KiwiArcader

Even though I run my own site I believe that helping preservation sites like this one benefits the preservation scene as a whole so I have donated.

My web hosting company says in theory I have an unlimited size/bandwidth plan on a shared server although I suspect if I started uploading GB's of mags to my account and making direct downloads available they would soon be asking questions.

Don't get me wrong mate. I understand where you are coming from but having been a member for years I can well remember the local downloads causing all manner of jerks signing up, making stupid posts to get a download and still moaning about how unfair things were. LOL

It seems like an awful lot of effort just to keep the moaning leechers happy though. Team members who have contributed mags to the site, I can understand wanting to reward them, as the mags wouldn't even exist without those guys but everyone else essentially comes along for the ride when it comes to providing magazines. I know people have contributed to the databases etc so they fall into the middle ground but it's not really the same as providing mags so a tiered structure makes sense there but having Joe Leecher who hasn't done anything other than create a login so he doesn't have to use FileFactory seems like just rewarding mediocrity.

That's why over at OGM all new downloads are being hosted on both FileFactory and Mediafire. However, there's only so much one can do when a website is being run on a budget where most everybody is simply there to leech and contribute nothing so in the end one person carries the can/costs for the whole site. I always find it interesting and annoying at the same time when these people moan and groan about access but don't want to do anything about it other than moan.

All my PC game purchases now are via Steam. I gave up on buying disc based games from the stores right about the time Half-Life 2 came out and forced me into Steam to decrypt the contents of the disc before I could play the game anyway. So physical manuals are non-existent with my current game collection. Books, specifically novels, are the same for me. I tend to look on Kobo or iTunes for the novel I want and only buy physical versions if the book doesn't exist in digital format. I spent a lot on my iPad and I want to get my moneys worth out of it. The fact I can take hundreds of novels, comics or game magazines with me on holiday far outweighs the feel good factor of having a KG of paper in my hand or flight luggage for a couple of books etc.

Indeed they are. There weren't many quality requirements in the beginning and a lot of scans were raw scans, or low resolution, or at 300DPI but then scaled down to pages sizes of 1280 width etc so there's definitely a place for better quality scans. I'd say "need" but for some people low res is better than nothing and more than enough and they are happy with that. At the end of the day it usually boils down to whether someone else has a copy of the magazine and is prepared to do the work. That isn't many experience tells us.....

The only thing I will say now that I've had a bit of a spat is that for all the databases and the guides on how to scan etc I will be surprised if it makes any major difference to getting more people scanning and preserving content here. My own experience with providing guides etc for my site were superfluous in actually getting new scanning members. I have five or six people actively scanning for my site and they all came onboard because they want to contribute to the scene, had the hardware etc and the guides I put up weren't even used. A couple of them came onboard because this place was going nowhere at the time. Which sort of comes back the point I made earlier.

The main driver for my answer wasn't even related to him. He was just collateral damage in all of this. It related to people I like to call leechers whining about how long it's taking to download a FREE mag then moaning about how things would be better for THEM if we did it some other way. These people generally don't front up with the cash for a premium hosting plan so they can get better speeds etc so by that same notion don't ... Scan anything and contribute or Donate to the site financially or via any other meaningful way either. This spiralled because I made one comment about Phillyman spending a LOT of time creating things like video games databases which places like Mobygames already have, or magazine databases which also have been covered by other sites like Magazines from the Past, and not a lot of time on actually scanning mags because of it so he took exception to it and yet this is actually the current scenario. I have a lot of respect for people like Rob or Andy who actually scan and create content even if both of them are not particularly putting a lot of content out there. But because of issues around that I created my own site as I see magazines preserved as more important than a fancy database. That's just me. What I don't like are people who are getting content for free complaining like a whiny little bitch like we should be doing whatever they say. "Quote .... I'm honestly not sure what the hassle is ..." That's a nice way to ask right?

Phillyman, A few years ago this used to be the place to come to get mags. That was the reason people like me came onboard and contributed scans to the site. Probably 2/3rds of the content for UK mags archived here were created by Meppi and I. Then you fucked off Meppi and he left after I had already been banned and you asked me to come back so I did. Then you completely dropped the ball after Megaupload packed up. Not only did you not put alternatives in place for two years for people to obtain content but you left the site completely and E-Day had to try and sort out the mess so the site continued in limbo for ages. THAT was the reason I created my own site. Because you dropped the ball big time. So don't go acting high and mighty like you haven't done anything negative because the facts support the fact that you have. I know that everyone has a personal life and that these sorts of things are hobbies. And I know that what you do with your time is entirely up to you. However, the primary reason for the site was preserving magazines is it not? A couple of bursts of a half dozen mags over the course of a year or two tends to indicate you are preoccupied with other things, one of which appears to be trying to make this site some sort of all things to everyone mega-gospel center. If you can't take some criticism of the 'perceived' current misdirection of the site currently from someone who actually gave a shit enough to re-upload mags when you finally got your A into G then feel free to delete my account ... again ... like you (and Meppi) did previously, but have the decency to delete my magazine submissions this time like you did with Meppi. You probably wouldn't though because you'd lose most of your UK content.

There's always someone wanting everything for nothing. E.g., they moan about slow speeds as a free user but are generally too cheap to pay for a premium plan from a file-hosting company so they complain about sites not using torrents. You just know the same people will leech everything off torrents and then cut and run afterwards, never contributing back to keeping the torrent active. That was tried years ago. It failed then and it will fail again if they try it again. It failed because the tracker site it was created on (Underground-gamer) bellied up and no-one wants to host it on a site as unstable as Pirate Bay nowadays. Creating a private utorrent tracker means your PC needs to be on 24/7 and you end up using your power etc for what benefit exactly that isn't already provided through using a file hosting company? Maybe if IP Board, the software running this site, have a tracker add-on then Phillyman might be persuaded to do it, but he's too been busy creating software lists and trying to make this place some sort of uber-everything site to even scan magazines, which was the whole point of Retromags in the first place.

