anyone who has spent any time here could tell you, my most obvious role is uploading images.  I've uploaded over 9300 so far, which currently amounts to 53% of the total images on the entire website.  They are all covers of magazines, books and comics, and also game advertisements.  They come from a variety of sources - wherever I can find the best and biggest scan available.  And yes, I'd say that about 95% of them get run through Photoshop and cleaned up before I upload them here.

To be honest, the greatest portion of my time is spent searching/researching in order to not only find covers that I need, but to find the publication data needed to construct our databases.  For a monthly mag, it's pretty easy - all you really need is to know when the first and last issue were published and everything in between just falls into place.  But I spend most of my time building the Japanese database, and Japanese publications are almost never kind enough to be monthly and regular in their publication schedules, so it requires quite a bit of research to be able to get it right.

Some people add info about a particular issue to the contents field on its database page (anyone can do this and it's a good way to contribute even if you don't own a scanner or any magazines.)  I personally don't have time for this, but lately I've been adding a scan of the table of contents pages if I have one available.

And of course, you or anyone else is welcome to help out in any way you can, be it contributing a scan, adding info about magazine issues, or adding missing covers to the gallery.  I will warn you that I'm fairly protective of the galleries/databases and might have some advice for how you should go about submitting to them, but that's just so I don't have to keep a watch over your shoulder and go in afterwards to fix anything, not because I don't want anyone to help.

 

EDIT: I just realized that this post (well, this entire line of discussion) is taking place on someone else's work-in-progress page, and that person's work-in-progress isn't even for Retromags!   Er, thanks for being patient while I hijack your thread for a while, Kiwi!

[Hoagie]

Thanks for the cover of PC Games Plus !

 

9 hours ago, Trickster said:

I've never heard of a magazine called PC Games Plus. I can see that it was around in the mid to late 90s, which is the time period I was buying pretty much any PC gaming magazine I could find in newsagents. Never saw it anywhere.

As for what I mean by MORE, I mean I need a lot more of very particular magazines. I want to complete my collections of 80s/90s GamesMaster, PC Zone, PC Gamer, Amiga Action, PC Powerplay, Hyper, Computer and Video Games, PC Format and Amiga User International magazines. I have most issues for many of these, but have struggled to find more than a handful for others (such as GamesMaster, PC Gamer UK, PC Format, PC Zone).

If anyone scans in issues I'm missing for any of these magazines, I'll donate the original cover price to Retromags. How about that for incentive!

Tricky 

Have you checked the blog Pix's Origin Adventures ? Its owner scanned a whole lot of PC Zone and a few PC Review issues as well. Most of these issues were "uploaded" (cough) on Internet Archive, but he has a few more PC Zone PDFs, and he must own many more issues of PC Zone, PC Format and PC Review, because he posts some pages here and there on his blog. Maybe he could help Retromags and Kiwis World. It would be great, because PC Review is currently one of the least preserved British PC magazines.

http://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/pc-zone-scans/

http://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/pc-review-scans/

[Trickster]

23 minutes ago, Hoagie said:

Thanks for the cover of PC Games Plus !

 

Have you checked the blog Pix's Origin Adventures ? Its owner scanned a whole lot of PC Zone and a few PC Review issues as well. Most of these issues were "uploaded" (cough) on Internet Archive, but he has a few more PC Zone PDFs, and he must own many more issues of PC Zone, PC Format and PC Review, because he posts some pages here and there on his blog. Maybe he could help Retromags and Kiwis World. It would be great, because PC Review is currently one of the least preserved British PC magazines.

http://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/pc-zone-scans/

http://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/pc-review-scans/

I did stumble across that site a while back, and grabbed a few he had. Thank you very much for the recommendation though!

I can't find much about PC Review. Any idea how many issues there were? Nothing on archive.org. Nothing on Wikipedia. I found someone selling a bunch on Ebay up to issue 62, so it was obviously quite a long running magazine.

[kitsunebi]

3 minutes ago, Trickster said:

I did stumble across that site a while back, and grabbed a few he had. Thank you very much for the recommendation though!

