Areala

I checked my collection earlier this evening, and the only issue I have which is missing from our archives is #190. It would fill in a gap, and I'm willing to donate it to the cause, but won't be of much help when you bump up against the missing issues.

(I also have GamePro Code Vault Issue 32 which, again, I am happy to donate to the cause, but this will not help you in your specific problem).

I think much of our hopes rest on @Phillyman indexing his hoard.

*huggles*
Areala

Looks like the Ehrgeiz guide is the first to appear on the site! Thanks for donating, @DaBCGang!

*huggles*
Areala

This sounds right up @E-Day's alley. He's the GamePro expert here.

*huggles*
Areala

11 hours ago, KMFMS said:

Areala,

THANK YOU!! Haven't heard back from MigJmz yet with a location to ship them to but I'll work on packing those up for shipment.

Also, I found scans I did of all of the covers before some of them started showing wear. Those should help for those magazines that aren't pristine.

My pleasure. I figured it was faster for me to figure it out than to make @MigJmz wade through his backlog. Glad to assist.

*huggles*
Areala

For the PSMs, the ones you have which wouldn't duplicate any of the issues we already have or the ones I donated to @MigJmz are:

August 1999, April 2002, July - December & Holiday 2003, January - December & Holiday 2004, January - April 2005, June - December & Holiday 2005, February - April 2006, June - December & Holiday 2006, January - May 2007, and July - November 2007.

That would take care of nearly the last three years' worth of the magazine's life, and fill in a few important gaps in the earlier timeline as well! Phenomenal offer!

*huggles*
Areala

On 10/19/2021 at 6:09 PM, cospefogo said:

Hello, guys!

If I am not wrong, my last login was in 2013! Can you believe that?

Recently a friend of mine (we are in Brazil) found someone on internet selling a lot of magazines of all sorts — from cinema/movies, to sports, to PC computing and, of course, videogames. The owner is moving to Europe and was in need to sell his collection. My friend was shocked when discovered there the complete run of all brazilian gaming magazines from 90's, in a PERFECT STATE! Brand new!

On top of that, the seller also had few USA GamePro and EGM on the lot — by seeing some videos my friend sent me (he is in another city) I instantly remembered RETROMAGS. I am a huge fan of 90's GamePro and EGM and returned here to check what I could find... AND GUYS, there is a LOT OF LOVE HERE!!! OOOOOHHHH!!! So many scans!

Thank you for this WONDERFUL WORK of yours. Nostalgia is hitting hard in my mind now... Today I am 44 years old but I vividly remember those days back in 1993, 1994 when, from time to time, brazilian comic stores were selling USA gaming magazines — expensive, of course, imported ones — But I have bought many of them.

I regret so much for selling my magazines back in the beginning of 2000's...

Regards!

Cospefogo.

What a wonderful treasure trove! Were you able to buy any of the magazines?

*huggles*
Areala

We aren't currently set up to preserve manuals, although this has been discussed in the past and might be something we expand into in the future.

For now, I'd recommend ReplacementDocs.com as a potential site of interest for game manuals. There are probably other sites out there doing instruction manual preservation, but that's probably the most famous one.

*huggles*
Areala  

22 hours ago, bombatomba said:

After managing to find some lost pages I have finally finished putting together OPM US #18, and some forum searching shows that the best way to submit is to ask and provide a link to Google Drive.  If someone would be kind enough to approve/deny that would be wonderful:

This was kind of an interesting experience for me.  It was a perfect storm of substandard magazine quality, substandard debinding, and substandard scanning equipment.  That being said I enjoyed the discovery of the process, despite the hardships caused by the issues I mentioned.  I would say the scanner is the biggest obstacle, along with it permanently being stuck at my place of employment.  It's a Xerox Workcentre 5335, which supports upload to USB, but tends to leave many scans at a bad angle .  The others were a Visioneering Patriot 430 (easy and straight scans, but far too many colored lines) and a Canon LIDE 700F (I can deal with slow but it causes far too much light bleed-through with magazines).  But I am at a point in my life where spending money is not an option, so I do what I can with what I have.

Anyway, thank you .  If anyone has any constructive criticism I would be happy to hear.  Despite my issues I would like to continue (though hopefully at a faster pace).  I have a number of US PC Gamer, Computer Games, and some US OPM and assorted strat guides I can contribute.

