KiwiArcader

I continue to edit and release scans of his issues of Play and will continue to do so until they are all done but yeah, it's certainly been the case that almost no-one else has fronted up. Pretty pathetic when you look at the volume of people taking from the site that none have the resilience to edit a magazine. That's typical of the leeching public though.... continue getting something for no effort even if the place collapses due to burn-out of the few members doing the work. If it gets to that point with my site I will simply take it down or make it private while continuing scanning for my own benefit and the other scanning members only. At the end of the day I owe nothing to leechers who contribute nothing towards the site. This year is make or break for me too I think.

Yeah, I don't know what happened that made him give up on Retromags but I personally surmise it may be because almost no-one other than myself took any of his raw scans that he made of PC Gamer, Super Play, Play and other titles and edited/compiled them into finished product until recently when a couple of Game Player issues were processed. That might have been a kick in the teeth as far as he was concerned hence concentrating on archive.org. As you say, we've had no contact from him at all since March 2017 so he's certainly miffed about something!!

All Jason Scott has done as far as I am concerned is rip off my websites magazine content and upload them himself to archive.org without once acknowledging where he got them from so yeah, fat chance he'll scan them himself going by that modus operandi......

It depends on how many over sized mags he has and if he hasn't already got rid of his collection. He put his comment up late October but never mentioned anything here at all, so it's quite possible they're already gone. That would be a bit rude given if they came from you, you would think he'd have made some attempt to see what you wanted done with any remaining issues still to be scanned. At least you only sent a couple of boxes. Meppi has received dozens of donations going by his website forum over the years and what with his ongoing health issues and scanner problems there's likely ZERO chance of people ever seeing their donations scanned in full, or even part thereof. That's the problem with one man bands and I include myself in this comment (Meppi is NOT a target of this comment) but if something happens (illness, lack of desire to continue, hardware problems etc) and they decide to give up THEY end up with physical mags while the donators never see the digital versions they thought they would. And in a worst case scenario, as is playing out with marktrade at the present time, they may sell off, ship on, or even dump their collections including those received as donations. That is rude in my opinion. Unless the person dies in which case that really is GAME OVER!!

According to marktrade's Patreon page he's finished scanning for good as he no longer has the desire nor will to continue. @Phillyman - Are there any magazines you sent him that have not been scanned and made available even in raw format on Archive.org? If YES I would think you should contact him asap and try and get them returned to you if you want them as he looks like he was going to give them away and Jason Scott over at Archive appeared to be making noises about acquiring them. It looks like he made this decision late October so the horse may have already bolted but it's worth checking. It's a shame it's come down to this but I think we all were expecting this given just how long he has been AWOL. At least he could have come here and offered his magazines/ scanners here at the time he made his decision though given the fact he had been sent magazines by Phillyman.. Of course, maybe you already know this as I haven't really been keeping across everything going on here in a while myself ......

I had the same concerns with that site releasing shit versions of my sites mags. I have an even bigger beef with that arsehole Jason Scott, the admin of Archive.org blatantly pilfering our scans and not even having the decency to acknowledge where he acquired them from either. But you know what, the internet is the internet, and if we all took that attitude nothing would ever get scanned and preserved. So while I'd happily punch his lights out if I ever met him, it isn't going to stop me scanning my magazines and releasing them. The web is already full of shit scans anyway. I like to think people visit my site for better versions than some of those other sites. I think Kitsunebi77 is cutting off his nose to spite his face personally, but he can do whatever he wants at the end of the day. It's his mags, and his time, so if he chooses to want to store ten tonnes of mags in his apartment in preference to a 500mb PDF or CBR file he will certainly most likely have bigger muscles for it. I'm happy seeing the weight on my house foundations decreasing as I scan my mags and drop the redundant print copy in the recycling bin.

I have unlimited gigabit fiber at home here in NZ. Speeds on Speedtest.net on weekday is usually 900+ m/bit down/450 m/bit upstream. That runs me $149 per month. I could opt for the next speed down but that is ONLY 100 m/bit down & 20 upstream for $40 less. Ugh!!! I am running my website on a dedicated PC on my connection along with two Plex media servers for my brother in UK and daughter to access, um, Linux iso's remotely.

Finally got around to scanning another issue of Computer Games: Strategy Plus, this time issue 60

The input tray is quite often missing on these. I think people upgrade to the FI-6670 and use the existing tray (it fits both scanners) so they don't have to pay full price for their upgrade. I acquired my scanner without the tray and then got one shipped over from Oz for $200 ..... thanks to flugle ...., a far cry from the prices people want for them in the USA ($400 - $1400). WTF????

