Save our gaming magazines

[NeoNero]

Ive seen this mentioned on another forum (maybe even here, did a search and found nothing) and thought it'd be a great idea and was wondering if other people would be interested in it.

With the age of the internet, scanners and broadband, and with magazines taking up a huge amount of space and being very heavy why dont we place them online for everyone to enjoy?

What this would involve is a LOT of scanning of the magazines, id love to see this happen, id love to be able to read the out CVG's out there before it turned pap, the old mean machines and Nintendo mags i never got to buy along with the Dreamcast ones and so on.

What would be needed is for people owning magazines to scan in each page, which with the speed of todays scanners shouldnt take too long per mag. Of course adverts can be missed out, unless they are gaming ones, they'd be nice to keep actually. The images would then have to either be put into pdf format which is easier to read or in html format which is easier to create and less time consuming.

Now ive got a whole stack of mean machines and sega powers, along with DC-uk and ODM i wouldnt mind scanning in, for my own sakes really and would love to share them all with you. Ive got a p120 lying around and can hook up my scanner to that so im not pc-less while the scanning is happening. It will take time as i have hundreds of mags but as i said id like it for my own sake (in case i ever throw/sell them) and to share with other people who'd like to read these mags.

Now with the amount of people on here who own complete sets of magazines such as edge i can see it being very worthwhile and a lot of people interested in it. It could be split up so people would do bunchs of mags rather than whole sets, spreading it out a bit.

So who'd be interest in helping me with this/be interested in having scanned versions of magazines ive got? Can anyone see any problems or reasons why it shouldnt be done, or things that should be done?

 

[IBarracudaI]

I've been thinking about that for some time, it would be great to have an online archive of scanned magazines. But people seem to be very lazy to scan their mags.. <_<

 

[IceDigger]

Or some people don't have a scanner.

Cool idea though.

 

[Zziggy00]

It takes forever....i just threw out 2.5 years of Game Informer...

 

[Dyne]

i got every gamefan, gamers republic, dreamcast magazine, play and next generation. the first couple years of egm and psm. and the first 2 issues of gamego. they take up some space......

 

[it290]

Yeah, you really need to cut the mags up and use a form feed scanner to make it efficient enough, IMHO. Also it seems like most people like to scan magazines, manuals and the like at 150 dpi or so, which really sucks.

 

[Ammut]

I have 2 scanners but no mags to scan

Though I may have 1 complete ODCM laying around still, I'll check for that.

---Ammut

 

[Alexvrb]

Originally posted by it290@Mar 6, 2004 @ 06:08 PM

Yeah, you really need to cut the mags up and use a form feed scanner to make it efficient enough, IMHO. Also it seems like most people like to scan magazines, manuals and the like at 150 dpi or so, which really sucks.

They always aim for one end or the other of the extremes. I'm just as unhappy with massive scans. Regardless, it'd be a massive undertaking to do properly, and hosting it might prove difficult too, if it becomes a popular resource. Then there comes the whole format issue. Eh, but I won't get into that.

 

[it290]

As for format, the best thing to do is make PDFs, IMHO. You could go with plain files, but that's kind of a pain. The cbr/cbz format would work as well, but right now there is only one reader for OS X/Linux and it's in a very early stage.

 

[racketboy]

I have some old game mags that I could "donate" to somebody that could promise to scan ar high resolution.

They would just have to pay for bound printed matter shipping (cheaper than normal) and be willing to easily provide me access to the results.

They are mostly from the 16-bit era.

If you're interested, just let me know.

 

[mtxblau]

Originally posted by it290@Mar 6, 2004 @ 09:41 AM

As for format, the best thing to do is make PDFs, IMHO. You could go with plain files, but that's kind of a pain. The cbr/cbz format would work as well, but right now there is only one reader for OS X/Linux and it's in a very early stage.

Or just rename them *.zip/*.rar and slideshow them. I don't think it'd be THAT much of an issue (cbr/cbz being my preferred format).

I have two scanners as well, but only a few very recent game informers. I'd be more than willing to help out though (if the logisitics could be worked out).

 

[NeoNero]

When i get a new monitor for this pc, i'll get my old p120 back online and start scanning them. Ive got full collections of DC-UK a few CVG's, Half of Sega Power and most of ODM.

Racketboy, where do you live? If its in london in the uk id be willing to pick them up and do some, although this project will take a VERY very long time.

The way id do it is jpeg images, that way people can put them into pdf if they want to and people are then not limited by the pdf format at a later date years down the line.

 

[NeoNero]

Oh and as for sharing, they could be placed on some space ive got for a couple of weeks, and then placed within the classic sega hub which im in most the time. File sharing will be the way to go to get it known.

 

[mal]

Originally posted by NeoNero@Mar 7, 2004 @ 08:38 PM

Racketboy, where do you live? If its in london in the uk id be willing to pick them up and do some, although this project will take a VERY very long time..

No, he's in California.

 

[Kidderz]

I'd of scanned my full set of ODM, if my Mum didnt bloody bin them.

 

[racketboy]

Originally posted by mal+Mar 7, 2004 @ 09:58 AM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(mal @ Mar 7, 2004 @ 09:58 AM)</div><div class='quotemain'> <!--QuoteBegin-NeoNero@Mar 7, 2004 @ 08:38 PM

Racketboy, where do you live? If its in london in the uk id be willing to pick them up and do some, although this project will take a VERY very long time..

No, he's in California. [/b][/quote]

yup -- mal is correct

 

[CommanderBubba]

I used to do a lot of research for school. Science journals are all going digital these days. Everything from the last few years is almost always available electronically. For new stuff it's easy: they make PDFs out of the articles directly before publishing. But some of the bigger magazines are taking all their old articles dating back for 100 years and scanning every page. Really crazy stuf... you can actually go and look up papers published by very famous scientists.

I'm certain that most of the game mags of the last few years were produced using programs like Adobe PageMaker and Quark, etc. The thing is, the latest Adobe software suite is able to natively open up those files and batch convert them to PDF docs.

SO... what this all boils down to is that somewhere, somebody at one of these game mags has probably got a bunch of CDs with all of the magazines on them in a file cabinet. It would be nice if we could convince an editor somewhere to open up the vault and run some notable issues through the Acrobat Distiller. (This would be for magazines that still exist, like GamePro).

 

[racketboy]

well when you find those originals, you get back with us, k?

 

[it290]

Heh heh.. more likely, everything has been done in Quark for quite awhile (although a lot of people have been switching as of late). It would be quite an undertaking to export all those to PDF.. you'd have to spend a great amount of time getting all the artwork, fonts etc together and then making PDFs and ensuring that nothing breaks along the way. In other words, if you were to convince some editor give up all the originals, you'd have to get someone to do all that work, which would likely take nearly as long (if not longer) as batch scanning the mags would.

 

[racketboy]

was anybody else still planning on doing this?

I'm going to start scanning my old gaming mags soon -- including my Sega Visions. Maybe we can get some standards (like format, resolution, etc) and make a bit of an archive