meppi

^

Bit late with the reply, but I needed to talk this over before I could give a definite response. Not to mention how I got sidetracked by playing Overwatch till 4AM after a long workday these past couple of days. Rehosting the magazines found on OoPA would be problematic, even more so if it would be with our permission, especially since quite a few of these publications are online thanks to agreements made in public as well as in private. So I can't give the go ahead for that I'm afraid. But what would be perfectly fine is putting up links to the content page of the magazines on our site, either as an alternative download to existing ones or to replace other, (possibly incomplete, lower resolution, etc) magazines on either site. (Retromags or OldGameMags) What I would appreciate if at all possible is a small bit of text stating that these don't fall under the premium membership downloads or something like that. Not sure what the different systems for downloading magazines is these days, but knowing that there wouldn't be any misconception to visitors that these download links are available to anyone would be reassuring. I'm not sure how many files got corrupted during Filefactory's hosting troubles last year though. And since I'm in the process of redoing all the old releases, I haven't re-uploaded all the original versions. Every single magazine posted in 2016 on the news page are sure to be 100% reliable, and probably a good chunk of the rest of the catalogue, but there will be broken links, or downloads that have corrupted pages here and there with the old ones. It'll take a while before I've gone through my full back catalogue though. :-/ Oh, and marktrade, I don't use any professional colour targets or anything like that. Over the course of several months during last summer, I spent checking and rechecking my scans. Comparing them with pictures I took of them as well as manual side by side comparisons on quite a few different devices. I went a bit nuts and tested hundreds of setups where each one had certain image corrections applied, sometime minute, sometimes with completely different ways to achieve something specific. After way more days than I should have wasted on this, I finally found a workflow with the exact settings that work wonders for my scanner. Just for safety I bought an extra scanner of the same model since they get updated every year or so, and that always screws things up again. Also, not every magazine seems to react the same. It probably has to do with the glossiness of overal quality of the paper and what chemicals are used in the process. The new "secret" magazine I'm working on for August for example didn't work at all with any of my settings. In the end I had to adjust the colour curves to be a bit brighter as well as up the cyan for reds by another +5 and do the same for the magenta in the yellows. Really specific stuff that only works for one specific scanner/software combo which is a bit scary when taking into account how easy these things can break or become incompatible. Also, thank you for offering those scans. ​And to be honest, I'm not even sure how that would work out with how they were purchased or if that would be a problem or not. But I have to say that I have enough trouble already to get my personal scans completed and released, so taking on an even bigger workload just isn't feasible. If I ever win the lottery and can spend all my time doing what I want instead of having to go to work, I'll get back to you on that.

I agree fully, that's why I do this while listening to podcasts, watching other programs and such. And it's also why it's easy to burn out for several weeks and need some time away from it all, thus making the release schedule even lighter.

Yeah, it takes up a ton of time. I scan every page from each side, so that I get the spine sides as well without any distortions. I can scan about 40 pages in 2 hours, perhaps a bit less if things go well. (these are actually 80 scans) Joining each page seemlesly back together, straightening and cropping them takes about 3 hours for 100 pages. Unless there's parts of the top or bottom of the pages that aren't scanned correctly in which case those strips need to be scanned again and edited into the pages. Editing or more specifically restoration takes on average 15-20 minutes per page, but can go up to an hour or even more when there's major problems. And cover pages, which mostly take the harshest abuse over the years take anywhere from two to five hours to complete. After that, all the tiff files get batch converted into jpgs with all the colour corrections applied. The draft cbz is made and then I painstakingly go over every inch one last time and edit out any spots and other things I missed the first time around. This also takes a couple of hours. I created a small feature article on the site a couple of years ago to show what exactly goes into restoring a magazine, as most people think we just slap a magazine on a scanner and call it a day. http://www.outofprintarchive.com/articles/features/out-of-print/the_restoration_process.html At the bottom of the page you get 5 clickable full-page examples gifs. They can take a bit to load, but give a nice example of how much can go into this. They are gifs though, so don't mind the artefacts and loss in details. Those don't show up in the final jpgs.

