I bought over 130 bootleg Megadrive covers some months ago and they've just been collecting sitting dust, so I thought it might be time to put them to use. Some people I spoke to suggested I make scans and upload them to the wiki. I'm just wondering how I should go about doing this. Should each game entry get a new page that says "bootleg scan" or something, should there be a new bootlegs category, etc.? I'm not sure how to best get these onto the wiki, so am looking for opinions here.
That looks like it solves the problem. Any standards preferred for scanning that I should be aware of? DPI setting, mainly? Edit: Decided to stop being lazy and looked at the wiki. 300dpi it is.
You're welcome. As I said before, Black Squirrel has another list somewhere on the wiki, but I don't know the link. It's well organized and he's found ton of similarities between the box arts, etc. He'll chime in later, I'm sure.
600dpi is a safer bet. I think 300dpi was put up there because it was "good enough" (remembering that not all scanners are created equal), but from what I've seen, 600dpi produces more optimal results. Anything above that doesn't really achieve much because the printers themselves were probably only about 600dpi on a good day. Personally if I were in the scanning game, I think I'd probably scan at 900 or 1200dpi, do any necessary edits at that resolution, and then scale down to 600dpi for the wiki (super sampling!). But I haven't really got the equipment for that so it's not my fortay. Do whatever works. As far as lists go, that link above is the list. UNLESS the bootlegs come from Russia. For that, there's Mega Drive bootleg games in Russia, because there are so many. I should stress that none of the organisation or naming or displaying of these things is set in stone - it was driven more by me wanting to get stuff up there as quickly as possible. If there are better ways, we're all ears.
There's already some scanning standards going on for preservation purposes: https://www.preservegames.org/2018/08/video-game-preservation-scanning-guides.html But for bootlegs which might have been printed at somebody's home, any good quality scan might be overkill already.
As someone who literally did scanning preservation for five years professionally for business and the government, this is a ridiculous amount of overkill and navel-gazing. I mean, FFS, why are you using a square instead of just digital rotating to the tenth/hundredth of a degree? It won't even prevent that level of skew to begin with. For pete's sake, just get it down, period, and stop gatekeeping others who aren't going to drop the money or time for digital translation of a medium.
I don't know, ask the Game Preservation Society or whoever made these... I'm just showing what's currently being done.
I don't think Sega Retro is in the business of "game preservation" as much as it "information preservation". The noise about scanning guides is moot - if you were to actually preserve these things properly, you'd have the best scanner ever at a stupidly high resolution, saved in a lossless format exactly how it was picked up by the machine (i.e. without any cropping or rotation or image enhancement or whatever). And it would sit in a box somewhere as the master scan... probably with at least two other attempts and some other sets of covers sourced from somewhere else, so you would rule out any temporary issues with the scanner. Basically, to do it properly, you'd need top-of-the-line equipment and a shedload of money to rule out the possibility of ever having to do it again. They probably do this for centuries-old historical documents -for our purposes, an off-the-shelf A3 or A4 flatbed will probably do. More important is getting the information onto the internet. We have until the end of time to source out better scans of things if needed.
Yeah, I'm not a fan myself of the over-zealous efforts that go into scanning done by some groups. Getting anything is better than nothing. I've seen how Retro Mags reject people's work just due to being way too anal about things, but that's their prerogative since they're not looking to be a general archive, I guess. I still intend to do the scans, just lazy to get to it but they're coming Just to clarify, this stuff definitely was not printed in someone's home. All MD bootlegs made in Taiwan were factory made as far as I can tell. Often times I've seen better quality than the homebrews that get released in the modern age.
To that point, I think having "scan masters" is a bit of a moot point since the masters used for low quality printing (spoilers: game sleeves don't exactly get high DPI treatment) are far more valuable, anyway. It's why I always have my eyes out for 35mm slides, actually--those would be enlarged for use in many 1980s and 1990s magazines and would be the closest to "source" screenshots of games. The fact that I co-developed proprietary 35mm technology that outdoes Plustek OpticFilm/Nikon CoolScan when it comes to preserving (9600 DPI!!!) doesn't hurt either.
