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Torrents are Back! Over the last few weeks I have been working on pulling everything out of the Download Manager and organizing it into torrents for mass distribution. I believe the last time we rolled everything up was back in 2008? Maybe 2010? This is the entire Retromags collection as it stands today with 1338 releases and coming in at 195GB. Because of the size I have broken down the collection into 14 sets of 100 magazines each. The magazines are in alphabetical order so the first torrent is #-C and so on. This was a huge undertaking to extract, match and get everything renamed and organized for distribution. Please seed as much as you can to keep these torrents alive. Download All 1338 Retromags Releases! As always our Download Manager will still be the primary storage container. Every 50 new or updated items in the DLM will get rolled up into a torrent "update" pack.

There are no real words to express the gratitude I have for the work that you and the others have put into this site. I remember when Retromags was on life support and it looked this important preservation project would be over. Now it has become bigger than I thought it would be and there is still so much left to do. So thank you for that, I have not got around to saying that before.

Personally, I think putting the magazines on a private tracker would probably be the most ideal way to do torrenting. I got approximately 30-40 GB of magazines scanned by Retromags from Underground Gamer, though it was in a largely disorganized and random collection compiled about two years ago. The fact that I was able to get everything I wanted (ie 16 bit era magazines) shows the ability to have continuous seeders on that website. I was seeding the Gamepro 1993 collection torrent there, and had about 5 people get it off me. Because that website requires people to have a good ratio, it is far more ideal than a public tracker where you have far more leechers than seeders. I personally want complete sets of magazines through the 16 bit era, because sometimes the most important information for my SNES research comes in the more obscure magazines (ie look at the info I found about the Canadian StarFox competition, which I found in an issue of Game Players). Trying to go through and collect it by doing individual web links is tedious, a drain on the bandwidth of this website, and I currently don't have the ability to do it.

I wonder if instead of having a huge torrent for each magazine, if they were split up. This might discourage people from downloading EVERY magazine that GamePro put out and instead only pick the ones that really want. Another option is to put all the magazines into a huge RAR file (maybe 10 issues at a time). This way, a user is forced to bear part of the internet load. It kinda depends on how many people are downloading. But I guess that's the nature of any torrent. I frankly don't have a problem giving away bandwidth. I'm limited only the the upload speed. I've left my torrent machine on 24/7 since June and probably upload 25GB per month. I doubt Time Warner cares. In fact, in July, they upped my speed from 6mb down to 10mb and 500kb to 1mb up.

It seems torrents are getting many votes. I wonder what Philly thinks? I think it would probably be a worthwhile thing to do, and it's cool that some of our uploaders are doing it with their own work. The MU idea is pretty good, too. Like I said before, with torrents it's possible to put every issue into the torrent, and then if someone only wants a few certain issues from it, they can take those as they please and not have to download the whole collection. This to me is pretty convenient. Are .pdfs generally smaller in filesize than .cbrs? I'm wondering because it would be nice to keep a torrent collection small in size for bandwidth reasons. Not to mention people would probably seed it more.