Japanese Magazines Scan Project

[gingerbeardman]

Whilst I'm here, my search is as follows...

Magical Puzzle Popils
マジカルパズルポピルズ

complete key to article types on this page: http://bring.under.jp/ftindex/ftexsam1.html

• cm　Advertisement
• ne　Introduction (new)
• re　Review (review)

Famitsu

• GG＿マジカルパズルポピルズ　【9】ne201    (#130, May 2 1991)
• GG＿マジカルパズルポピルズ　【13】ne184    (#134, June 28 1991) *free floating preview*
• GG＿マジカルパズルポピルズ　【7◆26】re38,cm161    (#136, July 26 1991)
• GG＿マジカルパズルポピルズ　【10◆11】re39    (#147, Oct 11 1991)
• GG＿マジカルパズルポピルズ　【3・13】cm101    (#169, March 13 1992) *just a screenshot and price*
• GG＿マジカルパズルポピルズ　【4・10】cm133    (#173, April 10 1992)
• GG＿マジカルパズルポピルズ　【7・10】cm118    (#186, July 10 1992)

Edited August 1, 2019 by gingerbeardman

[gingerbeardman]

I've been watching Netflix "Hi Score Girl" and GAMEST features heavily in episode 5, and more. 

The series features quite accurate details of early 90s arcade gaming in Japan. 

https://www.netflix.com/title/80997338

Edited August 16, 2019 by gingerbeardman

[sqwirral]

On 8/14/2019 at 11:50 PM, gingerbeardman said:

I've been watching Netflix "Hi Score Girl" and GAMEST features heavily in episode 5.

The series features quite accurate details of early 90s arcade gaming in Japan. 

https://www.netflix.com/title/80997338

This is the greatest thing I've ever seen

[JonnyCGood]

Relevant for this thread, I found Gamest Issue #125 and uploaded it to archive. This issue came with a poster which I don't believe is scanned. I believe this is a regular issue of Gamest much in the same way the previous SFII issue was dedicated to one game. I think later one they spun these issues off into the "Gamest Mook" line. If you check archive there's other issues of Gamest and Gamest mook floating around archive.

https://archive.org/details/Gamest125Gokujuparodiusspecialissue

[gingerbeardman]

1 hour ago, JonnyCGood said:

I found Gamest Issue #125

Please tell us how this came to be!?

Thanks

Edited August 23, 2019 by gingerbeardman

[JonnyCGood]

On 8/23/2019 at 4:00 PM, gingerbeardman said:

Please tell us how this came to be!?

Thanks

Found it in a collection of Parodius Japanese guide books. A lot of the special issues of Gamest and the later Gamest Mook (GM) series have already been scanned by various people over the years. Issue 64 was SFII, and Issue 106 was Fatal Fury. The scans are pretty good, but when this project gets to these issues they'll be scanned in even higher quality.

[kitsunebi]

33 minutes ago, JonnyCGood said:

Found it in a collection of Parodius Japanese guide books. A lot of the special issues of Gamest and the later Gamest Mook (GM) series have already been scanned by various people over the years. Issue 64 was SFII, and Issue 106 was Fatal Fury. The scans are pretty good, but when this project gets to these issues they'll be scanned in even higher quality.

I was in contact with someone who claims to have had the entire run of Gamest (amongst others) scanned by a third-party service, but they have no intention of releasing the files to the public.  You may be aware of the site http://1dollarscan.com/ which will scan mags and books for a fee.  There are dozens of similar sites in Japan - apparently digitizing your collections of books/manga/magazines is a quite common thing for people to do, presumably to clear up room in a country where living space can be expensive. But people keep those scanned files for their personal collections rather than upload them to the Internet at large.  That seems to be the way of it in Japan, with only the odd book here and there leaking out someplace.  So it's up to sites like ours to create a publicly accessible archive of Japanese publications.

[JonnyCGood]

15 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

apparently digitizing your collections of books/manga/magazines is a quite common thing for people to do, presumably to clear up room in a country where living space can be expensive. But people keep those scanned files for their personal collections rather than upload them to the Internet at large.  That seems to be the way of it in Japan, with only the odd book here and there leaking out someplace.  So it's up to sites like ours to create a publicly accessible archive of Japanese publications.

I'm finding things on Japanese manga/book sites, and I've tried finding where they're getting them. Surprisingly, many come from Western scanlation and manga/hentai sites, but others seem pretty mysterious. I think those other ones might be leaked from private JP collections.

Have you tried the Perfect Dark (P2P program)? Supposedly a Japanese P2P program and might have some things on there.

[kitsunebi]

1 hour ago, JonnyCGood said:

Have you tried the Perfect Dark (P2P program)? Supposedly a Japanese P2P program and might have some things on there.

First of all, even if I did have access to whatever hypothetical files might be available, the entire point of the perfect dark system is to keep everything off of the "regular internet."  Uploading whatever could be found there would just burn whatever bridges got you there in the first place.

Regardless, I don't do anything P2P anymore.  Too many hassles from my ISP.