There's still a ton of work to be done on the home, but it's starting to feel like a home. Still need to break out the floors, redo the plumbing, heating, new windows, doors, kitchen, bathroom, etc. But those are all things that are planned for the next 10 years or so as I want to get them done right instead of quickly, which costs a ton of money. In between all the work going on, I do love to spend time in the garden which is coming along nicely as well. Even got some unexpected visitors this past week. It's taken from inside so don't mind the cat hammock and the anti "bird go splat against the windows" stickers. The thing with the rereleases is, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. We've been over this quite a few times already and you've been very critical about how my scans used to look. Rightfully so in several occasions. That is one of the reasons why I spent many months perfecting all kinds of settings to make sure that not only the new scans, but also the old ones that were done on a totally different scanner look pretty much perfect compared to their physical counterparts. As we all know, making a digital magazine look spot on is near impossible. Each scanner "interprets" colours in a different way. so the output can be very inconsistent. Some colours look good enough while others can be way off. Finding the correct balance and settings to make everything play well together is hard enough as it is. Some scans look washed out while other, like mine were way to fluo heavy and bright compared to the originals. So instead of just running the old issues through the batch converter and making the colours look spot on, I've decided to give the old scans another editing pass as well since I've learned a lot from past mistakes and honed some nice techniques over the years that make things look very nice. This naturally takes time, more so on the oldest issues. Oh and I didn't adres this before, but the while white levels adjusting or "bleaching" of pages doesn't happen anymore and hasn't been implemented for many years now. Actually I'm in the progress of reversing those effects in the older scans I'm working on. Right now that's Dreamcast Magazine and Super Play. As for people "dropping off", you know, life gets in the way. That's just how it goes. Same with me really. Fist there was the appendix bursting and nearly dying thing, which screwed up my health quite severely. Then a couple of years later that all came back for me and I spent 2 months in bed and 3 months at home due to sickness. Last year it was the move (which I really needed, again for health reasons. This time physical and mental as my former home was in a neighbourhood filled with scum and drugs. That's why I moved to the countryside and picked a home with lots of privacy and a big yard with tons of wildlife.) and the tons of work that came with it. It is what it is. The slow new releases don't mean that there isn't any work being done, far from it in fact. I'm sitting on two brand new issues with the third one about 3-4 hours away from completion and the fourth one ready to get going. But I'm saving those up for the summer. August more specifically, so we can pay tribute to the late Hudson Summer Carnivals that they used to have back in the day with shoot em up competitions all through Japan. It's not the same, but I'm planning on having a new issue of this new magazine out each Saturday in August. It might even surprise you which one we've picked. On the subject of donated magazines not getting scanned, I explicitly mention this to people who come forward. About how it might take quite a lot of time before I can get to certain magazines and how each one takes up around 40 hours/100 pages. Combined with a 40 hour work week and an hour commute each day, that doesn't leave much room for hobbies. I have never heard anything bad from people who previously donated magazines.

Long story. Used to be a co-owner. Trust was lost on both sides when things that shouldn't have happened, did. Ended up leaving and creating something new with a different approach and stuck to that. Was offered the keys to the whole shebang here and turned it down without any regrets. Dunno where the parton things comes from as I haven't been here in many years, but rest assured I did not donate any money. Not looking to get into another internet fight as that's what it always has to turn into it seems, so I'll leave it at that. When you have a counter on your page with a couple of thousands of dollars, it looks bad to certain people. Especially when you take a look at the way print has been going the last decade. We don't approach publishers, editors and writers because we legal need to, we do it out of respect and courtesy to them. Heck, a lot of the time it's the other way around and they end up contacting us. We have our way of how to make this work and don't meddle with other projects, even though sometimes a bit of advice might be justified and that doesn't have anything to do with the money issue btw. But from experience it seems that such things are either taken the wrong way or even turned into something else on purpose, so we keep quiet and just do our thing. The approach we have taken has showed us over the years time and again that it's very much appreciated by people in the industry, or who used to be in the industry, so we don't see the need to change that. I'm certainly no legal expert and can only do what I feel is right. So when these people bring up certain proposals or viewpoints, which up till this point have always aligned with ours (with the exception of Dave Halverson and Steve Harris, again a money thing, but not related to what is discussed here), I can only abide by them as I wouldn't have anyway. Again, links and such are fine, as long as the sites in question don't gain any income from scanning and distributing said items, or claim any ownership of them. If you want to do so, fine, go ahead. I honestly don't care one bit. It's just that I can't and won't be part of that, and not just because the promises that we've made, which we fully intend to keep.

