Game publishers like to distribute promotional material to the gaming press in the run-up to game releases - official documents, screenshots and artwork to confidently say "this game is coming". In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the medium of choice to do this was the CD-ROM - there's been a few such discs added to archive.org in the last few months, and I'm currently in the process of going through them. https://segaretro.org/Category:Infogrames_Additional_E3_Art_disc_files https://segaretro.org/Category:PS2_Press_Information_September_2001_files https://segaretro.org/Category:Ubi_Soft_Digtial_Press_Kit_99_files https://segaretro.org/Category:Artwork_from_Crave_Entertainment:_2000_and_Beyond https://segaretro.org/Category:Artwork_from_Infogrames_Additional_E3_Art_disc https://segaretro.org/Category:Artwork_from_PS2_Press_Information_September_2001 https://segaretro.org/Category:Artwork_from_Ubi_Soft_Digtial_Press_Kit_99 (I've got Crave, Eidos and Virgin discs to get through, and you guys better start loving AeroWings 2) This is mostly Dreamcast with a light sprinkling of PlayStation 2 from 1999-2002. There are lots of little things that won't have been documented in these sets. Prototype material, plans that never made it to the final product, and even a couple of unreleased games (Boarder Zone and Test Drive Cycles so far). Oh and the developers behind Speed Devils saying that online play sucks (because we should take them at their word).
If it does I want it uploaded Most games will have something, they're just rare to come by. Even today you need special access to Sega's press area (which for the record we have - most of its contents are already on the wiki)
https://segaretro.org/Category:Artwork_from_Eidos_Interactive_Digital_Press_Kit:_Conference_2000 Tomb Raider Chronicles is a game Core Design didn't want to make, and everyone involved seems to hate it. This might be the earliest indication that they didn't care - whereas all the other Eidos projects have nice, high resolution artwork, Chronicles is selling itself on badly composited PlayStation models. "Buy our game" And to be sure, it's a soulless adventure made up of leftovers, but it's a damn-sight more entertaining than that version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire (the one with hot sexy pics of chairs).
I have an EU Nintendo DS press kit, not sure if that's already out there. I have meant to rip the ISO but there's little of great interest on the CD that came with it. The DS came out 4 months after the US release in Europe and all the assets on the kit for launch games were from the final versions of the game IIRC. I used to have access to Sega Europe's press site, but access needed to be re-upped every so often and I just let the login elapse after a while. I have access to Nintendo Europe's press site though if that is of any interest to anyone. There's lots of High-Rez art for modern games and limited art for games as far back as 2001. If there's any interest I can look at archiving some of that stuff.
If anyone wants a challenge: https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=Category:Artwork_for_Virtua_Fighter&action=edit&redlink=1 https://archive.org/details/nonredump-pc-012 This disc has Virtua Fighter renders - TIFF files using the CMYK colour space. I've converted them to RGB PNGs, but science means the colours won't match up correctly. Except when they do. I grew tired of fighting Imagemagick and annoying comments on the internet about this. You need one of 3458923048032 "ICC profiles" to make the conversion work - my results, I think, are okay... but they might not be accurate. What difference it makes, I can't say - Mediawiki plays with the colours some more when generating thumbnails, and you need a good eye to spot this stuff in the first place. I can't tell how intentional it was - Photoshop used to play with colours back in the day (perhaps it still does?), and you would expect these renders originally came from an RGB source. But then what use was an asset disc in 2004 if not for printing things later? Fun fact: converting all the TIFFs into PNGs saved 200MB across the whole disc. Remembering that a CD-ROM can only house about 700MB.
With nearly a decade between the creation of these 2 image formats, it's no surprise that the newer one offers better compression. Also, CMYK has one more color channel than RGB, so that might have an impact on file size too.
