gingerbeardman

Managed to get a feature on Nintendo Life about Electric Brain, which should hopefully be seen as a reliable source.

Does anybody have Famitsu #162 they'd be willing to scan this spread from? Also reproduced in the current (April 2019) Heisei celebration issue of Famitsu. Shigeru Miyamoto interview regarding Zelda: ALTTP

The Electric Brain Wikipedia page is under threat of deletion. Any experienced wikipedians in the house?

Unedited scans of Electric Brain issues 25 and 32 are on archive.org https://archive.org/download/Electric-Brain/ElectricBrain-Issue25-1992.cbz https://archive.org/download/Electric-Brain/ElectricBrain-Issue32-March1993.cbz This is to assist securing a couple of features from online game news websites. Hopefully they will help with the Wikipedia page, which is under thread of deletion.

Electric Brain is staple bound, so not a problem for all concerned. The only reason I'm accepting them "on loan" is the owner doesn't want to give them up. A fair compromise was reached in order to get this uncommon magazine scanned and preserved. I wouldn't accept any glue bound items "on loan" for the reasons you mention: they will essentially be destroyed. I use VueScan software on macOS which works a treat. I think you can get that for Windows too?

Oh dear! Oops. Sorry. I meant I find them more interesting. In my defense I wasn't aware you had not personally scanned any of these. Thanks for sharing them anyway!

I'm still around, too. I have A3 scanner (fi-4530C) and am available to scan UK magazines in the UK. Just negotiated for some more Electric Brain to come my way on loan.

Thanks so much for this! It has a great page about POPILS one of my all time favourites.

You know I actually think these game guide scans are some of your best work. So much amazing stuff. What happens to them after you scan them? What state are they in?

Great work man, keep it up!

Can't wait to read these!

Let's agree to disagree on this one. I'll carry on using JPEGmini, you can use Photoshop, and the OP will undoubtedly keep uploading GBs of scans.

I think we're coming at it from different angles. My point was that on a bunch of images whose quality you are happy with, for example images straight out of a scanner/camera, you pass them through JPEGmini and its automatic process keeps the quality the same, and reduces the filesize dramatically. Of course you can manually try to match its results, by tuning photoshop export, but that's missing the point. By doing that you're just resetting the baseline of a start image you are happy with. Then you would run JPEGmini on that to get the same visual quality at a lower filesize, much less than 8MB. Hopefully that makes sense. Otherwise... we can agree to disagree on this.

That's a great help for me! I had seen those file listings, but did not spot the sneaky jpg links in there. I'll download those using jDownloader in future. Thanks! BIG help. No need to apologise. It's slightly more subtle than your appraisal but enough to say that what JPEGmini does cannot be done in any other program.

Actually, this is not true. I'd encourage you to look into JPEGmini to see how it works - it maintains the quality and reduces the file size. It does not lower quality to lower file size as you suggest. It's quite amazing technology. Try it out. To simply read these things in my comic book reader, I'd rather download 250MB JP2 files in 60 seconds than wait 20 mins to download 5GB. Especially with 10 or more mags. I'm looking for specific games and features so I'm flipping through these quite fast. We've just had a baby so I don't have time to scan or edit right now.

Finally found the time to browse some of these. My only suggestion is that you could use JPEGmini (trial version here) to optimise the JPEGs before you zip them and upload. It would shave gigabytes off each upload and save you a lot of time and viewers a lot of hassle. Right now, they're too painful to download (5GB!) and even the PDF/JP2 with huge page sizes are too slow to view on my Mac. I have to download the JP2 zip, and batch process the images to reduce them to an acceptable size to have a good viewing experience. Just a thought! Great work though! Keep it up.

Loving these guides. Where did you get them all?

Good news everybody! The wikipedia page for Electric Brain has been recently reviewed and approved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Brain

Cookin' on gas!

Cool! Are you going to submit it here?

Great news! Best of luck. Really exciting. You may want to hook up with Shmupulations who may be interested in translating some of your scans. I can't access the Google Drive, but Tumblr scans look like a good start. A query about resizing artefacts from either your workflow or Tumblr: the dots on the dotted lines seem uneven sizes and spacing, and the back/forward arrows I would expect to be smoother? I say this without seeing the magazine, though. I find VueScan to TIF gives better results than ScanSnap to JPG/PDF. It's also recommended to work on TIFs, definitely for archiving, and only convert them to JPG before zipping and uploading. You may also look to optimise your images before you upload. I use JPEGmini to get ~40% saving in filesize. More on that in my WIP thread. As @kitsunebi77 says, I agree that you'll have more luck with Patreon once people see a body of work rather than these first scans. That will show you are committed and going to stay the distance. Even more so if some good new information comes out of translations of your scans. Below are fixes to spelling and grammar of your Patreon intro. I think it would benefit from a proper rewrite as you get serious. Keep on going! Looking forward to your first full issue share on RetroMags!

Good spot, I tracked down the problem. The green level in VueScan had been dialled down somehow (slip of the mouse wheel?) and I had not noticed it because my macOS adjusts display colours at night to ease eye strain (Night Shift). Good spot! Will redo the scans (and save the raw scans this time!)