VGBounceHouse

I still have a lot of work to do on my magazine collection database but I'm gonna put that off to get another magazine done.

After this I want to sync my collection with RetroMags' numbering before I finish another previously scanned mag and begin looking at requests to see where I can help out. I plan on taking breaks here and there to create threads for a few other missing magazines in the Database forum.

Thanks so much you guys!

Done and done! That saved me an hour uploading this monster.

Any chance if I upload my version of the cover to the Gallery it could replace the current skewed one?

On to new business!

http://vgpavilion.com/blog/my-magazine-collection-part-1/

I finally have the raw data of my collection up. If you check that post you'll find a horizontally scrolling table with the fields I felt most important for my project. I will be using RetroMags' issue numbering standard but for archival purposes I wanted to document printed issue, volume and number entries. I will have a follow-up post that syncs with RetroMags to help mark issues here as "Acquired" as well as aid in the request feature. There are a couple of places where my plan diverges (such as separating NextGen from Next Generation) and some new magazines but I will create some posts in the Database forum for those.

Beginning next week I plan to knock out two issues of Video Games I already have scanned then I will take a look at the existing requests and see where I can help out. I'd prefer to concentrate on the earliest magazines but am more than willing to help fulfill the RetroMags community requests.

Thanks for confirming my suspicions. It's really shocking just how close to death video games came in the West after the Atari bubble popped.

They really didn't, though home computers weren't generating the same level of revenue they were successful enough and coin-ops were still chugging along. In terms of media, however, it was never financially viable to just cover the arcade scene and CGW was well established so the "pretenders" to the throne like Computer Play had to fight for the advertising dollar. And while they weren't no dedicated game mags you got plenty of coverage in the computer-specific magazines of the time.

Sure, in comparison to the money being raked in from 1979-mid 1982 it might look like the hobby was close to death, but I had no shortage of games on the PC and then Amiga while my friends gamed on Apple and Atari home computers. The NES took years to gain a foothold and when the Genesis hit much of its early catalog came from the Amiga and the devs were up to speed because of hardware similarity. Electronic Arts launched into this "vacuum" and had plenty of success across a broad range of home computers.

Hmm...the cbr links aren't working for me,

Sorry about that, forgot to switch .dev to .com they should be fixed now.

Awesome , eigther me or eday will get this up on the site as soon as possible. I'm at work so will be maybe 8 Hours before I can get to it.

Thanks again!

One more update...

Uploading the 600 dpi tiffs to dropbox now. Its only 4 images and 4 reference photos taken on my iphone so you can see where they where in the magazine and compare against the pages for color adjustments or leveling or whatever. But its 481 MB zip file. 600 dpi tiffs are extremely large apparently.

Thanks to Sean these additional pages have been added to the preview:

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1994/12/egm/pages/

I have also updated the RetroMags archive which still contains just single pages other than the two fold-outs:

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1994/12/egm/Electronic-Gaming-Monthly-Issue-065-Dec-1994.cbr

I use my reader primarily for reading comics. As such, it is set to single page display. In comic releases, all 2-page spreads are released as a one-page-join. Thus, when you get to a join, the page will be twice as long as every other page, and (assuming you are zoomed in) the reader will advance from left to right over the page before moving down to facilitate reading the content in the correct order. Setting the reader to a two page spread only allows for both pages to be displayed in their entirety. You can't be zoomed in at all. Unless you have a very large display, this probably makes reading most magazine text quite difficult. As such, there is still merit to including joins (as I said, that's actually the standard for comic releases, which is what the readers are designed for, after all.)

As a test I have added two more archives using the same image size/compression. The first removes all single pages that have a joined version so mostly advertising but also a number of editorial pages:

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1994/12/egm/egm065j.cbr

and finally an archive with everything, all the individual pages as well as the joins:

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1994/12/egm/egm065all.cbr

I do not name my personal files this way. Once you release your scan, I will be renaming it to Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 065 December 1994. I make a copy of the files I scanned and rename them as per the standard on the site. Once it's uploaded, I delete it and keep the one I named

I think this one is good to go now if you wanted to grab and rename it.

Computer Gaming World sometimes had a section on consoles from some of the distaff Electronic Games editors, I'd have to dig into the archives to find how frequently they did it though.

I'll check this out. Do you need a someone to do the the new release post and upload to the server? It going to take me a while to DL and check.

I still have never done that so yes please!

So I am running this by the mint copy I got that is a subscriber issue. There are some additional things missing in your scan that are in my copy.

The first is the Quartermans cheat sheet for this issue that goes after page 34.

