meppi

Hehe, I probably laughed way to hard at this video. :grin: Wish there were more of these kinds of things around, especially if they delve a bit deeper. What a great mag it was indeed. Too bad we will never see anything like this again. The 80s and 90s were the best time for videogame magazines. I just wish they were easier to track down. I have a whole bunch of official Club Nintendo magazines from the 80s, but they are all in Dutch, so very few people will enjoy them. Nevertheless I'll scan them in one day. Too bad I don't have the English versions of these magazines, as they were distributed throughout Europe in pretty much every language, even though the content was exactly the same. There's one on ebay now for only ?2, but sadly I can't bid on it since the seller only ships to the UK.

Official Sega Saturn Magazine 002 - dec 1995 (UK) Download here and extract the rar file to get to the CBR. Or grab it from Underground Gamer.

That's not so bad, on Underground-gamer there are so many people from different countries that you're bound to find quite a few who are interested in the magazines. I don't speak Spanish myself, but I certainly would like to see some classic magazines from the countries you named, especially Chile and Mexico as those are probably pretty hard to come by for most people. :happy:

Age old topic, but still. I used Azureus for several years without any problems or anything, until one day I tried out ?Torrent. It really does use very little resources and sticked with it ever since.

Woohoo! Just won the Official Sega Saturn Magazine issue 35! :cool: Now the only ones that are left to find are 8,9 and 24 and we'll have the complete set. :wink:

I normally first save my files as PSFs, but that's the because I use PhotoStudio 5.5 that came with the Canon scanner. If I'm correct, the TIFF files would be very large right? Around 20-25MB per scan? If so I would definitely save them as JPEGs at a quality of 90 or 9/10 should be more than enough. A PSF freshly scanned is usually around 6MB with my setup, and when I save that image as a JPEG I get about 3MB, so that should be small enough to be able to download for editing later on. I know what you mean about burning out. Scanning is a very boring and extremely repetitive job. But it helps to break the monotony when you switch from one magazine to the next from time to time. Like right now I'm doing Sega Saturn Magazine, and I have 36 issues to go. But once I get a bit tired of the same old stuff, I switch over to a Dreamcast magazine, for which ever page needs to be scanned twice. Once from the left and once from the right, since the magazine is to wide for a regular scanner. Before taking the 2 pieces and cutting and pasting the page back together. You'd be surprised how much it helps, even though you're basically still doing the same thing. Also don't worry about putting the scanning aside for a bit. Once you start seeing it as an obligation or a job, you will quickly tire of it. It also helps when you love the subject you're scanning and when you're doing it also for yourself, like you said, to preserve the magazines so you can read them later on when you got rid of the actual copies.

Not sure which Nintendo Powers are still missing. That's more Philly's expertise. But I'm definitely looking forward to the 20 year old mags. Also being 30 myself and all... :laughing: The time it takes to scan an issue depends on your scanner really. If you have a regular flatbed manual scanner I'd say an hour or 2 to get scans that are nicely aligned and all. If you debind the magazines and have an autofeeder, it could be much faster. But what many people forget is that scanning is only half the work. Editing the scans takes up about the same time of the actual scanning. (Again depending on which scanner you use) What you also can do is if you don't have a lot of time is like you said, simply scan the magazines, put them on a DVD, send it to Philly if possible. He will then put them op on the ftp and someone else can edit them afterwards. Just make sure that if you decide to go this way, that you don't get the width of the pages under lets say 1400 pixels. As they will need to be resized to a width of 1280 and when the original scans are smaller than that, the quality of the scans will suffer immensely when blown up afterwards.

Personally I wouldn't mark the pages themselves, but rather include a jpeg along with them like we recently started doing. Here's a smaller version: (if you want the big one, let me know and I'll put it up on yousendit) Or, you could just include a txt file in the map where your jpegs are before you rar them and rename them to .cbr. Anyway, if you're interested in joining our little project, you can always send a pm to Phillyman for FTP details and basically anything else. Or if you have any questions or need some help, just let me know. Oh, and glad to see some new people on here that are looking to contribute! As for lurkers, let's not forget. The more people decide to help out, the more magazines will be released, which will in turn motivate even more people to start scanning or editing.

You can download all these scans from my Rapidshare folder right here. The login password is: retromags64 Official Sega Saturn Magazine 001 - nov 1995 (UK) Download here and extract the rar file to get to the CBR. Or grab it from Underground Gamer.

Just won 2 separate auctions for 5 issues each of the Official DreamCast Magazine from the UK. Not sure how many mags were released at the time, but what I do know is that Ed lomas from the glorydays of CVG and Official Sega Saturn Magazine and Alex Huhtala and Tom Guise from the best years of CVG worked on this magazine, among others. I only had a couple of issues in pretty bad condition, but if things keep going like they are, that will surely change in the next couple of months. The issues are: 7, 8, 9, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20 & 21

I'm looking at this ebay listing for the full set of Saturn Power Magazine which lasted only 10 issues. I would bid for them myself, but the trouble is that the seller will only ship to the UK. :sleeping: So if anyone from the UK would be willing to get these (at a decent price) and then ship them over to me (all expenses paid for ofcourse ) let me know. It would be very much appreciated!

