meppi

Well since I'm not longer around to post Prince pictures, I'll just say this: Fire in the hole!

Official Sega Saturn Magazine 027 - january 1998 (UK) Wiki page here. Download page here. Rapidshare link

RetroforceGO! Episode 76: Ninja Gaiden with Conrad Zimmerman Destructoid's one and only retro podcast. DOWNLOAD LINK "Right click, save as"

Oh, I moved it before reading the reply. I moved it to the EGM Buyer's Guides & Supplements section as it was an actual supplement to EGM... Hope that's all right... Cool supplement BTW. I wish we got more of these for the NeoGeo or an actual magazine would have been even better. That's why I started collecting the Japanese NeoGeo Freak magazines even though most of us can't read a word it says. But even with that big negative point it still radiates the true feel of all things NeoGeo, so for true fans it's worth it for the pictures alone.

I know people don't think straight when they are in the mindset to commit suicide, but ffs put the gun to your own head and leave other people out of it.

There's a couple of buyers guides scanned in which can be found in the EGM subsection here: http://www.retromags.com/forums/Buyer-s-Gu...oads-cat54.html As far as I'm aware of there aren't any supplements included in the EGM scans, so they certainly are welcome. Oh yes please! I would love to see that one. I've never seen it on the site so I wonder what went wrong...

Finally had a visitor today but after our close encounter I have a feeling he won't be coming back an time soon...

Sadly no, everything is in Japanese. But they are very simple to navigate. Everything works pretty much the way you'd think it would. And I can always create a translation for the menus if you'd really like. I've done it before so that wouldn't be a big deal. Only the Kanji parts give me a bit of trouble as I have to look them up one by one most of the time. But it's so worth it.

This one just arrived on my doorstep from Play-Asia: I've been searching for this game for over a year now and finally it was back in stock. Anyone not knowing what this game is and why you should be interested in it, well let me give you a little more information. Illust Logic is the name that other companies in Japan use to describe Picross games. I hear you say, why would I need another Picross when I already have Picross DS from Nintendo which is just about perfect? Well, I didn't believe it myself, but it seems to be possible to improve upon perfection. This game is actually 2 games in 1. Regular Picross as seen in Picross DS and Color Picross which has a couple different rules but plays very differently from the regular version. What makes this game so different compared to Picross DS is the attention to detail. Like for instance when you complete a line the board will automatically put a + on every block in that line, so you don't have to go and cross out every single open space in between. Or the way when you have for instance a 25x20 board and you color the whole 25 block line, but then you have to return to the other side of the screen again. Instead of having to scroll over 25 block all over again, you can just click one block further, outside the playing fiend and you'll end up on the opposite side. This works both horizontally and vertically and is a very nice addition, especially when you're into time trials. And there's again an incentive to be doing that because if you finish the board quick enough, you'll be rewarded with stars that when you collect enough of them open up even more levels. Colorful Logic is quite different. Instead of having to have at least one open block between the black lines, you have different colors, I've only seen boards that use 4. And the basic rule is that different color rows are able to touch each other, only when there are 2 rows of the same color next to each other should there be at least one open block between the to act as a divider. I didn't think this would make much of a difference to me as I've become somewhat of a Picross diehard over the years, but the very first puzzle in Colorful Illust had me scratching my head more then one. I've only began to scrape the surface of this game as I've only just got it myself. I just opened the box and thought, I'll just give this a quick go to see if it's as good as I heard. And I ended up playing for over an hour already forgetting that I should already have brushed my teeth and eaten breakfast. Even when I'm typing this I'm itching to go back to it. So for everyone who has caught the Picross fever in the past or recently, be sure to pick it up while it's still available. You'll thank me later. http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-13-71-9g-49-en-70-25ob.html

Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all...

That was the general idea of what I created the wiki pages around, so that everyone would use the same naming template. That way everything would look like it fit together and we wouldn't have the chaotically ordered issues in certain series. This is the template I still use to this day and the way the wiki is laid out: Next Generation 001 - jan 1995 (USA) EGM² 001 - jul 1994 (USA) Official Dreamcast Magazine 000 - jun 1999 (USA) Super Play 001 - nov 1992 (UK) I have adapted so that the names of the months are fully spelled out in all of my final release versions though, but this still wouldn't impact the arrangement order. The problem is that most people are using their own way of naming the releases, so if there are several different people working on one series it can get a bit messy.

All the talk about the site needing a big overhaul to make it much more user friendly, less confusing, easier to browse and a whole lot nicer to view had me thinking about the tests I did quite a while ago. Now this is probably the last time I'm going to put any work into something like this as it has taken me a good 8 hours to get something decent looking together. This combines all the ideas of the download manager and the wiki and throws in the idea of having certain hand picked articles available online without having to download anything and thus making this more of a regular site which gets updates and has something to read instead of just a forum with a place to download mags. And yes, everything is hand made. The wallpaper, the table backgrounds, logo's etc. Even the code was written mostly by hand... Note that nearly all the links should work, but on the features page any of the 4 linked articles will take you to the Street Fighter Alpha Maximum feature. And the Magazine Catalogue is just a Sega Saturn mini catalogue page where only the very first issue will work and take you to a completed magazine page. This was obviously done with the fact in mind that I wasn't going to be creating a fully working site with dozens of articles and hundreds of finished magazine pages when the end result will likely be: "meh, it looks like sh!t, I'm gonna stick with the forum and not bother with the stupid site". http://users.telenet.be/twin-dreams/VGI/retromags/index.html