The second is a small subscribers card between 162 and 163.Another subscriber card between 176 and 177 (Holiday themed subscription card with a gift postcard for recipient of gift subscription)Correction on the last, you do have the holiday subscription card.

On the other two do you just want me to scan and add them in or do you want me to give you the raw scans and and you complete it yourself (And have the higher res scans for your site.)

Other than that its seems ready for release. Needs standard filename of " electronic_gaming_monthly_165_-_1994_dec.cbz " as well.

That would be awesome, would never have known those were missing! Happy to do the edits from the raw scans.

The filenames still confuse me, the pattern I used is the same I've used on my other releases. Some people use spaces, some underlines, some dashes. Sometimes a different pattern for the individual pages versus the archive. Is this just the EGM standard because no one mentioned anything with the others.

Also since there aren't too many, it's up to you of course, I wouldn't mind seeing the few content related combined pages.mit would t make the issue that much larger. And maybe the pull out ads at the front and back as one image.

Have you tried facing pages mode in your reader? I'm more than happy to include them just curious about the difference since the individual pages line up. I hate the 1 pixel border one reader I use adds when in that mode.

I've gone ahead and prepared a RetroMags "release" version. I use the quotes because while the file naming is done and the credits page is included I've only added the two foldouts and not any of the other two-page spreads.

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1994/12/egm/Electronic-Gaming-Monthly-Issue-065-Dec-1994.cbr

I'm happy to make any changes the mods or community think are warranted after browsing the preview page. If there are specific merges worth including (beyond how they naturally line up in facing pages mode) I will refresh the archive. Otherwise I believe this is ready for release here.

I know I'm the slowest archiver but hopefully I will pick up the pace on the next project!

Sorry about that, hopefully I have finally come through...

Did VG Bounce Hpuse ever get you those missing pages from EGM 86?

Nope. That issue has been sitting in limbo for a year or two now. He seems to have disappeared.

http://vgpavilion.com/eday/199609egm.rar

There are three TIFFs in there to cover the four missing pages. I originally tried to debind the issue but the two-page back ad had a massive amount of glue on it and I wasn't happy with the minor tears and smeared glue sections. Thanks to indexing my collection I found I had a second copy! The scan of the two-page ad (154-155.tif) is from the second copy folded onto the scanner galss and held down by both my flattening glass as well as the scanner lid. It looks fine enough but for my own purposes I plan on a second debinding adventure in the future, possibly with the suggested heat gun method from one of the other threads.

Ok, time to finalize things.

The preview page has been fully updated through page 404. The inside cover ad for Sunsoft's Looney Tunes games would take far too much guesswork to reconstruct because there is 1/4" missing including a custom font that I haven't found an equivalent for a proper fill. At this point I'm going to surrender on the plan to rebuild all joined pages in this one case though I may revisit that decision in the future. I have put up two versions of the ad, one with the page fold included and one without. You'll find both at the bottom of the page. Just curious which one is preferred.

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1994/12/egm/pages/

I have prepared a test RetroMags release. I used a scale of 203.7dpi which produces a standard image height of 2200px saved as JPG level 9. I used DPI scaling so that the inserts which are of a different size would scale proportionately rather than being forced to match the height of the standard pages. This archive doesn't have any joined pages, the RetroMags page nor proper filenames. It is 476.4MB in size:

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1994/12/egm/egm65temp.cbr

I still need to finish the Quarterback Club ad edit and add any joined pages people think are worth including. I also need to know where the joined pages should go, between the two joined pages, following them or whatever.

Note: I need to grab some sleep but wanted to post this first. The file is still uploading but should be ready within 20 minutes, so around 6:40am EST.

EDIT

I was able to repair the Looney Tunes ad thanks to the same issue I used to fix the Quarterback Club ad and the preview has been updated. The temporary archive still has the old versions of those four pages.

Updated again through page 385.

So looking at what you have so far. If I was doing it, I'd probrably put facing scans in there for maybe 6 of the spreads you've got so far in addition to the ones above. The Chun Li table of contents. The SF2 article first page with Chun Li again. The Ristar two. The RPG map. The Tarzan ad. But your free to do it how you want of course. That table of contents is basically a poster layout and would be cool to see as one image.

And it's eday who has the EGM 86 that needs the last 4 pages I believe.

Thanks for that Sean, don't know why I didn't have the joined Chun Li pages included already. Hopefully I already have all the others on display. I'll check eday's thread and if I find the call I'll do the reply when the scans are ready for download.

I'm into the Marketplace now so the next 10 pages or so will go much faster then I have the horrible Looney Tunes ad from the inside back cover to deal with which is gonna take some fiddling. Looks like I can put together a test archive sometime tomorrow and then we can decide on the finals.