I understand that it can come of as overly protective. Heck, some even call it elitist. Yet I can assure you it is not. It comes down to having different philosophies. For instance, we deliberatly distance ourselves from sites who accept monetary donations. This is a touchy subject for many publishers and thus we don't even want to give the impression that we condone making money of other peoples IPs, even how big or small the amounts might be. We don't forbid our scans to be linked nor shared, and don't even mind that they would be rehosted in case anything happened to us in the future. All we ask for is to respect our wishes and most importantly intent and requests of the people who made the magazine in the first place. In the work we have done with certain publishers during the past 7 years, it has come up more than once that we have to stay away from certain things, be that certain publications or even to distance us from certain sites. That's just how it goes. Sites that seem dubious to them or ones that sometimes even come of as hostile to them (not specifically RM, just to be clear here) in any way can't be something we seem to indorse, nor would we want to. In the end it should be all about the love we share for these classic magazines which hold tons of memories as well as respect for every single person who made them possible in the first place. The internet is already hostile enough, so I just wanted to clear this up.

Don't worry about it. It's been a long time since I did those versions, and since I never put my name on the scans or anything like that you couldn't have known these were done by me anyway, unless you go digging deep into this forums past.

Indeed. All those issues were already scanned by me and have been removed since I'm redoing them in higher resolution as well as with a lot more eye for detail and new editing techniques, which means that the new versions I'm doing on OoPA are without a doubt my "definite" versions. some of those old version took me about 5 hours to create from start to finish, while the issues that I've been doing since starting up the new site take anywhere from 20-30 hours to create. Hopefully that shows through in the quality as well. Same thing goes for Maximum, CVG, or any other magazines I've scanning in the past 5 years. Just about all of those have been picked up by various sites and distributed all over the place. But again, I'm not happy with the quality of my earlier works so those will not be put online on OoPA. So if you're looking for high quality ones without any blurriness on the spines or parts of the scans missing due to cropping issues head over to the catalogue section of our site.

Really? http://www.outofprintarchive.com/catalogue/n64magazine.html

Not that many actually. Since I started redoing all my scans, those are the only ones that take up a lot of space. A magazine of 100 pages takes up a bit over 2 GIG as PSD files. So I think I have about 15 DVDs of these kinds of scans, along with duplicate copies of them.

To say this sucks would be an understatement. I've had external HDDs go corrupt in the past so I know what that feels like. Although it wasn't of the same magnitude as this. Luckily that thought me to be very cautious so I bought a 1TB Time Portal when my old wireless router crapped out almost 2 years ago. Knowing that everything I work on gets automatically back-uped after only a couple of minutes gives me a lot of peace of mind. Besides that I have a 500GIG external HDD to copy the things that I'm not working on immediately, and on top of that I burn 2 DVD copies of all the original and fully edited PSD files ones I finish a magazine. I certainly wouldn't give up on the HDD that quickly. If it's even half salvageable in one way or another by getting someone to look at it, it certainly would save you a lot of headaches.

Don't have an iPad myself, but I can recommend Comicbooklover which has a version out for it. Been using the OS X version myself for almost 2 years now and it's great. Not sure if FFView work on iPad, otherwise you might want to check that one out as well. Bonus is that this last one is free.

Using either zip or rar files doesn't really matter, as long as you create the archives without any compression algorithms. So using 7z wouldn't make any difference either, unless you use it to compress the files inside, in which case you'd be dealing with files that have been compressed twice. Remember, jpgs are lossy. so using 7z to compress them even further would not do much good when it comes to keeping the scans in the best shape possible.

Mine says 14-October 06 but I had been lurking for a while before I signed up. Thought the site was dead back then so I didn't bother at first.

Oh man, I'm so sorry...

Indeed. I especially love the prototype and beta info about games. badinsults, you might want to check out the screenshot of Super Mario World in Mean Machines 3. On page 14 where the huge bullet bill is still green instead of black, and only has an angry eye without the mouth.

Some incredible games already named in here like Ninja Cop/Ninja Five-O, but this is one that probably won't get a mention anytime soon despite being one of the very best puzzle games ever created. And no that's no hyperbole either. Incredibly rare after all these years and I was lucky enough to get mine brand new for €94 and make sure it's not a bootleg. The title I'm talking about is Compile's Guru Logi Champ:

I think the problem has shifted to the majority of people playing pirated games on the actual hardware, not on the PC.

Well theoretically it is possible, and they should put as much effort into this as they can to protect their business and that of the people that work with them. Wether it'll work is a whole other matter, but I hope it does for a change.

Not sure how CDisplay is doing things these days, but back when I used it, it didn't recognize the cover page so it put that one besides page 2. Using ComicRack fixed that though as it does realize that the first page is the cover so it treats it as one. Also found it to be a much better CBZ reader as well. Been using Comicbooklover for about 2 years myself now.