marktrade

Thanks Retro! Have you tried that auto deskew utility I mentioned? I don't think I'll be uploading any more unedited scans like that, now that editing is pretty straightforward (no pun intended). Manually straightening every page was just killing me.

If it's in your scanning queue for the near future I would mark the status as "scanning."

Issue 21. The penultimate issue.

I only see it helping. Marking something acquired doesn't mean others can't scan it. Even new scans of already-preserved magazines are welcome. How would it hurt anyone?

That means you're also able to go through the database and mark the issues you plan to scan as "acquired." I go through the database often to check for what we're missing so whenever you have a chance to do that I think it would help!

There's an auctions section of the forum. I imagine anything like that would be appropriate in there. http://community.retromags.com/forum/72-auctions/ As for the Incite Video Gaming issues, I already have all of them (except for issue 0, which someone else is selling for a very high price) and already made a thread about it in Magazine Talk. It's Incite PC Gaming that I don't think anyone has.

I'm not into blondes myself, but I can see the appeal. I really liked her in a Starfleet science uniform! Issue 20 here.

The last time I posted here and announced that I would be bidding on something it didn't seem to help. Lots of people who visit Retromags still seem very interested in having a physical magazine. Plenty of people here with magazines want them to be scanned but don't want the bindings cut. The physical magazine is their priority. So frankly I'm not sure that's possible! If I come here to announce that I'm bidding on an auction that just means more people are likely to bid on it to see if they can get it themselves, especially if it starts low, like most billmarioman auctions do.

And another one. 19.

Aaaand issue 18. I used to read these magazines and wonder how many years it would be before I had a machine that could actually run these games. Now the games look so old and I have plenty of good memories of them. It's pretty great.

Thank you for going through the trouble. If you had caught me at another time I might have been able to help but billmarioman had to choose this month to liquidate his magazine collection and I already spent too much money on those. Good luck with everything.

Issue 16, Holiday 1999, before the Y2K bug destroyed everything. I suppose it's fitting then that there is a scanning glitch on page 53. I looked around my apartment for the magazine so I could rescan it but I might have thrown it away, so it will have to stay there for the time being. I'll be happy to fix it when the opportunity presents itself. Until then everything is readable and it only affects a minor portion of the page (which is probably why I missed it, or else I would have rescanned it right away). There was also a minor page-order error in issue 09 that I fixed today, didn't affect anything except a double-page AvP ad spread that looked messed up anyway, haha. New file being uploaded.

Got time for another one. Issue 15

Issue 13! They sure had a thing for Jeri Ryan. This one had a lot of glue, some pages are pretty messed up near the binding. I edited what I thought was reasonable although there's more I could have done. Still a worthwhile scan.

If we post in the New Releases forum, will it appear on the front page of the site?

Thank you for checking here first. There are so many game magazines all over the world. It's a shame we don't have resources for all of them. Maybe I should at least ask for a shipping quote. I'll PM you my location.

Issue 09 up. Some great reminiscing about Star Wars Episode 1 hype in there. That summer I played an enormous amount of Williams Arcade Star Wars Episode 1 Pinball.

Issue 08 available. Notice that this is the "Naked Edition" which shipped without the discs. I don't believe there's anything different with the issue itself except the lower right area of the cover where it says so. Might merit further research.

That's an interesting suggestion. It would affect something like GMR, which has proportions that give it the appearance of an A3 format magazine but in reality is smaller than A4 at 8.2"x10.2", smaller than letter. Even though I still sympathize with Sean697 in that it doesn't matter, it doesn't affect me and how I view the files, I'll go along with it if it's an accepted community standard. VR is coming up fast. There are people who are going to want to recreate the experience of reading magazines in a virtual environment. They will have expectations of size and proportion of magazines relative to each other as they pull them off their virtual bookshelves. I've been saving the bindings after I cut them off so I can scan them all later to assist in recreating magazines as virtual objects. Of course there's no hurry for that now but maybe this time next year people will be working on it, and the year after that it'll be fun, and the year after that it'll be preferred. Who knows? Regardless, saving the original scans with the original DPI settings also preserves their physical measurements, so that's another value-added to saving originals, at the very least. One more thing I just remembered, the dimensions of pages are not consistent for stapled mags, especially thick ones like Famitsu. The outer pages will be larger than the inner pages because they have to wrap around those inner pages. That's another reason why shooting for standard width just doesn't make sense. The outer pages can be progressively wider by almost half an inch.

