[Black Squirrel]

Server troubles meant that for the last few months, there's been an embargo on magazine scan uploads. This has now been lifted, and I'm in the process of mirroring ~20GB of stuff I've been collecting from the internet over the last four or five months.

http://retrocdn.net/Special:NewFiles

I don't take any credit for doing any of the scanning (credits on the English side go to OldGameMags and Retromags - give them love and money), but having everything in one place (albeit at a sometimes lower resolution than the original source - my upload speeds aren't that great) is a great step forward in video game documentation and preservation, and helps, as all mirrors do, to keep this information up in the public domain. PDFs of gaming magazines from all over the world - we had a ton before, and now we have even more. Although I suppose you could have gone to Archive.org too.

Scans mostly range from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, and we've got stuff up there from all over the world in numerous languages. US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austraila, Japan and even a big batch from Argentina, plus tons of others. I uploaded something from Denmark yesterday. Portugal the day before.

Anyway just thought you'd like to know, as it makes for some fascinating reading and could drastically alter your opinions on things. Obviously what we really want is extra hands on deck to replicate pages like this for every game on site, but I've spent six years making similar calls and it doesn't always go down so well



And of course if you have the means to scan magazines (or anything relevant) that aren't up here, please let us know

This post has been edited by Black Squirrel: 21 June 2016 - 04:26 PM

[Scarred Sun]

While I appreciate what you're trying to do here, I'm not really surprised this topic has stayed dormant for a few days.

The truth of the matter, as I'm sure you're well-aware, is that processing magazines is just...a really time-intensive task. When I was doing GamePro earlier this year (before I had to stop and allocate that time to making sure the server didn't blow over in a stiff breeze each day) I think I averaged about an hour to 90 minutes per issue, and that was just looking for review scores, release dates, MSRP pricing, and unreleased game information. Throwing article breakouts into the mix will likely bring that down to an average of 2 hours per issue. On the other hand, I absolutely agree that this level of breakout needs to be done. I'm just wondering if we need to either incentivize this or make it somehow much easier for people to process magazines somehow.

Also this is to say nothing of the stockpile of Japanese/Taiwanese magazines I need to scan.