marktrade

I uploaded several new mags to the UK link, including issues of Segs Pro, Sega Force, and CDi. Check it out! https://archive.org/details/UneditedUK_marktrade Two more issues of SuperPlay have been deleted because Depressor edited them. Top post updated.

I just finished slicing and scanning a bunch of magazines and am preparing them for upload. They're gonna look good!

Mortal Kombat, for sure. I didn't expect I'd be saying that so many years later because I originally considered the movie somewhat disappointing, but over time I've really come to appreciate it. I thought Need for Speed was decent as well, but Mortal Kombat wins for music and cinematography.

Well, lately I've been scanning stapled magazines by removing the staples and scanning the entire uncut sheet, but I've been unsatisfied with the glare that appears near the gutter in some pages. I thought I could reduce this by laying the magazines out flat under presser to remove the crease or at least lessen its effect, and while I did have a measure of success, it wasn't that much. So I think I'll go back to just cutting the magazine straight down the center, unless it's one I really like in which case I'll destaple and cut the pages by hand with a razor. That's what I'm doing now with the remaining UK magazines I have. It's going to take hours. The existing scans I've uploaded that contain some glare can be edited still. There are probably some out there who like it because it makes it more "magazine-like." Maybe?

Here is issue 02. https://archive.org/details/CDi02NovDec1994

Original post updated with new acquisitions! Only seven issues missing now.

There is something else I think about, which is that in the future these magazines will be read less by human eyes and more by computers used by people searching queries. 300 DPI is the recommended standard for OCR and 600 DPI is recommended to OCR asian text.

Forgive me but this sounds like "640K ought to be enough for anyone." 600 DPI may not be necessary, but it sure helps. I mean look at all those pages in Dengeki PlayStation with all those tiny fanart pictures with handwritten text. You can't tell me a 600 DPI scan wouldn't make that easier to read.

Sounds good to me, especially because it's actually a bit difficult to buy the first issue of GameFan. The "buy" link at OoPA is broken and has been for a long time. When you go to gamefanmag.com and click on "digital back issues" it doesn't even show up. You have to click on "catalog" and then sort through A-Z, because it won't be on the first page if you sort oldest to newest and it if you browse only issues from 1992 it won't even show up there! You have to really dig for it. Personally I'm waiting for the day when Retromags will be recruited to make commercial scans for publishers. We're building a lot of talent here.

One miserable summer at Boy Scout camp I was gathered around a table with some of the other scouts as we waited for everyone to get dressed and ready for one of our perfunctory camp-wide meetings. One of the reasons scout camp is so miserable is because you have to hang out with all kinds of annoying people you wouldn't spend time with otherwise. People like Ben, who always gave the impression of being very slow-minded, slow enough that I seriously wondered if he was a special needs person (they were at camp, too, but usually in their own troop). Nope. He was in our troop, and I was one of his youth leaders. I pitied him because I knew he would be bullied by someone somewhere eventually, and probably already had been bullied in school. He would come in late to conversations and say something that would go over like a lead balloon and make everything awkward. How could he be so slow? We just learned to tolerate him. Of course he dressed slowly and he was one of the people we were waiting for. As we waited, we made note of all the other boys who somehow got out of having to go to camp that year. "Where's Matt? How come he isn't here?" That sort of thing. We mentioned another younger boy by his last name because he had a common first name. This boy was very quiet and mild mannered, and no one had any kind of negative feeling toward him, but he was noticeably very fat and so was his entire family. Because he was so quiet it was the only trait we knew they all shared. "Hey, did you ever notice…? He looks a lot like his family?" one of the boys said. I looked at my friend. We were older than the rest. I was senior patrol leader and he was one of my patrol leaders, so we were trying to set a good example. "Yeah," someone else said, "they're all…" "They all have," someone interrupted, "very big…" "Uhh…" "Feet," another said. "Yeah," my friend said, smiling in relief, after struggling to find some random discreet way to refer to someone as fat. "They all have very big feet." He nodded at the others in a way that suggested that they didn't have to say any more that might be considered mean and they could drop the subject. "Yeah, big feet," I said. Whew, dodged a bullet there. But we didn't notice that Ben had walked up to the table. "Yeah to carry all that weight around," he deadpanned. Everyone erupted in laughter. It was one of the longest uncontrolled fits of laughter I've ever had in my life. Because we all thought we were being very smart, talking in code and nodding cleverly about something discreet, especially my friend and I, who thought we had avoided an unpleasant moment of saying something mean about another kid who wasn't there and didn't deserve it. Nope. Not with Ben around. All our efforts at decorum were futile around him. All we did was tee off for the slowest kid in camp. And for that moment, we were all dumber than he was. We would talk about it years later and it annoyed Ben because he didn't understand that we were laughing at him and ourselves for being so stupid, not at the fat kid and his family. He kept saying, "I don't get why you guys thought it was that funny." It was the one funny thing he ever said and he didn't get it! That poor kid.

