meppi

A bit like these official Sony projections from not so long ago? Those are some fudged up numbers all-right.

In the end no one cares about the excuses or predictions, the numbers speak for themselves and have done so for a very long time.

The thing seems to be having something for everyone, and I do mean everyone. Which is somewhat of what the NES used to be like back in the day. Not to the exact same extend, but pretty similar.

Hate to say this buy that pure denial. Wouldn't the cheap option be the $199 Xbox 360? And why would people buy a new 360 when it breaks when microsoft extended their replacement plan by was it 1 or 2 years? Also people bought the PS2 in droves when it was released over here at 26.000 francs back before they dropped down to 18000, which comes to roughly 650€ and just 450€ respectively. The PS3 launched at 600€ and is now down to 400€ with software bundled and it still isn't selling like it should. There's clearly more going on than the market having to settle down. People buying stuff just because it's cheap is rubbish, just look at the €90 Wii Fit, which is still doing unbelievable numbers for instance.

Sega to Close Arcades, Cancel Games, Lay Off Hundreds GameLife The house that Sonic built is getting significantly smaller. Sega's Japanese main branch said Tuesday that it will close 110 arcades, cancel some games in development and seek to lay off 18 percent of its staff. In a series of press releases, the game publisher said that these cost-cutting moves come in anticipation of its recording an annual loss of 25 billion yen (about $238 million) during the fiscal year that will end March 31. Arcades: Sega owns and operates 450 videogame arcades in Japan, and said it would close 110 of them that show "poor future potential and profitability." This move "may" make the company's arcades profitable even if the that segment of the business gets tighter in the coming fiscal year, Sega said. Software development: Sega says it will chop 20 percent off its research-and-development budget for arcade and consumer games. The company plans to do this by "consolidating titles to be developed" and "enhancing the self-manufacture ratio." Running this through my Japanese-to-English translator, these phrases mean that Sega will cancel some games in development and develop more games internally, rather than outsourcing them to outside developers. (I've asked Sega for clarification.) That's a lot of games. Layoffs: Finally, Sega said it would "solicit the voluntary retirement" of approximately 560 of its 3,127 employees. I wrote in 2007 about the culture of Japanese layoffs: It's simply not done. Laying people off is like disowning children -- it's a long process that may take weeks of consultation with employees to convince them to resign. While I have no insider information about the inner workings of Sega's Japanese branch, this would seem to be precisely what's going on. In its official statement, Sega seems to leave no doubt that the "voluntary retirement" will take place as envisioned: Furthermore, to maintain the appropriate size of its work force compatible with its current revenues, Sega has determined to solicit voluntary retirement of approximately 560 employees. Consequently, Sega will be able to reduce labor cost by approximately 5,000 million [yen] for the year ending March 31, 2010 and thereafter to ensure improvement of the earnings in its amusement facilities business and consumer business, as well as whole businesses. Sega's U.S. branch, based in San Francisco, reportedly laid off 30 employees last month. Sega is a division of Sega Sammy Holdings, which has a variety of other amusement companies under its umbrella. Tuesday's announcements concern Sega specifically.

Dun dun dun........ PlayStation 2 101.2K PlayStation 3 203.2K PSP 172.3K Xbox 360 309K Wii 679.2K Nintendo DS 510.8K WII FIT (WII) 777K WII PLAY W/ REMOTE (WII) 415K MARIO KART W/WHEEL (WII) 292K LEFT 4 DEAD (360) 243K CALL OF DUTY: WORLD AT WAR* (360) 235K SKATE 2 (360) 199K GUITAR HERO WORLD TOUR* (WII) 155K NEW SUPER MARIO BROS (DS) 135K MARIO KART DS (DS )132K LORD OF THE RINGS: CONQUEST (360) 113K (*includes CE, GOTY editions, bundles, etc. but not those bundled with hardware) --------------------- Dollar Sales figures Jan-09 Jan-08 CHG Video Games $1.33 Billion $1.18 Billion 13% VG Hardware $445.4 Million $380.3 Million 17% VG Software $676.6 Million $614.7 Million 10% VG Accessories $209.8 Million $188.3 Million 11%

YEAH! Eum no.

Link contains some strong language, don't complain once you've clicked it. http://www.theonion.com/content/video/sony...stupid_piece_of

The Uk ones are up to date though, I haven't bought a magazine in ages. CVG is UK as well and NeoGeo Freak is also mine.