I'm in a similar boat in that I have things I'd like to scan, but my scanner is a fifteen year old flatbed. It's so slow as to make doing anything other than covers or the smallest booklet-style mags completely impractical. I feel your pain.

That said, you did a really good job despite all those obstacles. I've seen some very minor errors as I've flipped through (page 20 isn't fully cropped to the bottom bleed, and there's a duplicate Retromags attribution page at the end of the file), but if this is your first attempt, I cannot WAIT to see your second! Top-notch work!

*huggles*
Areala

The Video Game Database has been a part of the site for well over a year at this point, but I decided to start messing around with it and I'm pretty excited at the connectivity this will allow.

For a sample, here's an entry I filled out for 1943: The Battle of Midway:

As you can see, the database entry allows a screenshot, a video link, and box artwork as you would expect. But it also allows us to link to specific issues where the game was reviewed (Electronic Gaming Monthly #1, in this case), and also allows gallery links to display up to three ads for the game.

What's more fun is that if you go to EGM #1's entry in our magazine database and scroll to the bottom, you will see links to the various entries in the video game database for the games reviewed in that issue.

There's an awful lot of work to be done with this, but every project has to start somewhere, right?

Anyway, if you feel the urge to help out with the website but don't have the time or equipment necessary to scan or edit mags,  taking a few minutes to edit this database and link the games reviewed in a particular issue of a magazine would be an excellent way to give back to the community and help us grow our utility as a preservation and archival site!

*huggles*
Areala

Xbox and GameCube emulation have really come a long way in the past year. I just started messing around with both Dolphin and Xemu, and the results are honestly mind-blowing, especially from Xemu. Neither one is perfect, and my system is not bleeding edge as far as specs go (I'm rocking an nVidia GTX 1660 6GB, so I'm a few years out of date), but man is it wild seeing my computer push these systems around.

*huggles*
Areala

I've seen a few of these, and the covers all had a prism/shimmery effect added to them which would have made getting a decent scan difficult. I don't know that they were all like that, but the ones I saw were.

*huggles*
Areala

On 8/31/2021 at 11:01 AM, FataMorgana said:

Il file non funziona

L'ho appena testato e ha funzionato. Puoi riprovare, per favore?

I believe Phillyman simply hasn't collated the newly available magazines into a torrent yet. A new torrent goes up about once a year or so with all of the previous year's content added in.

*huggles*
Areala

3 hours ago, elliogle said:

Hi all! I am a 3DO collector (Been on and off since its launch), I am back in the game and are currently putting together a full wiki around the marvellous machine! This includes every article that appears in magazines. Retromags has been very helpful, and happy to return the favour by uploading magazines (I have missing 3DO UK/Japanese ones, Thai, German and other Japanese magazines. As well as strategy guides.)

My question is, whats the best way to scan them? I don't want to cut them up, I was looking at the Fijitsu Scansnap and happy upto that value, but reviews are abit...meh....for magazines, so wondered if anyone else has recommendations?

Welcome to the party, @elliogle! That's an incredible offer, and I'll echo what @MigJmz says about looking into any local scanning services that might be able to accommodate your needs. I agree, better to have a decent-quality still-bound scan as opposed to lacking one completely.

*huggles*
Areala

So  I thought I would resurrect this thread since I never posted in it, but also to address some new tech that has arrived in the four years since @kitsunebi started it.

For PS2 emulation, PCSX2 is basically the gold standard. It's not perfect, but it runs virtually everything I've tried to play on it reasonably well. Infrequent updates, but at this point in the dev cycle, that's to be expected.

The Wii and GameCube scene has come a long way as well, with Dolphin doing a stellar job of tackling games and frequently updating to kill bugs and add features.

PPSSPP is, likewise, the best PSP emulator out there as far as I can tell, and it runs every game I've tried with it just fine.

But for PS1 emulation, if you haven't tried out DuckStation, holy cow... ePSXe is a phenomenal emulator, but DuckStation is a whole different level of incredible. Seriously, give this one a look, because what this team is doing with PlayStation emulation is some god-tier shenanigans, and they update frequently. You can run games exactly as they were intended, or you can upscale and perspective correct the dickens out of them, up to 8k resolution if you have the graphical hardware. 

RetroArch is what I'm using for just about everything else. Its multi-core approach, allowing it to frontend for basically every system on the planet, makes it so convenient.

