KiwiArcader

13 hours ago, kitsunebi said:

So I sometimes forget there are other, possibly inferior ADF scanners out there.

Well, technically the Avision AD240 is a very good scanner. While classified A4, it has a wider scanning area so it can actually scan oversize magazines which would be perfect for most all magazines but the software is really, really bad with auto-cropping of dark pages for some reason. It is ISIS driver capable but I couldn't get it to work with Quickscan Pro so I gave up on it.

3 hours ago, kitsunebi said:

ADF scanners auto-crop.  

Technically, the software for ADF scanners auto-crop, however, some scanners have better bundled software than others in regards to this feature. The Fujitsu IX500 has really good auto-cropping where as the Avision software is frankly appalling, so your mileage varies for this functionality from scanner to scanner.

18 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

I thought you had more than 2 scanners?  Cause that's it for our database contributors, and one of those just started last week.

Oh wow!! I DO have more scanners than that!! I'm feeling blessed about now 

Retromags has 15,000 members of which the number editing the database is about the same as those currently scanning mags for Oldgamemags. I will take my scanning members any day as without them magazine preservation is dead in the water no matter how good databases are populated 

Wow!!

Posting a reply on an ELEVEN year old thread. That must be some sort of record!!

Seriously, I did a double take when I saw flugle's post about Hyper/Megazone when you consider between the two of us we have already added almost every issue of Hyper to my website along with 30 issues of Megazone. Then I saw the date. Hahaha!! 

He needs an A3 flatbed is what I am reading into this conversation. They aren't as cheap but there are a couple of options that don't involve buying a piece of crap Mustek scanner (avoid those like the plague)

Try and find a Brother MFCJ6530DW all in one. They have a good A3 scanner 

I'm with kitsunebi77 on this particular issue as far as OGM is concerned. There are a couple of factors in which I allow an incomplete magazine to be added to the download pool:

1. Page/s missing due to it being removed by the original owner and where no other digital copy is available on another site that I can use to replace the missing page/s in question. In this instance I will make the magazine available as something is better than nothing and at some point someone may come along and who has the ability to scan the missing pages. This may include covers or posters in the center of the issue.
2.  Pages with pieces cut out - same conditions apply as per above. Where the missing portion might include advertising, say on the reverse page, I try to locate another magazine issue with the advert in question to at the very least minimize the missing content

Both of the above are conditional on not having a significant amount of missing content. For example, missing four pages of a double sided poster are not the same as missing four pages of article content. Even missing the advertising content like publishers seem to do with their digital releases is abhorrent to me so I would not entertain your idea of having a PDF made up purely of some articles being made available on the site. My reason is that sites OGM are trying to preserve magazines for future generations to enjoy and to my mind preservation means the full magazine issue and not just bits and pieces.

Back in the early Retromags days of old they didn't have a cut-off date and as I recall the Nintendo Power's were scanned and available but in pretty shoddy quality. Then they decided to put a cut-off date in and the issues got removed that violated the date rule. Subsequently they removed the crappy quality raw scanned versions and the rest is history. The current versions are way better anyway I think. I aren't all that interested in USA game mags so I haven't looked at them all that much so I may be wrong re quality of the currently hosted mags but I don't think so.

6 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

There's no need to deliberately post anything there.  If they're interested in something, they'll swipe it and upload it within hours of its original upload, just like they've always done.  Like vultures, those guys...

Yep, they are the poor cousins of Archive.org in regards to game magazine thievery!!

If you are scanning the mags yourself then hosting them here on Retromags seems the logical way to go. If you are talking about 3rd party scans then it's a total no-go due to the rules of the site.

Archive.org are a bunch of thieves sitting under a "library" banner to protect themselves from copyright and not even making any effort to ensure the content they pirate is at the very least readable. Their total lack of quality control makes them a joke!! The best quality gaming magazine content comes from ..... you guessed it .... Retromags, OoPA and OGM who they've been freely ripping off for years.

So good on you if you do decide to ditch them!!

Hey, you made the comment about his picking up and running with it. We simply stated "HOW" he runs with it, namely site ripping whole content from other sites.

While you may have no issues with that, others who have spent thousands of dollars buying scanners and magazines only to have their hard work pilfered with zero acknowledgement of their efforts is a slap in the face. There's sod all people scanning content in good quality out there. You would think he'd encourage people to visit the sites that assist the preservation cause by acknowledging where he got the content to ensure people visit which provides encouragement to continue what they are doing. Nope!!

Yep, I've laid out the rules around NOT sharing Oldgamemags files on other sites pretty explicitly and if members decide to upload them to archive.org or elsewhere I close the site down to non-scanning members. I am sick and tired of people like him ripping my site content and making it available over at archive.org with no acknowledgement of where he acquired it from.

No honor among some thieves right?

2 hours ago, vgmax said:

OK I managed to get an OCR of a page from the Gameboy Gallery Strategy Guide. It had a 90% transcription success rate... not too shabby though certainly requiring a bit of work to read, especially with the machine translation. I used https://www.newocr.com/

Well, that's a bit of a crock then!! You're likely to get something like "I like Princess Peaches star count" turned into "I like Princess Peaches star c<OCR removes the o>unt" then which will cause no end of confusion for the young Gameboy kiddies  

Indeed it is. Specifically, you are looking for issue 172 

5 hours ago, Areala said:

Seconded! Happy birthday, you lovely, wonderful man.