I'm afraid it will be a while before the new one is completed. Why didn't I think of that when I did all of those back then.... That's an easy one, all of the UK magazines you see on this wiki page are mine: http://www.retromags.com/wiki/Acquired_Issues The link to this page seemed to have been taken of the front page though, so better keep the link as there's a lot of data in there.

The first thing to do is create templates if you want to start from scratch. Otherwise you'll have to copy&paste a whole bunch of code into every single entry. Look at how I put the thing together and you'll see things like {{AtariAgeindex}} for instance. Which is just one line that links to the index box template of that magazine. it's a real time saver doing it that way.

Thank you! That is good to know as it takes so much time to put it all together in a way that's just "perfect". Just ask triverse about the hundreds of PMs we have exchanged on that subject alone. He's been a invaluable resource when it comes to making the site what it is today. Just like with the thank you page for instance, every time I hit a wall where I just can't seem to think around no matter how hard I try he has brought something new to the table to get back on track and make it so much better than before.

Holy sh!t at trivers recap! Write another one up on the "yes we should give meppi's site a try" column btw.

For a picnic?

Not sure if the expandable links thing is possible. I think it should be though, but Phillyman will be the better man to answer that. About those sub-par scans, my first reaction would be to indeed delete them. But after the recent shitstorm with only 1 member, we could face the same thing again but with several at the same time. Not something I look forward to. So the idea of keeping them online for now but replacing them with better copies would probably be the best way of doing things, but it would be best to make it a priority. And we will need to have an official post about the minimum requirements as well, otherwise they will just keep coming. Jeesh, there's so much stuff in this thread that lots is getting lost in the discussion. PDF versions as E-Day mentioned. Yeah, I'd make them oblate as well. There's really no need to have 2 versions of each release online. It just add more to the mess. And the double page scans as well. The thing is, what do we do about about these:http://www.retromags.com/forums/Total-Game-Boy-Color-downloads-cat47.html The quality is crap, pages are faded or overexposed or I don'tknowwhat. They are doublepage scans as well which happened to magically start popping up after the whole fusoya fiasco about that very topic. And the scanner has replied to Barbieonweed that he can buy and scan them himself if he doesn't like joined pages after barbie asked to please not join the pages here: http://www.retromags.com/forums/Total-game...05-file863.html Oh and he has zero posts in the forum. None of us have these mags to replace them. My first though: delete.... Gonna stop posting now as there's already so much being lost here I don't need to add to it with another 36 page essay.

That could work. I know, that's one of the things I need to address in the editing guide. That's the way I tried it a couple of years back, to the same effect. So I never did it again. Until a couple of months back when I was experimenting once again, as I had been manually cleaning up the backgrounds with the clone stamp tool in the meanwhile. Besides this taking a huge amount of time, it also meant that you couldn't do it between text, unless you were willing to spend 2 hours per page. (which I'm embarrassed to say, at one point I actually did...) So the best way to tackle this problem is to use the lasso tool, or the polygonal lasso tool and encircle the parts you don't want to have painted over like on the image below. Then just do cmd+c and then cmd+v (can be alt or ctrl or something on windows, I can't tell) which copies the selection and pastes it onto a new layer which sits on top of the old one. I know, in this example you don't actually need to do this as Yoshi's black outline will protect the inner parts from the bucket fill you're about to do on the white outside of Yoshi. But when you want to do the white parts of the eyes and cheek as well, this will be the best way to do it. But it's the same technique which can be used for everything, especially if it isn't protected by a dark outline. Then select the background layer and take the white bucket fill tool and fill the parts you want to be white. You should immediately see the result. It's best to use a tolerance of 24 and an opacity of 100 while keeping the anti-alias option off for painting white backgrounds. That way it doesn't eat into the black text that might be on the page. For black it's the same setting, only switch the anti-alias option on. You should end up with this: (did it in red so it shows up better) After all this is done don't forget to flatten the layers as well. Now you can use the brush tool or clone stamp tool to remove any tiny spots that the bucket fill might have missed. This technique can even be applied when you have an image that sits underneath text on a page. That was one of the biggest problems for me to deal with when starting to use the bucket fill technique, but in the end the solution was just as simple as the one I just described. Might sound longwinded, but once you've done it a couple of times it quickly becomes second nature and you'll save lots of time you'd otherwise spent manually correcting the backgrounds. I must add though, that if you feel that an image, especially if it's artwork looks better without messing with it this way, then by all means leave it the way it is and simply do the background.

