I recently grabbed a Japanese copy of Sonic Drift 2, and realised what shitty scans we used to have of old manuals. Good for the year of 2004 when we originally scanned them, but man! They're tiny now. Recently I've been kind of into extracting old artwork (which Sonic & Segaretro are very helpful with) and remembered that I did try and extract some of that cool artwork from Sonic Drift 2 using those old scans Safe to say they weren't the best, but it was the best we had: Well now thanks to my new copy of the game, and my work's 600dpi scanner, I've given the Sonic Drift 2 page a big art uplift. Brand new Super-rediculous scans of each page are now in the manual page, and through some long and exhausting photoshop work I've extracted all the artwork at massive sizes and added them to the page, as well as Logos and Cover scans. So now Fang looks a little more like this: I also got copies of Sonic 2 and Sonic Drift 2 on Game Gear as wel, and I'll add them in a few weeks. What other old artwork or manuals are we looking to get new versions of? Right now most of my older games of this type are in another state, but if some pop up I'll definitely get them rescanned.
On the Sega Retro side of the fence, there's more things which need scanning then I can possibly comprehend. We have a grand total of 1 Japanese Game Gear manual out of a pool of dozens. It's why the scan tracker exists (although I use the term "exists" likely because it's gone offline and I haven't seen Andlabs here in months). There's a few crappy-ish ones on Sonic Retro... but the fact that manuals even exist is a massive plus over most of this stuff. Also the Sonic Retro wiki is a bit behind the times - on Sega Retro we moved to using PDFs loaded with JPEGs for ease of use, and presumably the upgrade will make its way onto the other wiki at some point.
He's easier to get hold of on IRC - I'll try and chase him up and see if we can get this back up and running, the thing's a very useful tool.
I've got loads of japanese game gear games, including Panzer Dragoon Mini. A quick look shows the manual for that isn't scanned.
On that topic, what is the best way to make these types of files into PDF format? Particularly those that might have a variety of sizes (separate front and back, but keeping internal pages together) or at least just letting each page be their own size? I've tried Adobe Bridge, but it doesn't like me that much.
I might be misunderstanding, but I don't think there is a scan with a white background. The original scan (which Rlan posted here) has a coloured background. (It's quite a complex background too, so cutting out stuff must be hard). Excellent job on the high res scans and cutouts, Rlan! The cutouts must have been quite the task! Hopefully more high scans of the other manuals can be obtained (and maybe some more translations as well).
Judging by the scan we have, it was originally printed with lots of jaggies anyway, so we'll never have a good cutout job out of it.
