E-Day

Like you said, what you do off this site is none of our business. If you want to upload magazines you didn't even to Archive so that they aren't lost, that's not something we're concerned with. If you want to upload your own scans there, same thing. Your scans are yours and you can do what you want. The only thing I am unsure of is posting on here about what you're uploading to Archive. I'm not sure if it would be an issue or not or implicate the site if something went down. I'll leave that to Phillyman to address.

Currently when I scan something, I use the ADF that is part of my HP All-in-One Colour laser printer. The quality is fine, but it has a tendency to pull pages in quite crooked, and it only scans one side at a time, though it's pretty speedy. It also tends to cut off a bit more of the end of the page it's scanning than I would like. Normally this doesn't pose a problem, but I have a two-foot stack of GamePro magazines that I want to scan, and they tended to print their page numbers and stuff very close to the bottom edge. Running the GamePros through the HP guarantees that there will be many pages I will have to run through again because it cut too much off the bottom. And I just don't have the time or patience to sit at my computer to use the flatbed scanner anymore. Ideally I would like a Fujitsu ix500, but they are about $600 in Canada. That's a bit too much for me to spend on a scanner I would only ever use for this site without begging members for donations, so I have been looking into other scanners like it. So far the ones the Fujitsu get compared to are the Epson WorkForce ES400 / Epson WorkForce ES-500W, and the Canon Image Formula DR-C225, which is pricier than the Epsons. Both Epsons are faster than the Fujitsu, and can scan something that is 240 inches long. That's overkill, but it's handy for those smaller square insert ads that fold out to have 10 panels. So I am wondering if anyone has used the Epson scanners and if they were good for both image quality and scanning almost perfectly straight like the Fujitsu. I'm curious about the Canon too, because I know my $90 flatbed produces great scans, but the DR-C225 is a bit too pricey. I might as well get a Fujitsu that I know is good. Or if anyone knows of another cheaper ADF that is good and not terribly pricey.

Currently playing, not including Smash Ultimate, SteamWorld Dig 2. The game is addicting and it seems like when I start playing it I don't want to stop. I loved the first one on the 3DS.

I'm not advocating their product. I'm using them as an example, and they're still around. They just sent it an email this week about issue 14 being sent out soon.

You can look at any of the existing game magazines that are around now except Game Informer. Nintendo Force, Pure Nintendo, Old School Gamer Magazine, RETRO; they all do "per issue" subscriptions through Patreon. You pay the normal cover price when they publish an issue and they do not have much advertising at all. I think Nintendo Force has no ads at all. Or maybe look at any specialist hobby magazine, like model railroading or quilting. Their subscriptions are typically much more expensive than the cheap prices you could get for a year of EGM or GamePro, and they have far fewer ads. I didn't mind the ads in game magazines because a lot of time they were interesting. Even if I had no interest in the game, they were often funny, amusing, cheesey, or had some nice art to them, so I read most of them. Some are permanently burned into my brain I think the downfall of magazines in North America has more to do with distribution costs than anything. Japan is tiny, so it's faster and cheaper to ship stuff all over the country. The same can't be said for the US and Canada, which are huge and require a lot of distance to move stuff. Magazines with low readership seem to thrive in the UK as well. One photography magazine I read has a circulation of about 26,000 issues, including digital, and it just keeps going and seems to be thriving. Future puts out several photography magazines including one just for Canon cameras and one just for Nikon, and they all seem to be doing well. Meanwhile the latest numbers for Maximum PC from the USPS Statement of Ownership form show their circulation is about 31,000. I would guess their content to ad ratio is 75:25. And with having to ship their magazines all over two countries, I am not sure how much longer they will be in print before Future shuts them down.

He's usually too busy to answer everything, or something that will take some thought. I wouldn't want to step on his toes with suggesting that, though I've let him know that I was annoyed at us that we didn't think of doing this ourselves. He actually has a magazine on loan from me for one of his Let's Read videos. He did let me know a while ago that Coury from My Life in Gaming was wondering if I wanted to go on their show to talk about the site. I said that Phillyman would be the best person for that as he knows the ins and outs of the site and started it. I only ran it for two years, and it happened to be during MegaUpload's takedown

I'll check that out tonight hopefully. I should give deskew another go. I think I tried it a while back but couldn't get it to work.