Nah, I don't think it's too expensive at all. With my subscription I pay about ?8 per issue, shipping included. (And international shipping isn't cheap, I should know ) Looking at how they were selling EGMs over here a couple of years back for around ?15 in the shops, I think it's a steal actually. Sure, it's not like they are free like thousands of US subscriptions for EGM, but then again that magazine stopped being worth reading about 5 years ago. Well, for me anyway. When you also take into consideration that it's pretty much the only retro gaming magazine out there as far as I'm aware. And that it's written by a crew who absolutely know their stuff to a tee, I truly can't complain about the price. For example, when I found the Xevious special in one of their magazine, I immediately went to check out if they did mention Xevious Fardrout for the PC-Engine, (a game that I didn't even know existed until several months ago. And I'm a huge import retro gamer and also a huge Xevious fan!) and sure enough the game was indeed in there, along with Super Xevious Gamp No Nazo for the Famicom, which I own on the Famicom and blew me away when I first played it that it wasn't simply a port of the arcade Super Xevious game, but instead a completely different one. And an incredible shooter as well. :grin: So these people surely are true experts, and true gamers as well, which shines through when reading their views on these kind of games.

To be honest, if we had a Nintendo magazine like the US Nintendo Power over here, I would certainly get a subscription as well. Seeing as for this generation I opted to go Wii and DS only, since there isn't a new Sega system. Too bad that the official Nintendo Player magazine, which changed to Nintendo Ultra I believe, stopped being published somewhere in the mid 90s. Other unofficial ones simply weren't as good.

An ugly truth dawned upon me recently. Starting from 1990, when I was about 13-14 years old, I bought loads of game magazines and loved reading them from front to back. Actually it should be a couple of years earlier with the Club Nintendo magazines, but I got those free in the mail thanks to Nintendo. But starting from 1990 I actually started buying magazines. Like I said, I loved reading through these. A couple of years later I actually had subscriptions to 5-6 magazines and things were great. But starting with the DreamCast, all my favorite ones started going down hill fast. CVG, EGM, (OSS seized existing), The Nintendo only magazine I bought at the time got worse and worse every month. So in the end the only ones I was left with were the DreamCast magazine and the French Joypad, which were both still excellent. (But with French not being my first language, I obviously didn't get as much from it as from an English magazine) The DreamCast died, and so did my subscription to DC mag...so the only one that was left was Joypad. This continued on till last week. I came to the conclusion that in fact when the new Joypad came in the mail for the last year or so, I barely even looked at it anymore. The Next-Gen stuff doesn't speak to me, and they developed the same attitude towards Nintendo as you see on so many message boards today. :ermm: The old crew left a couple of years back, so it was only natural that things would change, but it just took a while before they changed considerably, and even a bit longer before it sank in that they weren't going to go back to the magazine of old. So I decided that I won't be renewing my subscription come February. Now, I had heard a lot of good things about the British magazine Retro Gamer, and being someone who loves the classics more than the new stuff, it really appealed to me. I came across a CD on the net with low quality PDFs of the first 30 issues. A CD that was appearantly released by the magazine creators. After flipping through these and thinking too bad these aren't available where I live, I went to their site to notice a very nice surprise. They do subscriptions for the rest of the rest of the world as well. This was something I wasn't expecting from such a niche magazine. So I took a 12 month subscription for the next year. :happy: I also bought 4 back issues as well, which have just arrived, and I must say, this is the first time in a long while that I have enjoyed reading a new magazine so much! I love it! Hopefully they will be around for a very long time to come. So if there are people out there who love classic gaming as much as I do, then you can't go wrong with this one. The newest issue has a making off special of one of my favorite games ever: Blast Corps for the N64. They cover everything from the classic 8-bit consoles and computers up to the Saturn and N64, perhaps even the DreamCast, but I'm not 100% sure on that yet. Well they even cover arcade games that predate all of those old systems as well. If there are people that thought about getting scans from these, don't bother. I obviously won't be scanning these magazines. The writers and editors deserve every bit of respect and financial support for the great job they are doing, and as one of the few new magazines that I still find worth reading, I will support the 100% as well. For subscription details or buying individual magazines you can always check http://www.imagineshop.co.uk/mag_home.php?magID=11 and http://www.retrogamer.net/flashindex.html

It should be the october or november issue of 2002, but as it's not yet 5 years out of print, there aren't any scans for yet.