I'm down to the final 20 pages. When I scan the single page ad I need to repair the one double-page Quarterback Club ad I will also scan the requested pages from EGM 86. Just need to track down the thread to know who to alert that the TIFFs are available for download lol

This file will easily be 1 gig

The 300dpi version is over 3GB at the moment.

That's what I was concerned about. Due to size should we have two versions? On with single pages only and one that offers all the combined images as bonus content? We've never had a scan of this size with all the ads in addition to all the posters and all the double page content combined. I mean on those Video Games magazines from the early 80's that were small it wasn't really a big deal.

I mean on some of the EGM;s I've scanned I did two page combined images but it was usually only 3-4 tops for the whole magazine. This one is going to have like.,, 100 ? I don't know.

As always I will defer to the mods (and community) of RetroMags in assembling the release. Is going with two files even an option? When I run the initial build of the CBR I'll post the size of the file based on the 2200px height I use for resizing for RetroMags.

Well I have the capability, but that isn't the way files are set to open by default on my reader. Displaying two pages side by side so that both are completely visible means that the text will be smaller than I would prefer. I can change the way it's displayed via a menu, but frankly changing the display method back and forth every time I hit connected pages is more trouble than it's worth. Since cbr is really designed for comics, it's primarily used to read single pages from top to bottom. All comics released these days with two-page spreads assume the reader will be set to display single pages only, so only the joined image is included, and it's extremely rare for single-page files of those pages to also be included. So in comics, anyway, joins are the norm, and thus I would assume most people's CBR readers are set to single-page display by default.

Currently the only "joined" pages planned for inclusion are:

There are a number of pages that kinda only make sense when joined like the ones with maps. Please refer to my work-in-progress page:

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1994/12/egm/pages/

In case you've never used my site each image can be clicked/tapped for fullscreen inspection (mousewheel/pinch & drag). Each single page will line up fine when in facing pages mode (except that the CBR readers I've used seem to like to put a single pixel frame around each page disrupting the join) but kitsunebi77 please feel free to suggest other joined pages (the ones already joined are at the bottom of the preview but I can join any others) and hopefully we can come to a consensus on which pages should be included in the RetroMags release.

Down to the last 50 pages. So many printing errors on the pages with dark backgrounds!

Just wanted to say again how much I appreciate you putting these ads together. Even back when these magazines were still new I lamented that I couldn't see the entire page. I'd have to sit there and wonder how a nice double page ad was supposed to look. Now that I see them so many years later, I feel like it was such a shame they ever divided them in the first place.

Thanks, I actually enjoy the tougher ones but sometimes it's nice to get an easy one like this:

There is no need to join ad pages. People can set their reader to display a single page at a time or two pages at a time. If you are joining ads, hopefully you are including the pages as singles images as well as the combined image.

I only combine pages that are folded out in the magazine like a centerfold. And even then I include each side of it as single pages (page 111, page 112, page 112w for the combined image).

If you check the preview you'll see each page is available on its own. In my previous RetroMags releases I have followed your advice and only included fold-outs, not two-pagers. I do need to assemble them though, both so that when someone's in "facing pages" mode everything lines up, and for my own preservation site where I index the ads and need to show them as single images as well as allow people to take them for their own use.

I'll have questions about that again this time as there are two fold-out ads, including one with as irregular page cut lol you can see the individual pages and the merged ones, at least how I thought they best looked if you were physically unfolding and reading but am happy to make whatever changes best fit RetroMags archive style.

Sorry for the long delay!

I've made some more progress and have updated the preview page

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1994/12/egm/pages/

I've finished through page 333 except for the one ad reassembly. With luck I will finish up tomorrow or the next day.

Sean, I know the overlap is minimal on some of these pages and I put that one up more as an example of dealing with the top-of-page three bar thing I was whining about. While joining ad pages is my focus I am cognizant regarding the use of facing pages when reading so making sure the pages line up has me dealing with this a lot, which unfortunately has slowed me down as the last 40 pages or so have been nothing but joined pages because of that lousy top bar

As mentioned earlier I also needed to index my magazine collection which I finished last week, nearly 1,300 magazines with details. I will have the database up after I finish this issue of EGM and the process means I'll need to start a few threads in the Database Discussion forum lol

Today was the final day of clearing out my parents' house to ready it for sale. Was far more work than anticipated but I did discover some tucked away gaming history gems along the way. Unfortunately is severely slowed down my progress on the issue so sorry about that.

Back with another double post woo hoo!