But most importantly...I don't care.  If I thought for one second that some Japanese P2P program might have stuff I was interested in, like a complete run of 1990s-era PC Gamer, I might consider it.  But the best I could hope to find there are more Japanese magazines, which frankly don't interest me at all, since they're mostly about Japanese games.  I don't really care for video games anymore, and Japan has historically never developed quality PC games, so none of the games I grew up playing on PCs came from Japan.  The only reason I scan Japanese mags for Retromags is because I didn't want to just be another useless leecher, and Japanese mags are the only things I have access to here.  So I bought a scanner, bought a bunch of Japanese mags, and started contributing.  I realize that 99.9% of our members don't do that, but it's always been my hope that some day, one of those 0.01% will pull a PC gaming mag I'm interested in out of their closet and decide to finally give something back to this community.  It's almost never happened, but I guess I can dream, right?

[Ethereal Dragonz]

4 hours ago, JonnyCGood said:

Have you tried the Perfect Dark (P2P program)? Supposedly a Japanese P2P program and might have some things on there.

Interesting. I have not heard of Perfect Dark before. I just set it up and will let you know if I find any magazines.

[Ethereal Dragonz]

5 hours ago, Ethereal Dragonz said:

Interesting. I have not heard of Perfect Dark before. I just set it up and will let you know if I find any magazines.

Okay, I found some interesting ones: Famimaga, Hobby Japan and Micom Basic.

I'll upload whatever is not already on Archive.org once they are completed.

...but mostly Perfect Dark sucks, a lot of it is bad garbage.

Edited August 27, 2019 by Ethereal Dragonz

[kitsunebi]

Dunno about the others, but there are well over 100 Micom Basics on archive.

[JonnyCGood]

45 minutes ago, Ethereal Dragonz said:

Okay, I found some interesting ones: Famimaga, Hobby Japan and Micom Basic.

I'll upload whatever is not already on Archive.org once they are completed.

...but mostly Perfect Dark sucks, a lot of it is bad garbage.

Here's a "cracked" version of PD. PD normally requires that you download a certain amount of "unity" to share with others before you can download or search, but this should let you set any GB amount you want. For how to use it,  just google "perfect dark tutorial" and "perfect dark nodes" for the rest. You'll probably need to forward your port too. I have not personally tried it.
https://mega.nz/#!F0xAkK7a!PP4xTBGBYx9rwgibSyFaL7NxaV4CkLBdhp9iclFBpwQ

Edited August 27, 2019 by JonnyCGood
expand

[kitsunebi]

1 minute ago, JonnyCGood said:

I have not personally tried it.

Any reason why not?  Or why not the normal way?

As I said, I'm unable to use P2P due to my ISP.  Just curious if you have a similar situation which makes it impossible.

[JonnyCGood]

10 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Any reason why not?  Or why not the normal way?

I don't know how to forward ports or even know what that even means. I used to know what that meant, but I haven't done it since 2004.

[kitsunebi]

Just now, JonnyCGood said:

I don't know how to forward ports or even know what that even means. I used to know what that meant, but I haven't done it since 2004.

Yeah, back when I used to torrent (before I had my Internet shut down by my ISP) I had to look up some online tutorials about port forwarding for a members-only comics torrent site I had joined.  I've forgotten as well, so I couldn't give any advice other than to say that the info is out there.

[gingerbeardman]

I installed PerfectDark in a Windows VM on macOS and it is working.

Opening ports was the trickiest part, as I had to do it in multiple places:

1. modem & routers (I already had a port open so I reused that number in PerfectDark settings)
2. in the VM using nat.conf and confirming the VM's local IP address

And of course open the firewall for VMWare Fusion.

PerfectDark was good enough to show the correct port open status so it was easy to see once I had it working.

I found some 花札 (Hanafuda) related stuff already. So we're good to go!

[JonnyCGood]

Gamest also had a video series of released via VHS. Most of them rips are 360p, and not the best quality. I think most of these come from Niconico.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8BzROJQvZM

 

[JhonnyD]

for some reason I'm not receving notifications for this thread, anyhow the scans are slowly getting along and I managed to acquire the elusive Issue N.3

[JhonnyD]

On 8/23/2019 at 8:10 PM, JonnyCGood said:

Relevant for this thread, I found Gamest Issue #125 and uploaded it to archive. This issue came with a poster which I don't believe is scanned. I believe this is a regular issue of Gamest much in the same way the previous SFII issue was dedicated to one game. I think later one they spun these issues off into the "Gamest Mook" line. If you check archive there's other issues of Gamest and Gamest mook floating around archive.

https://archive.org/details/Gamest125Gokujuparodiusspecialissue

Gamest numbering is all over the place, it includes several special issues like the one you posted, some issues of gamest comics and even totally unrelated stuff later on

[Ethereal Dragonz]

10 hours ago, JhonnyD said:

for some reason I'm not receving notifications for this thread, anyhow the scans are slowly getting along and I managed to acquire the elusive Issue N.3

You are a hero for getting these Japanese gaming mags out online.

[JonnyCGood]

3 hours ago, JhonnyD said:

Gamest numbering is all over the place, it includes several special issues like the one you posted, some issues of gamest comics and even totally unrelated stuff later on

This site is an index to all the Gamest issues, and it lines up exactly with the issue. Here's their breakdown of issue 125:

http://www.netlaputa.ne.jp/~dummy/gamest/magazine/gamest/v125.html

This page has the covers too:

http://www.netlaputa.ne.jp/~dummy/gamest/magazine/cover.html

 

[JhonnyD]

yep, I kinda knew about that link, I just wantt 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

Currently scanning a Famitsu issue (these are huge ) and Gamest 3

Edited October 7, 2019 by JhonnyD

[JhonnyD]

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

Edited October 9, 2019 by JhonnyD

[kitsunebi]

6 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

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.