I'm afraid that you've pretty much lost the bet by default. See, the thing is that up till a couple of years ago (between 2001 and 2005), Nintendo Power used a different ratings method than the simple 1-10 scale. Your friend probably already knew this. They rated graphics, control, game design, satisfaction and sound from 1-10 and then took the average from all of these to give the game a final score. So it was pretty much impossible in those days to score a 10/10. Oh, wait... I just read that again.... He said only RE4 and Metroid Prime 3? Guess you won after all. :laughing: Metroid Prime 1 also got a perfect score it seems, although I don't have a scan of that one.

WOW!

I believe this was the year that I finally got my first very own game system. A Popeye Game & Watch. Been a Nintendo fan ever since. :grin: I grew up in a pub, so I have been playing arcade games since the age of 3. Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pacman, Mappy, Elevator Action, Wonder Boy... Oh boy, great memories. It's only natural I still prefer the classics over the "next gen" stuff. :happy:

Hehe, no problem. The editing looks just fine btw. Just a small white line at the right side of the 2nd scan and a tiny mark under the Vision text, but otherwise it looks spot on. Great work! :happy: And don't worry about the speed, I'm scanning in my Sega Saturn mags and the scanning alone takes about an hour and a half, if everything goes smoothly. But the editing is another thing. Especially with these magazines being so discolored. I wish they were on shiny paper instead of mat paper. That would have made a big difference.

1984, wow. Very nice! I'm really looking forward to this one. If you want help editing the magazine, just give a shout. As it seems to have quite a bit of tears, but those can be edited with a bit of work lots of patience. I'm very busy with my own SSM scans right now, but I'll do what I can.

BTW I think I'll need your friend code before you can see my Mii's, if I'm not mistaken.

Even though I'm European, I actually hate soccer. :fear: So I didn't get this game, but I've heard lots of praise for it so I might pick up a copy in the future if I can find it at a nice price. There's just way too much coming out starting November, even if I only own a Wii and a DS. *quick edit* Oops I totally forgot I own a PSP too. But I haven't played it since November or so...

Sweet, I think I'll seed the Official Game Guides Collection some more.

I think most will know the basics for scanning and editing magazines, so I'm just going to briefly touch upon that before getting into the main part of this post. You scan a page in 300dpi, rotate if necessary so that the text does not appear slanted. Afterwards you crop the page and fill in the edges with the clone option in Photoshop or Photostudio. This way you'll get a nice straight edge around the page. Then you resize the page to a width of 1280 and if the page doesn't require additional editing, then you're done. Now save the page as a JPG at 90% quality to get the best result while keeping the size at around 500kb. But most pages could use a bit of touching up, be it white/black dots, scratches, dog ears, etc. The most important tool to deal with all of these problems is the clone tool. That one will solve 90% of your problems. For covers and pages that need to be scanned in several pieces you can always cheat by copying parts of the page to another one you're working on. (See my tutorial for scanning pages larger than your printer size) The techniques remain the same. Now on to the main problem. With old magazines one of the most common problems is discoloration of the pages. Leaving darker smudges or complete areas on pages that should overall be white or any other plain background color. This also happens at the bindings of the magazine if they are scanned without debinding them. Until now I thought that the best option for this was to use the Bucket Fill tool. The big problem with this technique is that you get lots of artefacts around pictures and actually also around all the text. You also lose the feel of the original magazine as everything becomes very sterile. The way I'm doing things now preserves the "texture" feeling of the original magazine and at the same time remove all the smudges and darker spots. Again, the Clone tool is your best friend. Set the opacity at around 80 and the Brush Size anywhere between 40 and 60. Now pick a nice open spot close to the discoloration and clone this. Then go over the nearby spots and dirty looking open spaces until you get a nice even looking area where everything blends in. Repeat this for every part of the page that has nothing but background. Hopefully this example page will illustrate what I'm trying to explain here. You clone the parts at the green hart and then go to the pink strips where the arrow points at on this page. Since you are using a large brush, but also an opacity of only 80 or so, you don't get to clone the original spot completely, but instead you paint a transparent layer over the dirty parts which pretty much cancels out the dirt. As an example, once you've done the short bar on the top left, you can use this newly painted part as a basis for the very long part just under it, indicated by the smiley. The same thing goes for the parts on the right, which in this case are at the bindings side, so these will need more attention than the left side here. After writing all this down, it actually sounds much more complicated than it actually is. And while it could sometimes take up to a half hour to make a problematic page try to look good with the bucket fill method, after a bit of practice with this technique it will only take up 5 minutes at most. After all this is said and done, the best option is to not have to do any of this at all. So if you get very clean pages after the standard scan, crop and resize, so much the better. If not, I found this to be pretty quick, effective solution to deal with these problems. Like I said before, this way you keep that actual magazine feeling intact which is very important to me.

Only correct answer: my girlfriend.