Down to the last 100 pages:

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1994/12/egm/pages/

At my current rate I should I have the archive ready on Sunday, Monday at the latest...who knows, maybe earlier lol

I'm being slowed down by my most recent EGM frustration, top-lined facing pages, so here comes a short but much-needed venting. If you look at an example (such pages 274-275) you'll see three beveled lines running across the top of the pages. Some of these also include overlapping art but plenty just have the lines and a solid pattern for the pages. I straighten both pages along these lines and once merged find out they don't line up. The culprit? One or two of the lines are a different height on the right side. Now I know EGM cut a lot of corners to save a buck so I'll forgive them (reluctantly) for not forking out for an acetate or other overlay. But even if they were just using glue stick to affix these lines, wouldn't they just print out a huge roll of them and cut to order? Even with the slight color variations wouldn't you think they'd print out each on continuous paper and work from that? I guess not, looks like they just eyeballed it on a page-by-page basis. Man is that tedious to repair.

Ok, that feels better. Hope everyone's having fun!

Best offer accepted. It's a shame eBay doesn't disclose what the offer was.

lol the only issue I'm missing from that mag's run. I'd be curious too though who knows if it'll just show up again being re-sold by the buyer.

I'm back at it after the move. Since I'm just crashing with a friend I'm no longer hosting the site at my house so it's a bit slower to update the preview site but it should be good to go by the time I've posted this:

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1994/12/egm/pages/

I've actually made it to page 250 but this preview update ends at 243 because of the two-page spread for NFL Quarterback Club on pages 244-245. There is a nearly half-inch gap in the ad which is not usually a problem, but this time I have the Dolphin logo on Dan Marino's helmet to contend with as well as the "scraggly" logo. I knew I had seen a single-page ad for the game somewhere and lo and behold it's in the very next issue. The elements are in slightly different locations but will be easy enough to clone to repair the break.

The good news: I have the issue on hand. The bad news: I hadn't planned to sort through the 30 boxes on magazines to build my "on hand" list until after I was done with this issue.

So to provide a gameplan going forward: I am continuing to work on this issue but will take breaks every so many pages to sort a box and record the issues in my database. Once I have found the issue I will de-bind and scan that single page and go back to finish those two pages. After the entire issue is done and I have made a RetroMags-format archive I will automate my database so people can see my collection in case there are requests. After that I'd like to do PC Accelerator Issue 1 to help marktrade finish off the entire run of that magazine.

Welcome to the world of EGM. I find this constantly trying to find a good point to level on. Sometimes you just have to look at it and find what the best element to align to is.

Thanks for commiserating Sean, it is quite maddening. At the first college I got kicked out of I became Features editor of the school paper (while also running the underground parody of it lol) and got them to buy a typesetter. This was 1985 and it had 8" floppies but with rule guides on the printouts things always lined up nicely. Here they are a decade later and there are sometimes five baselines on the same page.

Oh well, wanted to report in that I have finally made it to the halfway point. This is a 404 page issue and I have finished editing through page 202. I'm more thank halfway done overall as the two 8-page inserts (and other 2 pagers) are behind me so I only have 202 scans left to edit to generate 202 pages versus 222 pages done (and 32 facing pages). If you want to see additional madness check pages 190-195. This is a "Special Feature" and that batch of pages included background and foreground imagery that crossed the middle (and was quite a pain to repair). Starting at page 196 the same Feature is in play along with the background imagery but they gave up on having the background seamless across facing pages so what's that about lol

As before you can see (and zoom in on) all of the work done so far:

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1994/12/egm/pages/

Don't know if I can get the rest done by Monday morning as hoped for, but I'll try!

Sorry for the double post, just needed some quick venting lol.

Anyone who's looked at my work knows I'm obsessed with facing pages and the challenges involved due to printing errors, pre-page-layout-software rules being off-angle, the usual. I noticed some talk about straightening pages in another thread and wanted to mention the joy of this issue of EGM. I manually straighten every page on the text baseline which takes time but I think leads to the original graphic artist intent. I noticed something new on some of the pages: multiple baselines. I couldn't believe it. Given the way layout was done in 1994, still a mix of electronic and manual, and the shortcuts of the era, I knew I couldn't use Electronic Gaming Monthly's page number footer despite it being the only consistent piece of text of non-advertising pages, since that element was often added last and with the least care. So I usually go for the largest horizontal block of text and then do a rectangular selection against one of two other blocks for consistency.