I've been wondering the same thing myself, but the file sizes are still well below 400mb, which I'm told is a reasonable limit because that's where today's mobile devices start to slow down noticeably handling the file. Anyway, they are large format magazines, which is typical of UK gaming mags. Physically they are of larger dimension both in height and width from US mags. So at 300 dpi they will have larger dimensions. At some point 300 dpi will be an acceptable standard for all releases, as technology improves. It seems we're getting closer to that point. And I mean real 300 dpi, with dimensions intact. Not pseudo-300-dpi where you change the pixel height, which has been the norm.

So I just finished editing issue 01 of CDi magazine. The editor's column says it's the first issue and everything. But it's dated Sep/Oct 1994, which is off from the Retromags database by over a year. Anyone know what's going on here? Here's a link, btw: https://archive.org/details/CDi01SepOct1994

14 more issues of PLAY have been added. 4 issues of Super Play have been deleted since Depressor edited them. Original post updated.

I don't own a Wii-U either but winning this might get me to buy one. I suppose I could make a few more Missing Magazine threads.

Update on discs. PCXL 01 disc PCXL 02 disc PCXL 03 (missing) PCXL 04 disc PCXL 05 disc PCXL 06 discs PCXL 07 discs PCXL 08 discs PCXL 09 discs PCXL 10 discs PCXL 11 discs PCXL 12 discs PCXL 13 discs PCXL 14 discs PCXL 15 discs PCXL 16 discs PCXL 17 discs PCXL 18 disc PCXL 19 disc PCXL 20 disc PCXL 21 disc PCXL 22 disc Disc 03 is the only one that's missing! Issue 11 is taking a while to update, but the second disc is there.

The first six issues of PLAY magazine have been scanned and uploaded. https://archive.org/details/UneditedPLAY_marktrade Top post has been edited. More to come.

Hah! I just looked at the post above in Firefox and Chrome and they really don't like my profile. It looks almost completely whited out. I wonder why that is. If you're having trouble, try saving the image and opening it in an offline image viewer. It looks great in Safari and iOS 9.3, honestly. Edit: That's right, you have to enable color management in Firefox manually. http://ntown.at/2013/12/28/firefox-color-management/ But I thought I already had it enabled? I guess one of the updates reset it to default or something.

Woo! I finally made a profile for my ADF. The targets I ordered from Germany arrived yesterday and, because they have a lower dmax than the one I was using before, my profiling software accepted the scan. The first thing that jumped out at me about the profile is that it made everything brighter, as if the page was being viewed under very strong light. I suppose that's closer to what it would look like if you were Ant-Man stood behind the scanner glass and watch the page pass over the light. So after assigning the profile I lowered the brightness and raised the contrast by about 50 pts each to maintain what I consider a typical luminosity. Have a look. Here is the raw color scan from before: And here is the same image with brightness/contrast adjusted by -/+50 and assigned the calibrated profile: If you're viewing this in a program that does not support color management, then the second picture will just look like the brightness and contrast were adjusted, but if your browser does support color management, then you should see some significant color differences. It's not perfect and never will be. In the end this is just another option people have when viewing my scans. I even made a separate profile for the backside scanner as well. The backside is always a little bit different from the front, but I'm concerned at just how different the backside profile is from the front profile. Also I'm concerning myself with how different profiles are when they're made with the same scan but with different software. I could end up making and sharing a lot of different profiles. I'll have to write a guide explaining what each one is. There are even programs that allow you make a profile from multiple scans, which I'll look into. But boy it sure is nicer having a profile than not having one. You can assign any color profile to any image using Photoshop by going to the Edit menu and selecting Assign Profile. This won't alter the image itself, just how it's displayed. But adding Adobe RGB is a really crude way of looking for results. It's preferable to make a custom profile for your scanner, which is what I did here.