RetroforceGO! Episode 75: Listener questions Destructoid's one and only retro podcast. DOWNLOAD LINK "Right click, save as"

That would be the basic idea of what I did with the preview site I worked on a couple of months ago. http://users.telenet.be/twin-dreams/VGI/re...s/features.html And the magazine catalogue part is just another sample page where I had to delete the images from since I only have 50MB of space on the ftp. It's only bits and pieces since it didn't get very far in development. A wiki page as the main site is a pretty terrible idea in my opinion. There's not enough control on a wiki site to make it a homepage. Either on the server side or on the side where users can input things.

I really do agree with you on the Download page thing E-Day and on the site layout in general, but I myself have no idea how to do those things. I have quite a bit of experience with plain old HTML web design, but when it comes to the inner workings of the forum and everything that's built around it, that's a whole other mess. The whole system is very confusing and I'm afraid if I were to start looking about changing stuff like that, I could bring down the whole site, so I will stay clear of that part. As far as I can tell the structure is very rigid so we have to work with what we've got I'm afraid. I'm sure Philly could explain everything much better as he's the one that set this whole place up in the first place. But to me even including something like an alphabetical lookup seems to be next to impossible...

That's more or less what I was thinking of. First the USA section where you'll find every section on EGM, GamePro, Game Informer, etc. Under that one UK, with Maximum, OSSM, etc, The the International one with everything else catalogued by magazine naturally. And the final 2 the Game Guides and Game Manuals since those don't really need to be divided by country of origin as they are simply 2 categories.

Well I was at least expecting some kind of critique. I was just thinking on my feet and thought up this type of system in 10 minutes or so. So if there are any adjustments, which might improve on the idea, fire away.

There has been some discussion recently as well as in the past about the misc section of the download system. The biggest problem with it is that there are quite a few people that wrongfully think that this section is a collection of lesser or even unwanted magazine, which of course is anything but true. But due to the way it's ordered I can certainly understand that it might look that way. The reasoning behind the misc section was to keep the download section from becoming too cluttered with magazine sections which only had one or two issues inside. The thing in that at this moment we already have 24 separate magazine sections in the download manager not including the various subsections, so I've been thinking. Perhaps it might be a good idea to create 3 different sections depending on the origin of the magazines? A USA, UK and International section. which would have subdivisions for all the underlying sections. As we have for instance a US official Dreamcast magazine as well as a UK one which caries the exact same name. We could keep the manuals and gaming guides as root sections as well as they would just complicate things. Perhaps the Misc section also, if we decide on keeping it around. I'm looking for input on this, so I'd like to here the various thoughts about what might be best for the site. The main idea is to keep the section easy to browse, ordered and uncomplicated.

That's what I mean, the file size comes down, but when you look very carefully you will be able to see small artifacts start to form in the JPGs at level 8. Best noticeable in full color pages. I tested it extensively before I took the jump and decided to start redoing all my issues since the change was very noticeable. Naturally not only from saving at 9, but it does play an important role. Ah, then it must have been something else. I remember someone saying that he converted the files to JPGs at a quality of 10 and that it was pretty much like CS3 quality 9. Was a while ago though. I think anything between 1-1.5MB (more or less, doesn't have to be too precise) is an excellent size for a great quality JPG page scan. It already is quite a lot higher then the ones we used to do in the beginning at 1280 which were around 300-700kb per page.

Yeah, I did that myself when I got my new computer. But at this time it seems a bit like overkill. I weighed the pro's and con's of 1280,1440 and 1600 and thought that 1440 was the best solution when comparing overall quality to size. Obviously 1600 is superior but the file size becomes huge at that point and with the current technology it's not very feasible yet. Might be in 5 years or so when we all have blue-ray writers as standard and download speeds of 256MB/sec and HDDs of 500TB. There is naturally a way to keep down the file size of a 1600 scan, but that would mean saving the JPGs at lower quality settings then a 9 in Photoshop (might be a 10 in Gimp) which would actually be counterproductive as you'd be losing the exact same thing you'd hope to be gaining: detail and clarity.

Hehe, no problem. So very true. Same goes for Lost and Dexter IMO. Some of the greatest TV shows I've had the fortune to follow. Oh, before I forget, I have upgraded your membership status from newbie to team member. Congratulations.

I just checked the issue and made a couple of adjustment if you don' t mind. The first one is that I included a thank you page in the release, which can be found here in various sizes: http://www.retromags.com/forums/index.php?...ost&p=13710 Then I noticed that the cbz was about 130MB for just 30 jpgs, which is quite large. So I resized them to a width of 1440 and a quality of 9 in PS4, which is still very high, and ended up with a cbz of 44MB. I'll upload them right now if that doesn't interfere with me watching the first episode of the new 24. Otherwise it will be in a couple of hours.

Well it used to be when you googled retromags that my name would show up, but someone seems to have put a stop to that.

Just got back from the dentist (again...) so I'm a bit woozy at the moment, but I'm downloading the file right now.

Ah the joys of getting older. It's all downhill from here on out. Enjoy!