KiwiArcader

Frak yeah .... The Thing is still great to this day. I took my girlfriend of the day to that one when it came out. When the dogs face split open I grabbed her arm at which point she jumped out of her seat screaming like a banshee causing everyone around her to go off as well. I had to grab her as she just about went over the balcony railing (it was an old 2 story cinema) but I couldn't save her icecream which landed on a guy below. LOL Then there's Alien ... that was cool scary too. The airduct scene was creepy in the same vein.

Creating 100 entries is fine ... I did that sort of number with Analog/ STart etc ...more of an issue is uploading 2.9GB's of files to MU.

Well ... as I said I copied over all my collection to my Windows Home Server which had duplication enabled on it so all 300GB's of mags etc is mirrored onto a second HDD ... just not my "in progress" stuff which was sitting on the portable HDD. But triverse won't be happy as I am back to square one ....

I have all 100 of them in PDF format. Quality wasn't high but still pretty readable.

Never seen this ad for the game before. I am more used to this one which came out for the 8bit range of computers ....

Yeah ...well ... in hinsight maybe ... but I find I like scanning a whole bunch of stuff before working on something as I find editing one mag boring and need a break by doing something else. I had scanned all RISC Users a long time ago but because everyone here didn't really appreciate them I stopped processing them and moved onto other things. I have a feeling they may be backed up on one of the 10 or so small HDD's in the basement. About 4 months ago I secured a 80 mag pile of PC Gamers and had scanned a whole heap for editing over time.That lot of scans are definitely lost along with the Coleco stuff I obtained although I still have the debinded mags for those PC Gamers in a box so can scan them in again .... ugh!!!!! At this stage I'm taking a couple of weeks out for my sanity while I get my Xeon Server up and running and implement some file-saving backup systems so it doesn't happen again.

Well .... I removed it from the case and tried it off the SATA port directly and still no go. It was making some strange high pitched noises (not grinding noises) before it went belly up but now nothing so I'm more inclined to think it's something to do with the drive power mechanism than the electronic PCB. No burn smells or signs of an issue ... At this stage I am dead in the water while I get all my old smaller 250Gb/320GB HDD's out and start working through them to see what is still stored on those which is going to take a few days. You know, I used to think people stating their HDD's had died was just an excuse to get out of having to do anything ... " My HDD died so I can't finish that emulator you've been waiting for but which I haven't really made at all" kind of thing ... so having a HDD die on me (my first since a 100MB died over15 years ago) has been a bit of a rude shock to the system.

The HDD is well out of warranty and the costs of data retrieval off dead drives are mortgage material ...some thing I simply cannot afford. It's ironic though that I had the server up and running off an old PC I had lying around but I decided to go the whole hog and have just bought a full-blown rackmount Xeon instead ... dual redundant PSU's, ECC RAM etc ... but the HDD chose to crap out before I could get it up and running. I was just talking to triverse about it too ... geez ... what a frikin' nightmare!!

Well .... sad news all round with this posting I am afraid. After setting up a Windows Home Server and copying all my mags, books etc onto it and setting duplication up I forgot to do the same with my working drive. I didn't think it would be a problem as my WD 640GB portable has been rock solid since I bought it. Well today my lax attitude came back and bit me the ass BIG time!!!!! Today my HDD decided it emit some strange sounds and presto ... it stopped working. Thinking it might be USB related I tried different ports, changed the power adapter etc, all to no avail. I still have to remove the drive from the case and try it on a SATA port directly but I am not confident that it will work. The net result of this is ALL my work that wasn't complete appears to have got up in smoke. That encompasses all issues of RISC User awaiting editing, approximately 20 issues of PC Gamer (some 3500 pages), a number of half finished mags in the process of editing for here and OoPA and also some super secret stuff being worked on for OoPA. To say I am devastated would be an understatement given the number of hours of my life spent on those files which is now gone. Many of the mags on that HDD have been sold, dumped etc after being scanned so may be irretrievable if I don't have backups on some of my old unused HDD's sitting in the basement. Time will tell as I get them out to see what is on them so let's hope some stuff is backed up still. At this point I don't know what to do or where to go from here.

Sorted. Try again. I think it was one of those "I'll die after I've been uploaded" files where Megaupload reports an error and when you do finish it it ends up with 2 links. I don't recall deleting any links, especially when MU says it's been downloaded 56 times but who knows with these hosting companies?

I checked my MU account and the file is still there. I also checked the link in JDownloader and it registers as good to go so I'm not sure what the problem is to be honest

Issue 08 I didn't process but Issue 027 I did create and it is my Megaupload account hosting it here. So I'll check it out when I get home. If what has been transpiring over at OoPA recently is any way related then it may have been taken down. Read into that what you will ...