I can't find much about PC Review. Any idea how many issues there were? Nothing on archive.org. Nothing on Wikipedia. I found someone selling a bunch on eBay up to issue 62, so it was obviously quite a long running magazine.

This site seems to suggest there were 95 issues.

http://magazinesfromthepast.wikia.com/wiki/PC_Review

[Trickster]

51 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Well, since we don't have any scanners from the UK or Australia contributing anything to our site, we obviously aren't going to have a lot of those magazines lying around to be scanned.  It isn't that we wouldn't like to have more UK/AU mags, it's just that our scanners probably don't own any/many.  Since almost all of the people who contribute scans here are based in the US (or that other country to its north, the name of which eludes me,) most of our scans are of American mags.  I try to contribute Japanese mags since those are the easiest/cheapest for me to obtain.

I started gaming on a Commodore Vic 20, then PC (well, Tandy), and finally consoles (beginning with the NES), and continued playing on both consoles and PCs up until around 2005, after which I haven't touched a console and only rarely play anything on a PC.  But so far as nostalgia and passion go, even though I enjoyed both computer and console games in my youth, it's the PC games rather than the console games that still have any appeal to me.

These will all be coming first, since they were donated to me to be scanned by one of our members.

https://www.retromags.com/forums/topic/10237-kitsunebi77s-random-stuff/?do=findComment&comment=53594

What do I spend my time doing...  I scan mags from time to time.  In my head it seems like only one mag per month, but it's actually a bit more than that (I scanned 22 mags last year.)  But as anyone who has spent any time here could tell you, my most obvious role is uploading images.  I've uploaded over 9300 so far, which currently amounts to 53% of the total images on the entire website.  They are all covers of magazines, books and comics, and also game advertisements.  They come from a variety of sources - wherever I can find the best and biggest scan available.  And yes, I'd say that about 95% of them get run through Photoshop and cleaned up before I upload them here.

To be honest, the greatest portion of my time is spent searching/researching in order to not only find covers that I need, but to find the publication data needed to construct our databases.  For a monthly mag, it's pretty easy - all you really need is to know when the first and last issue were published and everything in between just falls into place.  But I spend most of my time building the Japanese database, and Japanese publications are almost never kind enough to be monthly and regular in their publication schedules, so it requires quite a bit of research to be able to get it right.

Some people add info about a particular issue to the contents field on its database page (anyone can do this and it's a good way to contribute even if you don't own a scanner or any magazines.)  I personally don't have time for this, but lately I've been adding a scan of the table of contents pages if I have one available.

And of course, you or anyone else is welcome to help out in any way you can, be it contributing a scan, adding info about magazine issues, or adding missing covers to the Gallery.  I will warn you that I'm fairly protective of the galleries/databases and might have some advice for how you should go about submitting to them, but that's just so I don't have to keep a watch over your shoulder and go in afterwards to fix anything, not because I don't want anyone to help.

 

EDIT: I just realized that this post (well, this entire line of discussion) is taking place on someone else's work-in-progress page, and that person's work-in-progress isn't even for Retromags!   Er, thanks for being patient while I hijack your thread for a while, Kiwi!

Is there somewhere more suitable to continue this conversation? Sorry Kiwi!

I can try my hand to adding information to the issue pages. Can you provide an example of one you feel represents a really good example? I'd like to help out the site in some way. Even if I had a quality scanner and photoshop, I don't have physical magazines any more (stupidly threw them all out about 12 years ago). #regret

[Trickster]

Just now, kitsunebi77 said:

This site seems to suggest there were 95 issues.

http://magazinesfromthepast.wikia.com/wiki/PC_Review

Wow. How strange that I've never heard of it. I guess it never reached Australian shores, unlike all the majority of Amiga mags and PC Gamer / PC Zone.

[kitsunebi]

5 minutes ago, Trickster said:

Is there somewhere more suitable to continue this conversation? Sorry Kiwi!