I couldn’t recommend any scanner that doesn’t do native A3 scanning any more as most magazines I scan are bigger than A4. Additionally, A4 scanners don’t allow enough space around the edges of a scan if you need it. If you have a Fujitsu dealer/support company locally, ask them how much to service a fi-5650c and if it is reasonable I’d buy one off eBay for cheap. They do a good job with neon covers, are fast, and do duplex scanning. Being A3 they are great for processing raw scans

Definitely try putting black card behind the page when scanning. It helps reduce bleedthru from the other side of the page a LOT but it will darken the image somewhat. For my flatbed scanner I bought a matt black sheet of some sort of card like kids use for artwork (got it from an art/stationery shop) and taped it over the white back plate on the scanner so I didn't have to keep putting between pages. Worked a treat. And curl is bad but a good scan with curl is better than nothing at all. It's getting harder to acquire older rarer magazines so if someone is prepared to scan them but doesn't want to destroy their copy it's all good in my books.

Yep. Scanning guides are totally subjective and are only meant to be applicable to the type of scanner someone uses. I had two guides on my website, one on using my A3 flatbed (Brother MFC-J6510DW I think it is...) and after I obtained a Fujitsu FI-4530c document scanner I wrote another one on using that particular model. Then I upgraded to a FI-5650c and that was different again so I gave up on creating yet another guide. All I really tell people scanning for my site now is: Scan it the best that you can with the scanner you have. Hold the pages as flat as possible on a flatbed to prevent blurred sections of print If you are not going to edit the pages yourself (raw scans) leave plenty of space around the images so that who ever is doing the editing can straighten the pages before cropping without losing any content Scan at 300dpi in full 24bit colour. Sounds obvious but if you don't spell it out someone will submit a black and white scan. (I'm not kidding!!) Don't shrink/resize the images. Better to have full size images at the cost of a few extra megs in size than have a horrid pixellated version that looks crap on high res viewing devices like iPad Pro's etc. If you have both a document scanner and a flatbed you are in a perfect world. Some pages slip going through document scanner (thin glossy pages) so chuck them through the document scanner and see how they turn out. They are way, way faster than flatbed scanning so if you don't want to grow a beard in the time it takes to process a mag on the flatbed that's the way to go. You can always scan problematic pages using the flatbed. Welcome to the world of scanning but don't be surprised and put off if things seem to take an age to get the result you want. Trial and error as they say. Feel free to ask questions. You will always get a reply......

I like the nice edge to edge results of scanning using a document scanner compared to the blurred spine scans when using a flatbed scanner. That and the fact I can scan 100 pages a minute with one :-)

PC Format issue 17 is now available at Kiwis.World.

PC Format issues 18/19 are now available at Kiwis.World.

marktrade acquired a lot of mags from you Phillyman? If so, those items should be available here and not just over at archive.org anyway. Are you after the actual links to the magazine issues themselves or the individual pages the magazines are listed on over at KW?

The only problem I see with this is most everyone out there like RetroCDN and Archive.org is simply pinching everyone else's scans so I'm not sure what value there is pointing to other sites? If it's to allow scanning members to determine which mags don't need to be scanned because someone else has already done it that is fraught with peril in several ways... Existing scan may be missing pages/ centre posters etc. Quality of the other sites scans might be inconsistent with your requirements Other sites may have just ripped your scans off anyway but also may have edited them ( to remove Retromags advertising page and/or dropped quality ) I should think it would be far better to concentrate on the scans from members of this site? The only sites you can verify that most files originated from are OoPA, mine and Retromags. Pointing to Archive.org for most gaming magazine files hosted there is like advertising/popularizing a thief in my opinion.

Yep. Mine are cannon fodder, er, recycling fodder after running them through my A3 document scanner.

Yep. The Imagine Publishing produced issues of PC Gamer (USA) were stellar both in terms of the look of the magazine and in page count. Some of those issues were huge!!! Somewhere around issue 100 Imagine were acquired by/sold out to Future Publishing and that was the ballgame although if you peruse the issues you will see a distinct change in the layout from issue 73 onward. I personally like the earlier format so from a scanning perspective I'd rather scan those than the later issues. I pretty much owned all those issues issues until a run in with a Retromags mod and the year 2000 cut-off fiasco resulted in my burning a pile of magazines and in the case of PC Gamer, taking them into work for the lunch room.

marktrade's raw scans of Play issue 16 have been edited and are now available over at Kiwis.World.

PC Format issue 20 is now available at Kiwis.World.

You obviously haven't been around Amiga Format then. It's like these two were joined at the hip in regards to wacky covers :-)

PC Format issue 14 is now available at Kiwis.World.

PC Gamer (USA) issue 123, the tenth anniversary issue, is now available over at Kiwis.World.

Personally, I'd run with the naming convention on my site for this title Sega Visions (1990-06) Vol.01-01.pdf for the file itself and likely simply Vol.01-01 on the product page. If the product changed mid-cycle from one naming convention to another I'd use 1990-06 release date as the title to ensure issues display correctly in Joomla.