My brother took me to Dave and Busters when I visited them back in '99. Great place ... multiple floors of arcade games, a movie cinema setup and restuarants. Had a fantastic Louisianna spare-ribs from memory... never looked at local spare-ribs the same way since. @Magic .... I have owned two arcade machines over the years ... just generic sell-off's from the arcades so the quality was only so-so. Plus, it was pretty prohibitive shipping cabs over from the USA and they needed to have the power stripped out for the proper voltage parts etc so generally companies like Taito created home-grown versions here. As a result they usually weren't remotely the same as the USA versions both in shape and artwork. Sad really ... Re my current project ... well ... slow going at present. I have all the sides, front and back panels cut from the template I created. Just need to have thebacking strips placed on them and then varnish seal the interior and paint the outsides in preparation for the woodgrain overlay to be added to the sides. The front and back are getting a black textured overlay. The taito trimlines never came with sideart as they were desigend to fit into tight spaces. I have a Happcontrols coinmech for it along with standard arcade joysticks, buttons etc. The wiring is a standard JAMMA harness. Where I am deviating from the norm is that I am using a standard LCD monitor attached to a RGBs to VGA convertor unit. I did this because of the intrinsic issues with CRT monitors due to magnetism which meant you needed to usually set the monitor up for the direction it would be placed in at the arcade. And the fact that I wasn't comfortable playing around near half a bazillion volts when putting new boards into the unit. Arcade PCB's have been obtained locally from arcades, auction houses and several brought in from EBAY. Games I have working 100% include Car Action, Carrier Air Wing, Donkey Kong Jr, Cabal, Wolf-Fang, Raiden Fighters, Zippy Race (I think) and many others. The older games are not JAMMA wired but have harnesses. I have rewired my JAMMA harness to Multi-pin connectors and have reqired the harnesses to this so I can swap a game over easily without worrying about incorrect wiring etc. Part of the fun is actually just working through the whole thing of creating the machine. I tend to do a bit here and a bit there in between real life stuff and ....er.... scanning mags etc.

Unfortunately, the arcades have been all but made redundant by the intoduction of the home consoles with their ability to use addons like light guns, dancemats and anything else that previously used to differentiate the arcade machines. From the N64 onwards 4 player has been available in the home and the Games Amusement industry has struggled to find ways of combating it, mostly with limited success. You could make a case for saying that their demise was written on the walls as far back as the introduction of the 16bit personal computers, especially the Amiga. Prior to that the 8bit machines were pretty ordinary, with similar graphics levels to the early arcade machines only. Now all of a sudden people were able to access conversions of arcade games with the same, in some case superior, graphics and sound. Add to that the fact you could take a potty break without someone grabbing your machine or having to stand by a smelly frakker on the machine next to you and it was all downhill from there really. However, in my opinion, the biggest issue has been the younger generation of people who have become happy with thier own company more than anything. And the internet. The arcades prospered years ago because there was no online multiplayer gaming so if you wanted to game against your mate you went down to the arcades for a round of SFII etc. People went there in groups as a normal part of socialising etc. That's all gone with the rise of the net. I know ... my kids play CS or TF2 and have no real desire to socialise even with our pushing them to. Personally, I love the old arcade games. Fancy graphics do not make a great game. Their graphics may be simplistic but things like Donkey Kong, Defender, Pacman have stood the test of time. I have owned arcade machines at home. I am now taking it to the next level and making a cabinet from scratch and have dozens of arcade game PCB's in my basement ready for the day it is finally completed. There's just something about playing them while standing in front of the screen and using the proper joysticks etc that consoles don't equal in my opinion.

Wow. Great stuff. thanks for donating these to the preservation cause. It'll ensure they aren't lost forever ....

Paintshop Pro 8 is my favorite program but under Vista or Win 7 is unusable due to crashing. Using X3 now which fixes a lot of random crashing with X2 but have had to start using Photoshop x64 for some OoPA stuff.

My scanner is a Brother MFC6890CDW A3 all-in-one connected via ethernet to the network switch but also has USB & wifi. It can scan to FTP, memcard or USB stick, or PC via their software [not great] or via TWAIN directly into Paintshop [my preferred option]

Download PDF versions instead Seriously though .... never been happy with CBR's etc .... had a couple of weird issues in the past too .... so I converted all the gaming mags to PDF and any I scan/create are also saved as PDF's. I still keep comics in CBR but I only read them on the iPad. Many people prefer CBR's ... lots prefer PDF's too ... but if your setup has a tendency to destroy CBR's & nothing seems to fix the issue either keep backup's to restore mags as they die or consider another format.

I have an A3 scanner and even then I wouldn't consider scanning 2 side by side pages as if the pages are letter/A4 you will lose several milimetres on either side of the platen. Mini-sized mags like the RISC Users are fine as they don't get near the size of an A3 page. What the A3 IS good for is scanning a whole A4 or oversized page in one go. No having to do two passes per page to fix the cropping issue a typical A4 scanner gives you. That and the fact that being a LED scanner it does a 300dpi A3 scan in 10 seconds or less

PDF's support additional features not available via the CBR format. Indexing, Chaptering, Hotlinking internally/externally within pages, the ability to use OCR'd text in pages for searchability etc .... I guess that's why the publishers creating digital versions of their own content prefer PDF over anything else. CBR's are just a flat picture driven format .... nothing else. Good for simple viewing so I guess it has a place in some people eyes but nowhere near as versatile. Still ... different strokes and all ...

What I'd love to see is a PROPER rebuild of the original Duke Nukem 3D Atomic edition for newer PC's to take advantage of modern video cards/audio etc. That game is still great even today.

Vapourware it remains until it has been published in my opinion ..... Duke Nukem ForNever .....

Anything dated 2000 or later can't be used here at the present time but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be retained for the day when we are allowed to make later submissions. EG, at some point we may be allowed to host 2001 content for example. I would hate to see any of those you listed being just dumped to be honest.