*huggles*
Areala

Thanks Areala. One day I will hopefully make it to Indiana and just maybe get a "real" huggles from my favorite Warrior Nun 

5 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY KIWI!

Thanks mate. I'm feeling my age more and more every year. Weird that!!

Amen to that my friend!!!

31 minutes ago, MigJmz said:

you be surprise people are cheapskates and wont even shell out 5.

Anyway how do kiwi get all these mags? Through contributions or does he collect? 

I have personally scanned over a thousand magazines and I still have a couple of thousand more in my basement waiting for their day on the scanner. I have bought magazines since I was a teen when computers first appeared so my collection ranges from early issues of CVG onward. Additionally, since I created OGM I have purchased hundreds of mags on the local auction sites specifically because they have not been scanned at all (PC Gamer (UK), PC World (NZ) etc). Physical donations are negligible due to shipping costs to send content to NZ or Australia where we have active scanning members.

As stated above, OGM does have a small contingent of scanning members who contribute, some regularly and others randomly. Some scans are great, some not, but all are either not scanned previously or are currently available in better quality on the site than those released previously in the past. Having turned 57 today my desire is to get unreleased content available while I am able to, and if that means a little less editing to get more magazines released then so be it. I simply do not have the time or inclination to spends dozens of hours editing a single title like Meppi does as my collection is far too big to work on that basis if I want to get them all scanned before I no longer able to.

As far as members signing up goes, I get a LOT of registrations and maybe one person out of fifty donates to gain access while the other forty nine don't and subsequently get deleted. You are correct, sod all people understand and contribute. Most everyone wants everything for nothing. It's sad times we live in. Of the 140 members of the site probably only a handful came from Retromags so the 15000 you have here are pretty much all leechers too if you were to look at the donations vs members ratio. You have so many simply because no membership donation is required although in truth people from the USA are clouded by GamePro, EGM and Nintendo Power and have little interest in non-USA content so it's likely you have a higher hit rate of donators here anyway. 

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.

7 hours ago, JonnyCGood said:

The retro series of sites (SegaRetro, sonic retro, nec retro) are another scanning/uploading project. They only accept pdfs though, sadly. You can view their magazine archive here:
https://retrocdn.net/Category:Shared_magazine_scans

The dipshits at this site rip Retromags (and used to also rip OGM's before I closed the site to freeloaders) scans, then degrade them to get the resulting PDF at a ridiculously small file size and upload them to their site. They never detail where they got the original files from.

It's all been said before around here regarding their M.O. Like kitsunebi77 I hate the fact they take our files and then turn them into a piece of crap basically....

I have 183 issues of CVG scanned over at OGM but as kitsunebi77 said, I haven't managed to get them uploaded to the site after migrating it back onto a web-hosting service.Some are really good quality, a lot are not as good but still better than Mort's scans. Part of this is to do with the scanning method and part to do with the age of the magazines at the time of scanning. Later issues were printed on cheap, thin type newsprint and are pretty fragile and depending on their storage life/previous owners handling etc haven't stood the test of time all that well. But it is what it is and anything that is readable is fine until such time as someone can scan a better quality version. Given the lack of people prepared to make such effort we make do with what we have.

On a personal note I also have most issues between issues 13 and 75 which are not yet scanned and are in nice condition so they will make for great scans at some point.

Be really careful with Avision's built-in software. On black pages it has a tendency to auto-crop large chunks out of pages which is one of the reasons why I stopped using mine. 

22 hours ago, TresHombres said:

I am still waiting for my approval, for what it is worth...

PM me with your PAYPAL donation details and I will look into it.

Any accounts created are automatically deleted after a day if no corresponding donation notification is received from PAYPAL or an email detailing past donation info is received from the account creator. I get too many accounts created per day from SPAM or people just wanting to leech to spend time sorting through everything and which could be better spent on getting the site updated with new content etc.

Yep .... right .... so oldgamemags is running just fine.

I migrated the site and cut over the userbase manually so there's a possibility I may have missed one in the copy/pasting I guess. I also have nearly 30 people who have yet to sign in and update their password which likely means they are using an invalid or discontinued email address or simply haven't visited the site. Hard to tell but if anyone has an issue all they need to do is contact via the email address on the site and I will do my best to get it sorted.

The Avision Bookedge scanner appears to be a nice flatbed scanner for those not wanting to debind their mags but with a truly hideous price tag although if you have access to one at work/library then go for it. The only way you will see how it outputs a quality image is by trying it and comparing the print copy with the resulting scanned image. I'm talking magazines with images here and not paperbacks etc.

In all fairness though, this thing should piss all over the rubbish scans you see on archive.org as far as quality is concerned so even if Retromags wouldn't use the scans if it doesn't meet their quality requirements you still have other options for where you could upload the scans too. Don't forget, sometimes it's just as much about the cropping/cleaning up of scans as opposed to the scan itself that determines how good the final product looks although all the editing in the world cannot fix a truly dud scan.