The entire soundtrack to HSX: Hypersonic Xtreme is underrated. In fact I think it's now even more underrated than before because the soundtrack seems to have disappeared from YouTube and no one has cared enough to replace it. Well it just so happens I made a music video with music from HSX and footage from Mass Effect so you can listen to it. Also the menu music from Speed Racer for the PS2. Sometimes when I need a minute to relax I just turn this on:

"And don't call me Shirley."

I have the Sega Pro and CDi magazines you sent me de-stapled and laying flat under pressure to get the center crease out so they can be scanned more smoothly. There are maybe a dozen or so. There are also a few Amiga magazines yet. I've been debinding and scanning a lot of the early issues of PLAY in the meantime. I will have about 20 issues from the first two years uploaded and unedited soon. The early issues are extremely hard to find.

So almost to the day that I complained iOS didn't have color management, and that iOS Safari didn't support color profiles, a new version of iOS was released that did. If you've updated to iOS 9.3 and go back to the previous page this thread, you should be able to see a difference in those Tomb Raider images I posted. This was never advertised and I didn't bother to verify it until now because I had already resolved to convert to sRGB. Apparently it was added because the new 9.7" iPad Pro display has a wider color gamut (DCI-P3, the standard for digital cinema projection) and fancy color features like automated white point adjustment based on ambient lighting. My new iPhone even automatically switches to a warmer color profile in the evening because some psychology studies show it helps people get to sleep better, probably because it more closely resembles natural colors at dusk and sunset. Seriously though iOS 9.3 came out almost the second I complained about iOS not having color management.

Since Retromags doesn't gain any income and one of the main requirements for a magazine to be linked in the database is that it's scanned by a Retromags user, it sounds like we have the okay. As a scanner I feel the most valuable thing about Retromags isn't the hosting or distributing of magazines but the information database that assists the collaborative effort of tracking down which magazines need attention. I'll get confirmation from the curators here, but I think it would be great if we could at least link OoPA in the database. You mentioned that each scanner has its own color faults. This has been one of my main areas of research recently. I've been purchasing color targets so I could scan them and calibrate my scanners. My ADF is a real challenge because the dmax is lower than most color targets, but having a custom color profile for one's scanner goes a long way to assist in color correction and minimizes the need for manual corrections. I'm wondering if you've also calibrated your scanner? Manually or with a color target or a combination? I should be getting some more targets from Germany any day now. You can see my updates in my work in progress thread. Also you're more than welcome to take any of my unedited scans on archive.org and edit them for OoPA. They were purchased by Phillyman and subsidized by Retromags' eBay Slush Fund, so that might make them off limits to you, but it's okay with me.

I'm more confused now than I was before! You're from OoPA, but I see that you're also a lifetime patron of Retromags? Is that an honorary title or did you donate? Because, if you donated or contributed, then you'd be associated with a site that accepts donations. Regardless, no one "makes money" doing what we do and if any publisher thought it was possible they would be doing it themselves. It doesn't make sense to me that OoPA would be okay with scans being linked and shared, but not by organizations and communities like ours who pooled resources together to make the endeavor a little easier. It's our enthusiasm and love that brought us together, but it matters more in the end is that not a penny changed hands? Are money and love mutually exclusive? Would you tell museums or libraries they can't host any copies because they are funded by members and local communities? We are lucky when there are still publishers who want to be involved in preservation, even if it's just to be part of the ethical discussion. It helps to identify which magazines are truly in danger of being lost. However, legally there's no need to involve them, as strange as that sounds. Courts are consistently ruling that scanning and making a searchable database of magazines is "transformative." It makes sense for the very reason that it's not a profitable venture in the first place, that it requires a significant investment of time, labor, equipment, and other resources. It's important to respect and appreciate the original creators, but let's remember who's doing the work here.

Scanners should scan! Anyone else can edit.