At least it's still every early on. Just think about it this way, if you would have scanned and fully edited say, about 50 magazines or so, and suddenly you realize certain mistakes you've made which you can improve upon tenfold. And you're bummed enough by it to decide that you'll do them all over again, that would have been much worse, no? PS don't look in my work in progress thread or anything, the person I'm describing above is purely fictional. ;P

Hehe, don't worry about it. This single line actually reminded me of myself when I just started out: Actually, I said just about the exact same thing. I've been through several revisions of the way I used to do things myself and in the end came to the conclusion that I wanted to present the magazines in the way that the original editor would have preferred. No spots, tears, dogears or discoloration which have been built up over the many years the magazine have been around. I do indeed agree that when you're working with colored background that it's a very bad idea to clean them up too much. Meaning something like sampling the color and using the bucket fill tool on it. That kind of stuff looks horrid. But when I look at a magazine which has either a pure white background or a completely black one and compare it to the way the scan comes out, there seems to be quite a bit of difference. When looking at an actual white page it's pure white, but on a scan it's very easy to see yellowing of the pages for instance. On a black page, again the magazine itself is just about completely black, but in scans it shows up with various ranges of grey as well due to the way the paper reflects the scanning lights. So the way I'm doing things now is to take the white or black pages, copy the images which might be compromised by a bucket fill of the background of either black or white, and paste those images on another layer. That way I can fill the underlaying one with just the right setting so the text doesn't gets "eaten", while also preserving the screenshots and artwork at the same time. I've actually just started on making a new editing guide as my old one is a bit out of date. Been looking for better ways to do the scans and editing for quite a while now. I'm using a CanoScan 70LiDE and PS CS4 on a Mac, so the setup is very similar. I believe a vibrance setting of 50 and an added saturation of 8 would look very good on your scans as well. I keep my scans in PSD format up until the very end when I run them through an automated batch process that changes the saturation to 50, vibrance to 8. Resizes the pages to a width of 1440 (the height depends on the magazine. I take an average of about 10 pages and apply that to all), and finally save them as JPGs at a quality of 9. I even keep the PSD files and save them on DVDs, for in a couple of years when screen resolution might be quite a bit higher than today and we all have a 2.5gig/sec internet connection, I can simply run them through a JPG convertor for making them into 2200 width versions or even non resized ones without having to scan the magazines all over again. Not that this is the be all, end all way of doing this, but it is a procedure that I've been trying to perfect over a couple of years. At least there should be some helpful things in there. Seeing you have CS4, the warping of the binded magazines shouldn't be too much of a problem. You can do as I do, as I hate to debind magazines. Scan the mag first the way you would normally do it, making sure you use the top of the page to align it with the scanner plate. Then move the spine of the magazine about 3/4ths over the scanner and scan the same page again. Make sure it's also aligned correctly, and that you put enough pressure on the top of the scanning lid. You should be able to use the File-Automate-Photomerge option about 95% of the time without any trouble. This also works great when a magazine is a bit too tall for the scanner and you have to scan the bottom strip separate as well. I understand what you're trying to do with the bi-cubic down sampling. But most people will not get any benefit from this as they set their cbz program to show the pages full screen, so they will get distorted anyway. And the distortion you get when resizing the pages to 1440 or 1600 is very negligible in the end. I wouldn't break my head over it. The only way it starts to get noticeable is when would start to resize the pages in a way that the width and height are not win proportion to each other. As for bleed through, it can indeed be a big problem especially with early 80s magazines which are printed on very thin paper. People have been looking to tackle that problem with putting black paper underneath the scans for instance, but that's one part that I can't say much about as I never tried that. I've been using the line of thought that, if there's a little bleed through in the original magazine, then it's okay to have it in the scan as well. We're in the middle of getting some new guidelines together for the scans, so you can't go wrong with using a standard width of 1440 or 1600 and keeping the scans at 300DPI.

Just to make sure. Is the HTML site idea shot down? Cause I'm not putting another 150 hours into it if it is.

They are actually quite a bit smaller than 1440 in width, except for the joined ones. If you're scanning at 300DPI, the images should indeed be quite a lot bigger and can be scaled down to 1440 after they have been edited. They do look very good though, even at this size. The only small notes I could give you at this point is to apply a bit more pressure to the scanner lid when you scan a page, but then again most look just fine. It's only n64_power_tips_19 that suffers from this. So it might not be that easy to get that particular magazine right. Oh and if you would up the saturation and perhaps contrast a little bit, the colors would be much more vibrant and really bring out the images. Depending on what kind of program you use, you might even have a vibrancy option which is even better.