*huggles*
Areala

Hello, fellow Lara-holics. It is I, Areala, prophetess for the Divine Ponytail, bringing to you tidings of great joy and overwhelming solace. For today, 'tis true, GOG.com has added four most excellent Tomb Raider games to their already impressive library, and rendered unto all Tomb Raider games a most incredible discounted price.

https://www.gog.com/promo/2021_games_festival_tomb_raider

Behold, for the next two weeks, one can acquire "Tomb Raider Legend", "Tomb Raider Anniversary", and "Tomb Raider Underworld" each for the low price of under US $1.00, and series reboot, "Tomb Raider: Game of the Year" edition from Square-Enix for a mere $3.99.

Lest this offer fail to entice you, I shall add that you can also acquire the classic "Tomb Raider 1 + 2 + 3" bundle for $1.99, "TR: Last Revelation + TR: Chronicles" bundle for $1.39, and "Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness" for $0.97.

Thus, if you have none in your library, the total cost to acquire ten total Tomb Raider titles, all completely patched and updated to their latest versions, comes to slightly over $11.

Be not afraid. Lara shall go with you across all platforms, free of restrictive DRM , the shibboleth which would vex even the most experienced archaeologist.

Be thou at peace, for today, the Divine Ponytail hath smiled upon thee.

*huggles*
Areala

6 hours ago, Blake00 said:

Urgh.. sorry guys. Can't seem to delete my own posts (just like I still can't edit them either despite someone telling me I needed 10 posts to unlock that feature).

So unfortunately someone else will have to get rid of the duplicate sorry. Prob better to kill the first one instead of the second as the embeds didn't work in the first one!

No worries. I took care of it.

*huggles*
Areala

Hi, @replis! Unfortunately we don't have any issues of this magazine currently in our database. Maybe one of our European users can help us out with that though. OK, Benelux region members: this is your time to shine!

*huggles*
Areala

1 hour ago, twiztor said:

well at least you've got Madden '04 to balance out the value. 

I don't seek out individual sports or racing games (they're my least-favorite genre) unless they have something unique or interesting to offer. A good example of this is Pete Sampras Tennis on the Genesis, which offers four-player play through two controller hookups wired directly into the cartridge (the only game on the Genesis to do this, as far as I'm aware).

Most of the other sports and driving titles, especially the likes of Madden or other EA franchise games, I wound up with because they came as part of a lot. Some I even have multiple copies of because of this. I don't want to just throw them away, but they also have zero sale or trade value to places that deal in retro games, so I'm kind of just stuck with them. Oh well...there are worse problems to have, and at least if I ever get in the mood to play an NFL game, I have Madden '04 to keep me company.

*huggles*
Areala

What kind of crack-smoking fiends have managed to jack the price of Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within (universally recognized as one of the worst horror games ever made) to over $350? I'm not done entering my PS1 collection yet, but this one blows even Koudelka, a phenomenal 4-disc RPG with light survival horror elements, out of the water. This should not be the most valuable game in my PS1 library.

I do not understand.

*huggles*
Areala

I have a fairly sizeable strategy guide library that I've built up over the years, but I focused on games (or at least genres) that I enjoyed. That, unfortunately, eliminates pretty much all sports games and virtually every wrestling game from that time period with the exception of a couple of the Smackdown titles.

I'll keep an eye out for any of them, and if I track one down I can see about getting it to someone who can scan them though.

*huggles*
Areala

Furthermore, Final Fantasy VII really is not that great. *ducks and heads for cover*

*huggles*
Areala

I should debind one of my black-and-white guides and practice with it. I might be able to contribute some of those.

*huggles*
Areala

13 hours ago, Realmguardian said:

Thank you for the reply. I have been dipping my feet into the emulation scene. I spent most of my time on various models of computers (from Timex Sinclair to Atari ST). My children had NES, SNES, PS1, PS2 and different handhelds. I finally secured a reasonable  equipped computer for emulation. I am looking at some of the rpgs that appeared on the PS1 and PS2 especially Suikoden I-V and Suikoden Tactics . So I am looking for scans of old Playstation magazines. Appears some may be difficult to find.

I dumped 38 issues of PSM on @MigJmz earlier this year, but I think the highest numbered issue I sent him was 97. There will be more PSM coming, but sadly I don't have any from the triple-digits. I'm always on the lookout for them though, so if I secure any, I'll pass them on.

*huggles*
Areala

1 minute ago, E-Day said:

I don't have any guides that I know of in my pile of stuff to be scanned.

Yet...

*huggles*
Areala