I can try my hand to adding information to the issue pages. Can you provide an example of one you feel represents a really good example? I'd like to help out the site in some way. Even if I had a quality scanner and Photoshop, I don't have physical magazines any more (stupidly threw them all out about 12 years ago). #regret

Don't worry about it.  This is what Kiwi gets for not having a forum on his own site.

I honestly don't pay much attention to the magazine contents sections in our database, so I'm not really qualified to tell you the proper to go about it.  Here's a recent example of a very thorough entry from our resident Warrior Nun:

https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/pc-gamer/pc-gamer-issue-123/

 

 

[KiwiArcader]

16 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Don't worry about it.  This is what Kiwi gets for not having a forum on his own site.

 

I do have a forum. I just chose to deactivate it 

[Trickster]

On 01/02/2018 at 9:11 PM, kitsunebi77 said:

Don't worry about it.  This is what Kiwi gets for not having a forum on his own site.

I honestly don't pay much attention to the magazine contents sections in our database, so I'm not really qualified to tell you the proper to go about it.  Here's a recent example of a very thorough entry from our resident Warrior Nun:

https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/pc-gamer/pc-gamer-issue-123/

 

 

Alright. I had a go. Feedback welcome. 

 

[Trickster]

On 01/02/2018 at 8:24 PM, Hoagie said:

Thanks for the cover of PC Games Plus !

 

Have you checked the blog Pix's Origin Adventures ? Its owner scanned a whole lot of PC Zone and a few PC Review issues as well. Most of these issues were "uploaded" (cough) on Internet Archive, but he has a few more PC Zone PDFs, and he must own many more issues of PC Zone, PC Format and PC Review, because he posts some pages here and there on his blog. Maybe he could help Retromags and Kiwis World. It would be great, because PC Review is currently one of the least preserved British PC magazines.

http://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/pc-zone-scans/

http://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/pc-review-scans/

I have promising news Hoagie. I reached out to Pix and asked him whether he might get around to scanning in the rest of his PC Review magazines. Below is his reply:

"They are on my to-do list but PC Zone is taking priority for the moment. There were only a handful of those available when I started also and I’d like to get as many done as possible before I move onto something else. I’ve barely scanned any of them for a year or two but should be starting up again within the next few weeks."

[kitsunebi]

38 minutes ago, Trickster said:

Alright. I had a go. Feedback welcome. 

 

Looks good to me.  Btw, in case you weren't aware, if you fill out 5 contents pages like that you'll get bumped to yearly patron status.  Do 10, and you get lifetime patron status.  It isn't automatic, though, so make sure you shoot Phillyman a PM and let him know which issues you did so he can promote you.

[KiwiArcader]

Nintendo Dream issue 86 is now available thanks to Cuckooguy

[KiwiArcader]

PC Format issue 32 is now available at Kiwis.World.

[KiwiArcader]

Can someone tell me the title and issue number of this magazine? 

[kitsunebi]

Someone?  Were you expecting anyone else?

Weekly Famitsu issue 618 October 20, 2000

[kitsunebi]

That's a special edition issue, though.  It might be Issue 617/618 October 13/20.  Can't you see the issue number on the back cover?

Edit:  Looks like what happened was, the previous issue was a two-week issue (Oct 13/20 2000).  Then, for whatever reason, they decided to publish an October 20 issue anyway (the one you have).  Since they'd already labeled the previous issue as Oct 13/20, they labeled this second Oct 20 issue as a "special edition," even though it's just another regular issue.

Have I mentioned before that Japanese magazines are STUPID?

[KiwiArcader]

Hahaha ... Yeah, I was hoping you'd help me out with this. It is issue 618 on the back cover but I couldn't figure out which title it belonged to. Big flippin' issue though....

Thanks for your assistance.  It'll be online tomorrow  

*** UPDATE *** It's online now. I wish you'd scan some more of those mags kitsunebi77. I have to say I really like them, even if I can't read a word of what's in them. Japanese magazine art = fabulous. And some ads are works of art compared to most English ads ......

Edited February 3, 2018 by KiwiArcader

[KiwiArcader]

PC Format issue 27 is now available at Kiwis.World.