Silly Thor. Didn't you get the memo? Wii has no games.

Just wanted to chime and and say I'm fully behind this idea. Thought is was something like that. There was another one as well, but I can't remember since it's so long I came up for the reasoning to use 001. Oh and if you zip up your completed cbz file into something called NP001 for instance you can name the cbz itself: Nintendo Power 001 - 1988 jul aug.cbr instead of nintendo_power_001_-_1988_jul_aug.cbr. Unless there's some other reason people use underscores.

------TRANSMISSION RECEIVED? HOW ARE THE ENGINES HOLDING UP SCOTTY???------- Point 1) I've agreed with this point even before you made it, from the very first time a random member asked about why we didn't put nfo files in our releases and that he would prefer them so he can somehow organize them better. There's just no point in them, besides giving someone the bragging rights to put their name on a release. Totally worthless otherwise. The thank you page is all we need and confirms that this is a team effort, not an individual "look what I have done" thing. 2) Agree. See above. The only problem I could think of with putting a release page up is that you can't just grab the thumbnails off the download manager for some reason. Might be covered in your post about it as I remember something like that, but only barely. 3) Yep, that's just about the only reason why I've kept up putting those podcasts on there. Also because the preview pics mostly look nice and colorful. Gives the front page a nice look. 4) Fully agree. But there should also be some kind of quality control since there are some truly awful scans online... :( But I believe there's anther point about this... 5) No problem whatsoever. Might cure the hit&run even if it's only a tiny bit. 6) Indeed, I tried it out at first but it's too complicated for it's own good. I don't see myself messing around on there for 15 minutes trying to update my profile saying that I finished 1 magazine when I can do that in my personal post in about 10 second. Lots of time wasted otherwise. This probably won't be the case, but would it be possible to protect at least the WIP pages in the wiki so someone doesn't mess them up. I know it can be rolled back, but if there are only small changes, it might not be noticed until it's too late. Or we can make a separate part in the forum for only WIP threads and nothing more. I've noticed that my page gets quite a bit of clicks. 7) Yeah.... I'm trying to put a better editing guide together for use with PS. Which should simplify everything quite a bit. I hope... 8) That's my fault, I was bringing al the NP pages into the new design so it looked as good as the others, but for some reason people kept updating the old pages, so I had to move everything over by hand and it got quite tedious... 9) The big reason why I went with that is that depending on the list you sometimes got: EGM1 EGM11 EGM12 EGM2 EGM3 . . . and so forth. But I can see how that doesn't work out for the best on the web itself, especially when googling. 11) I'd say goo for PS without a doubt. Not worth learning GIMP to only have to learn PS in the end as it's the better program and has thigs others don't. Hopefully my FAQ will help you out as well. 12) Indeed. This is a big one. As for resolution I would set the ABSOLUTE minimum at 1280. Personally I'd go even one step further and make them at least 1440 and highest 1600. DPI, no doubt about this 300DPI all the way. Many have disagreed for reasons they couldn't explain or that just made no sense. Look at one of my scans and at a 72DPI one which should "look the exact same as a computer screen can't show a higher DPI in picture than 72" Yeah right.... No reason whatsoever to scan stuff in 300 when you're going to downscale it in the end and it doesn't even result in a smaller size. The only thing that can suffer is image quality. Also make a point of it that the magazines will go through a quality control process so that we don't get things uploaded like that one guy keeps doing. Forgot his name. Think that we get a bad rep for banning an ass like kiwi, how do you think people react that come here for the first time, download an absolutely crap looking magazine? I'm sure several have left and never returned thanks to this. Also make it so that all the scans have to be single page scans. Not to single out fusoya or anything but it's such a bad idea to have various standards like this. Not to mention how moronic the argument was in the first place as just about any decent comic reader lets you choose between single pages and double page view. Remember how after the whole argument another guy came in and started to do the exact same thing. Those scans looked just as bad as whatshisname as well btw.. Think they were GameBoy Colour something something. 13) Hmm haven't noticed this at all. They all show up the same size for me. Or perhaps you're talking about when you click on the thumbnail.

Oh, it's fixed btw.

Always nice to hear good things said about someone's work. But sometimes the wait isn't quite that long...... Official Sega Saturn Magazine 028 - february 1998 (UK) Download page here. Rapidshare link