It may help to read the thread where I had this conversation with E-Day and kiwiarcader: http://community.retromags.com/topic/9877-my-first-magazine-scan/ They said DPI settings affected their ability to zoom in with their tablets. Desktop software lets you zoom in on pixels to an arbitrarily large percentage but tablet software limits the zoom level by DPI. In that thread I also recognize the value in scanning at very high resolution, even as high as 1200 DPI. Some higher quality magazine text is printed at 2400 DPI. Of course it's not necessary to ever scan that high, but there are benefits to scanning higher than 300 DPI, and I think those benefits will be appreciated as very high resolution retina-display tablets become standard and people want to zoom in on text. I should note that text sizes are largest in the more popular magazines on Retromags like EGM and GamePro, so the limit to what is reasonable is hit a lot sooner with those. The Retromags guide as it is seems to reflect that particular source material. I scan everything at 600 DPI, edit them uncompressed, publish some lower res versions, and then convert the high resolution files to PNG for archiving. Any lossless compression is fine. TIFFs allow for several different kinds of compression but PNG seems simpler and more convenient for me. I can just do it right from a contextual menu.

I was advised by kiwiarcader and E-day to have a consistent height rather than width and that has worked out well for me. Also I was asked to make sure the dpi setting for the file is 300, regardless of pixel dimensions. This affects how the file is treated by some programs, particularly Adobe for when someone wants to convert to PDF. I'm not sure which guide you are referring to. That's a REALLY awesome split image viewer you linked to. I've never seen that before. I personally never mess with brightness or contrast settings. My scanning software lets me set the white point while scanning. I just keep it at the default level of 231 and it hasn't failed me yet. This eliminates moderate yellowing as well as bleed-thru from dark images on the other side of the page. Although I'm not sure exactly how my software does it, I believe the same thing can be done manually in Photoshop through the curves command. Here is a quick edit I did of your image using a curves adjustment layer. I basically followed this short tutorial: It involves using a threshold layer to view the image's histogram, so you can get a feel for just how far away the parts of the image that should be black are away from actual black, and likewise for white, although when you're dealing with a document with black-on-white text, then you're not always going to have to go through that step. Just make a curves adjustment layer and set the white and black points and see what works. I set the white point somewhere on the high end of the yellowing, but not to the extreme, just enough that most of it went away. That changes the "tone" of the image considerably, enough that I wonder if the page was ever meant to look that white in the first place. Maybe it was supposed to look slightly warm or textured like recycled paper. Electronic Entertainment has paper that's kind of like that, but it's so subtle it's lost when transferred to pixels. Certainly it's up to you and what you think.

I think this is an improvement but more awkward than what I suggested. With the joined pages added as single images, the split page images seem very superfluous and end up offsetting the page displays for the rest of the issue (left pages appear on the right and vice versa). I guess it's a small criticism, as all the content is there and it's easily fixed on the reader's end by switching to single page view and then back to double page view. I don't think anyone else would say anything, appreciative they just had something. I once uploaded an issue with half its pages missing and no one said anything. One more thing, the file size might be an issue for others. It's definitely not an issue for me, as I read on a computer with a large TV, but when I first started in the Spring I was advised to keep the file size below 400 mb and compress at JPG level 9 because some tablets can't process anything above that very well. Although technology is always changing and it's just a matter of time before larger file sizes are more acceptable. My manual uploads to Retromags are restricted to 200 MB. I haven't tried to meet that file size yet. I would think that limit is unacceptable for PC Accelerator's small text but Retromags doesn't have a section for PC Accelerator anyways, so those are going to archive.org and OldGameMags. I look forward to when Retromags has sections for some of the currently missing mags and they let me upload files larger than 200 MB. Until I'm very happy to add my archive.org links and update the status of magazines in the database. Even though the database is incomplete, it's still quite large and very very useful.

There's a section for Incite PC Gaming but there was also an Incite Video Gaming that ran at the same time for the same number of issues (9 in total).

No, you'll encounter a lot more printing errors like that, colors or tones looking off in the middle of the page on double-page ads. I don't worry about it.