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Japanese Magazines Scan Project


JhonnyD

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9 hours ago, JhonnyD said:

Gamest 3 online, I've scanned a Famitsu issue, these contains some fold out pages that scanned through the scansnap iX500 result in some slightly cut sides. When put together I have some text missing and misaligned images. https://imgur.com/a/oe3cfET

I think that I'll need an A3 scanner when I'll decide to scan more Famitus issues

Thanks man, I never thought I would see some of these.

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On 10/7/2019 at 9:01 AM, JhonnyD said:

yep, I kinda knew about that link, I just want to point out that I have a full set of the regular issues, I don't have all the extra/special issues, so my uploads will have "holes" when it comes to the sequential numbering.

Do you have a list of specialty issues you don't have? The Street Fighter, Fatal Fury, and Parodius, special issues have already been scanned.

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23 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

When scanning foldout pages which have been cut apart into separate pieces, autocrop should be turned off.  The Scansnap's autocrop crops a very small portion of all 4 sides of the page.  It's nowhere near the savage butchery perpetrated on many of the magazines scanned for this site by guillotine cutter debinding (quality standards? what quality standards?), but when trying to join together scans of two fold out pages that have text running from one page to the next, you'll want every single pixel preserved.  So for those pages, turn off autocrop and set the scan size to the largest available (letter size should be fine).  That way, you'll be in control of cropping and will be able to more flawlessly reassemble the pages in editing.

I can find the option to modify document size but can't find the one to remove the autocrop, can you post more details

 

17 hours ago, JonnyCGood said:

Do you have a list of specialty issues you don't have? The Street Fighter, Fatal Fury, and Parodius, special issues have already been scanned.

I don't have most of them, same for the gamest mook series, I have a decent but not complete set. I'll scan everything I have first and that's will take forever. I would love to start gathering and scanning all the Famitsu and Famimaga issues but that's probably not gonna happen in this lifetime.

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18 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Unless my calculations are incorrect, if you scan two issues of Famitsu per week, you could be caught up in around 22 years.  And then you could die with a tombstone engraved with "He wasted his life.  What was he thinking???" 😋

That kind of reminds me of an ad for the SNES game Equinox:

equinox.jpg

Edited by Ethereal Dragonz
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22 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Sorry, I wasn't clear.  By default, ScanSnap paper size is set to "automatic detection."  This is actually autocrop.  By manually selecting a paper size, you are turning autocrop off.  If you select a size larger than the page you're scanning, it will ensure that you're scanning every part of the page.

Unless my calculations are incorrect, if you scan two issues of Famitsu per week, you could be caught up in around 22 years.  And then you could die with a tombstone engraved with "He wasted his life.  What was he thinking???" 😋

Thanks, will try to look into it when I have time.

It looks like I'll have to scan 2 issues each day then :D

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  • 2 weeks later...

Wonder if anyone's familiar of any trade journals that were published for Japanese game developers in the 80s/90s. Reason being I and a bunch of RHDN peeps strongly suspect that there were development libraries sold to companies thru trade mags, the kind of thing that wouldn't be on newsstands but would show up in the mailbox of developers/companies. Might be something to look for.

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Leisure Line was a trade magazine published in Australia by arcade distributor/manufacturer Leisure & Allied Industries

Cash Box International was another Aussie trade magazine produced by Jack Rodios 

Play Meter magazine was a USA produced trade publication

All are now defunct. I have issues of the Oz magazines on my website and I really want to acquire issues of Play Meter but they are hideously expensive on eBay.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks to the kitsunebi insights and some gimp trial and error (too cheap for photoshop and their creative cloud subscription nonsense) I managed to get a readable and nice looking of the 2 pages spread I had to cut

I probably could have scanned a couple of Gamest issues instead of this whole editing madness 😑 luckily the Famitsu issue I scanned has only few of these fold out

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Luckily for the purposes of editing magazines, any Photoshop from the past 10 years is more or less the same.  The only thing missing from GIMP is Photoshop's content aware fill tool, but there is a plugin called Resynthesizer you can download that works in much the same way.  Get that plugin and GIMP will be just as good as Photoshop for magazine editing purposes.

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On 10/10/2019 at 2:17 PM, kitsunebi77 said:

Unless my calculations are incorrect, if you scan two issues of Famitsu per week, you could be caught up in around 22 years.  And then you could die with a tombstone engraved with "He wasted his life.  What was he thinking???" 😋

Ahhh... what a way to die tho. 

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For Famitsu, the goal should be to scan every single copy in existence. We can instead aim to scan every single copy from particular years, and then work our way up. So all the 1986 issues for instance. 

Also, Famitsu has released a digital version since at least 2016. So you won't need to scan those copies. I myself have purchased many of the digital copies.

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To be perfectly honest though, there are indeed only a limited number of years worth scanning.  Not just Famitsu, but all magazines.

Retromags is a site for people nostalgic about not just games, but more specifically the magazines they used to read.  Emphasis on "USED TO."  The reason everyone here has a hard-on for GamePro, Nintendo Power, and EGM is because those are the magazines they read as a kid, back when magazines were actually valuable sources of information about new and upcoming games, and not just a sad rehash of information everyone has already seen online like they are nowadays.  No one's ever going to be nostalgic for magazines published today because: A: There aren't any.  Well, almost.  And B: People are nostalgic for stuff they liked as kids, and kids don't read any of the handful of mags still being published.  No one's going to grow up and say "Oh awesome! It's a scan of that issue of the Official Xbox Magazine me and all my friends used to pass around in school when I was 10 back in 2019!!  Man, that really takes me back!"

So while there is cause to scan stuff covering the 8-32 bit eras, and probably the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era to a lesser extent, by the time of the PS3/Xbox360/Wii era magazines had pretty much stopped mattering.  Very few if any people will ever be nostalgic for any mags from that era in the same way as people are about something like Nintendo Power #1.  So there isn't going to be much enthusiasm driving anyone to scan those mags.

Personally, I feel that our current cut-off dates already allow for literally 100% of all the issues that anyone actually cares about to be scanned.  Anything we don't allow yet isn't actually something anyone's particularly anxious to get a copy of.

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22 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

by the time of the PS3/Xbox360/Wii era magazines had pretty much stopped mattering

This, after PS2 era and with the shift to digital distribution (both of games and information) monthly published printed media lost pretty much any relevance.

Sure I would like to see everything scanned and preserved but that's not very realistic giving the amount of stuff out there and how few people are doing this. You wouldn't believe how much stuff they printed in Japan, you can find guides and mooks even for the most obscure games.

I'm planning to scan my whole collection but with 2 kids and a job it won't be done anytime soon.

BTW Gimp served me well, I'm just using it to piece the pages together, as always I publish my scans raw and unedited in order to maintain my sanity.

Here you can find that monstrosity known as Famitsu 571 https://archive.org/details/Famitsu057119991126/ (I think the cover is missing in the gallery)

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Should be fine.  I don't see any major blemishes like rips or creases to edit out.  Just resize to around 1920px high (or no bigger than 2200 px high).

When uploading to the gallery, name the pic in accordance to how the other pics in the gallery are named.

And afterwards, go to that issue's entry in the database, click edit, and in the box labeled "single cover image," put the number in the url of your pic.  (You can see the number by mousing over your pic.  For example, the most recent pic I uploaded, Gamecca #50, is number 33274.)

All done!

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