In the section "Tricks of the Trade" there are boxed elements as well as a sidebar. I'm finding some pages where I have to "average" my standard procedure because each "boxed" area (as in singular games, not individual screenshots which are boxed within the larger box) is off by a fraction of a percentage. As irritating as facing pages with spine-crossing lines that don't line up (no pun intended) you'd think a singular typeset element would be a constant, but it appears they set each boxed area and then pasted them above the background individually. Oh well lol

I had the first of two moving days today which slowed down my progress. I've now finished through numbered page 140 (with pull-outs that makes 160 individual pages plus 25 facing pages) and can only hope to be more productive tomorrow. I've updated my preview page if you're curious about the results so far:

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1994/12/egm/pages/

Thanks Sean, I really appreciate it. I'm gonna concentrate on just the scanning for a couple of months then get back into the web archiving again.

Didn't get as far as I hoped on EGM 65, only 112 pages done so far. Hope to get cranking by mid-week. I put up the pages I've done so far (except for the ones I've done tonight) here:

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1994/12/egm/pages/

There already have been a number of tricky reconstructions, particularly that EA sports one because of where the page split. The Konami Warner Bros fold-out map was no picnic either lol

I've used a heat gun before but it just occurred to me, while reading this, that I only used it while pulling the page in the opposite direction from the other page, with the magazine in the open position. This would pull off many small chunks of clue along with the page, which I found annoying and not fit to put into the scanner. I also had small success with getting a clean separation. Even while melted, the glue was pulling off ink from the page. Anyway it occurred to me that maybe my problem was that I was pulling the page in the wrong direction and that I should have been pulling the pages all in the same direction, away from the spine instead of away from each other, while the magazine was in the closed position.

So I just tried it that way on one of my duplicate issues of NextGen and had a lot of success! The pages come off much more cleanly and I seem to be getting all the page content. I'm definitely going to practice with this more.

Any recommendations from either of you guys on a heat gun? I'm happy with pulling the pages out by hand as I've done for EGM 65 but at the "section breaks) a gun could loosen that extra glue that added minor tears.

My god. Your site is incredible. The sheer work you put into each issue integrating it with the web page is simply amazing. This is professional quality work. I think on a small scale this is very sustainable, but I couldn't imagine doing that kind of work for large scale preservation. It's like the perfect version of what we try to do here. I tip my hat. In other news you alpha web page has some spelling mistakes.

Definitely need to fix those then, I know there are spot errors from the OCR as well because of some weird exceptions Word makes in its spellchecker (and my need to preserve spelling mistakes in the articles).

I am preparing some videos about the alpha and will be doing some feedback articles and a livestream to nail down the specifics to go into Beta (such as what constitutes a reference to a platform, and adding company pages and other linkable high-level stuff worthy of indexinhg for research/exploration). I already have a few people coming forward with additional "artifacts" (letters from Nintendo of America, signed covers and more) and will be allowing other contributions at the game level. After Beta I will have an API to allow others to directly reference site assets (though all are freely downloadable). After that I hope to have enough details to let people do the same process, just need to finalize the CSS and template HTML as well as my shortcodes for linking to other data like games.

In case anyone missed these:

http://vgpavilion.com/games/frogger/

is an example of a Game master page where you can drill down to the releases

http://vgpavilion.com/games/frogger/coin-ops/

http://vgpavilion.com/games/frogger/colecovision/

such as those two examples where you get the coin-op flyer, manual and home release box and catalog.

I've only done one other at this point since I want to focus on the magazines (and get back to my contributions here) but this is the across-the-board archiving I'm shooting for.

Thanks for all the encouragement, it isn't something I could hope to finish alone (my list of magazines will be going up after my move, still sorting my 500+ issues) but hopefully I won't have to

[quick note: if you haven't already tried it, on the web page versions each image can be clicked or tapped and you can zoom and pan or pinch and drag which also gives you access to the individual 300dpi assets if you want to grab any of them, still need to decide how to make them more easily downloadable]

I very much hope you finish this up. What a monster of a magazine. I'm almost positive it is the biggest EGM ever made.

I'm on page 80 as I type this. I'll be moving at the end of the month but hope to have the RetroMags version ready before then. I previously extracted all the ads which would be significant progress but am redoing them based on some new techniques in touch-up I developed so I lost that head start lol

Hey,

Your link in a post above for Videogaming Illustrated Issue 12 (December 1983) isn't working (http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1983/12/vci/Videogaming-Illustrated-Issue-012-Dec-1983.cbr). 404 error. Can you restore it? I never got to download it and I would like to add a direct link on the site.

Sorry about that, I did some changes to the directory structure so the RetroMags version is http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1983/12/vi/Videogaming-Illustrated-Issue-012-Dec-1983.cbr now (vi rather than vci).

Please let me know if any of the ones I prepped for the site are broken or if I can help getting tyhem to the right places here for direct download.