So what everyone is saying is subscribers have gotten a bum deal ... again ...?

Fair enough but seriously, they are giving the finger to paid up subscribers knowing all to well that people won't complain because they have already handed their money over. They think they have you over a barrel. Personally I wouldn't give a company that treated me like that the time of day. Steve Harris should take one up the ass for the crap his company (he still owns it right?) is shoveling on their subscribers. It sounds like he's running a customer service company out of India like the one on Transformers. "Sure we'll put you through but if you pay more money we'll make more effort. Honestly" Once I get my new scanner sorted I will start scanning all the issues I possess of EGM date restrictions be blowed. I call it the middle finger subscription.

Bloody hell. I don't know why you guys persist with this crap. Write your subscription costs off as a bed debt and move on. You put it quite succinctly .... a total cluster...k it most certainly is

You pretty much describe what I am saying. People that lived through the dawn and golden age of home computing have not generally changed other than ruing the fact that when it comes to game packaging things have definitely changed. My kids wouldn't even contemplate sitting down with a 200 page manual even though games they liked like Neverwinter Nights? came with a honking big manual. I actually think that was the last game I saw with one. Something like that anyways if it isn't the actual game. I still have dozens of manuals for games I don't even have any more as I loved them more than the games themselves. LOL However, unlike you I have embraced digital as a means of having lots of content available to take anywhere. That's why I debind and scan my mags then throw them out once I have created a PDF. I simply don't see the need to harbor a veritable ton of paper in my basement any more. Getting brownie points from the wife for moving it out the door doesn't hurt either and it made a great bargaining chip for getting a Samsung 12" tablet too :-) On a side note, hopefully Elite Dangerous when it arrives will allow us to relive the days of old Elite all wrapped up in modern day visuals. And even more hopefully it'll include those things like the novella, key guide, system charts etc that made it's granddaddy so much fun to open the box let alone actually play.

It's as much about the changing attention spans of users as anything else in my opinion. Nowadays the console generation have wanted their fix immediately so the attention span has shortened considerably, to the point where if they cannot simply load and go, they generally move on to something that is. I know that is a somewhat simplistic over-generalization but you only have to look at the types of games on the shelf now to see that adventure gaming where serious thought was given to progressing further has fallen by the wayside to be replaced by games that are scripted to point you in the direction you need to take. Open ended gaming is largely non-existent on consoles. The PC remains the sole gaming platform where an Elite type open ended experience can be found even though consoles are a million times more powerful than the Acorn BBC which started it in the first place. It's a sad state of affairs if like me you were brought on games that had a novella to immerse you into the game before you even started and had a manual the size of a telephone book but truthfully, even if the publisher offered exactly the same content on the disc in PDF format what percentage of people would actually bother to read them? Not many methinks ...

I think you're nuts subscribing to a magazine whose customer support staff treat subscribers like second class citizens. But that's just me ....

You know what to do to a..holes like these? Scan their mags as obviously they don't give a rats about loyal subscribers and as they appear to be able/afford to make a living off producing 10 copies of an issue they won't be affected financially by someone scanning them. The sooner they die and put everyone out of their misery over not getting their paid for copies the better off everyone will be.

Very nice scans JohnSmith. Very nice indeed .... Thanks for contributing to the magazine preservation scene. There's not many of us out there so it's great having you onboard.

The other thing about archive is that they have no considerations whatsoever for content quality. People upload files to Archive.org from sites like this one and mine without a second thought (or even acknowledging where they came from) and those ones are generally fine but they also upload any old crap found on torrent sites that may have been scanned years ago in poor quality and then make them even worse but down-sampling them to create epub files and so on. Quality control is not their first consideration, nor second, nor any as far as I can tell. Additionally, they aren't entirely clean when it comes to copyright either. Recently they have made complete collections of arcade ROMs for M.A.M.E available without any consent being received from the ROM creators/owners from what I have read.

I have issues 01 & 02 of this magazine on my website

That leaves PC Gamer as the last magazine they are publishing separate UK and USA editions for. My money is on the USA version getting shut down sooner rather than later if they are indeed bleeding cash.

I didn't realize you lost access after Phillyman took the site over again. My comments were based on the assumption you still had owner rights. Sorry E-Day .... my bad on that one.

Rapidshare is pretty much crap nowadays after they made the last lot of changes to their service, one of which was screwing free user limits on accounts down. I downloaded the file no worries whatsoever as a premium user. If Phillyman doesn't get his arse into gear and sort out issues like this by uploading them to the Retromags Filefactory account I'll make it available over at OGM for you. I think he and E-Day have lost sight of the prime goal of Retromags ... preserving magazines ... in their/his pursuit of being the be all, end all of gaming information. They're trying to out-do sites like 'Magazines of the Past' but I think it's actually been detrimental to the site. PM me if they don't sort it out soon.

In answer to the quality on Retro Gamer compilation DVD's ..... NO!!! The quality is just as substandard for the PDF as the Games tm disc. What they have done is store and use higher quality individual article pages for the quick search feature. Doing this keeps the whole mag PDF down size wise and not having good and bad quality images mixed in together. I merged the quick search pages into the PDFs manually as described by RetroDefense above ages ago and while it makes them somewhat more bearable it really still renders them mediocre as far as I am concerned. Added to that they have stripped out all the advertising content and replaced it with "E-Mag" filler pages which is a cardinal sin. In my mind every issue of Games tm from #01 to 83 needs to be scanned for preservation purposes. 84 onwards are available in proper digital versions from the iTunes store and appear to be 100% complete.