I have an action in Photoshop that will do the colour correction and resizing /saving all at once. What takes me time is straightening pages and cropping the edges.

So Japan probably got their own version, which makes sense since there are a lot of inherently Japanese games that never get released outside of the country. But that still won't fix the emulator issues that people have been complaining about. I was at my local big box store, and they had a cabinet full of the PlayStation Classic. Full, as in maybe they sold one or two. A far cray from trying to get the SNES Classic or NES Classic the last two Christmases.

If I did get kickbacks, I would have at least one Fujitsu ADF scanner by now. Are any of us good enough writers to write a decent game review that doesn't sound like someone trying to project themselves beyond their abilities? I like this idea, but I don't know if anyone here but Areala could do it. Plus I think people who would be into this stuff would lean towards a physical publication rather than digital, and that's a whole other kettle of fish. But retrospective publications that talk about certain games, with a current review as well as what magazines were saying about it at the time as well as strategies would be nifty. We would probably need some legal expert to let us know how much we could quote before it became plagiarism. What I wish we had thought of years ago is something Chris from the Classic Gaming Quarterly YouTube channel started doing almost four years ago, and that is reading through old game magazines and discussing the content and the games. So simple, so brilliant, and so perfect for this site. Yet none of us thought about that. Sure, we could start doing it now, but that would be a bit of a dick move since he's a friend of the site and it was his idea. Darn!

I know they weren't. But because of how they included the games for it (NTSC and PAL), and not including a power brick, it seemed like they made one version that they can ship to every part of the world, and thus the problem with the North American version will be the same on the version sold in Japan. Out of the list of the included games, the only one I ever played was Final Fantasy VII. It was good, and I would say the 38 is fair. I would also say that VIII should therefore get a 39 and IX should get a 40

Scan #292 is done. GamePro Issue something. I've left it with Melki to edit while I move on to scanning the next issue

I am going to attempt to use my old, slow flatbed scanner to scan: GamePro Issue 90 (labeled 100) January 1997. I'm not sure how it will turn out - if it turns out - but we'll see!

That doesn't seem to be one that is in our database. Excellent! What are these tools you're using. Apart from Photoshop, what do the others do?

I think it's irrelevant considering the issues that have been pointed out between the emulator but working well to several games being the PAL version. So a lot of games game don't play the same anymore. They should rereview the games to be accurate.

This calls for a thumbs up.

For scanning I think so far I saw maybe one of those. I brought up another stack of GamePro that I am going to sort through and de-bind, so I might have some of these. I know I don't have the GamePro with Doom 3 on the cover because I don't even have that one in my personal keep forever collection.

Wipeout being absent makes no sense, but Gran Tourismo works require ridiculous licensing again for all the cars, so I'm not surprised by that. These licensing deals for cars in games and players shouldn't expire. They should be fine so that the games can be re-released in the future.

I used to be able to edit scans at work during down time and could sometimes edit a magazine in a day. Since they locked down our USB ports I haven't been able to do that, so it's all done at home. Now instead of dedicating time to scanning and editing I'll do it while watching TV.

I have mine in banker boxes with the magazines stored vertically. For my GamePro magazines I have each of them in individual resealable magazine bags, like these or these. I'm contemplating adding backing boards as well, but that would mean less magazines per box, and another box to keep around.

My priority now will be to get through the stack of GamePros I have sitting at my computer downstairs and scanning them on my flatbed for Melki to edit. Not having to edit them means I should be able to scan them more quickly when I sit down to do it.

I didn't like how the 3D games looked when they first came out, so you can imagine how I feel about them now. The move to 3D is what caused me to lose interest in gaming. Even now, apart from racing games I would sooner play a 2D game than a 3D one. I have heard a lot of complaints about the game list for the PlayStation Classic, and I can see why. To be fair, I was not excited about this thing even before the list came out. I owned a PSone back in the day, and I enjoyed it a lot. But it's not a console I feel the desire to revisit. I spent most of my time with it playing through the three Final Fantasy games that came out for it, and there is no way I have the time or would want to spend the time playing through all of them again. I think I sank 93 hours into Final Fantasy VIII alone.

Retromags Presents! Compute! Issue 71 April 1986  Database Entry! Download Directly! Thanks to Phillyman for scanning this issue (and to me for editing it!)