The only Sega console I had at the time was a Mega Drive, but I had friends who had Master Systems and Game Gears, so I had the chance to try all three... I never had a Saturn (I played a few times at friends' houses)... years later I bought a Dreamcast with my eldest nephew (which we later sold...)... But I remember a lot of Sega stuff that happened in Portugal at the time (I was ten years old when the Mega Drive arrived in Portugal in 1991) ...
My perception back then was that people who own "a Sega" are fewer and "Nintendo kiddies" are all boring. That's what a sexy console does to your brain. Lol I was actually more into drawing at the time, and only got obsessed with games through Nintendo's cast of characters. They probably stood more out, but Sonic and Tails have always, at least until modern Knuckles and Shadow came around, remained the best. Maybe Link came close?
Was this dubbed? There was a satellite program in the UK showing 5 episodes a week on Sky One called Games World, and it'd have been viewable in Germany given we could get German programs on analogue Sky. Spoiler It also featured Jet from Gladiators in a skintight catsuit, which was a bonus
Bayonetta fans https://archive.org/details/FeelBAYONETTA829SpecialFanSiteKit/ Accidentally came across this in my travels. It is a "fan site disc", containing various assets for... Bayonetta fan sites I guess. It's claiming to come from an event, "Feel Bayonetta 8.29", which took place before the game's launch. There's some artwork we don't have on the wiki, so my original plan was to mirror bits of this disc, as I have with other press discs. But now I'm thinking it might need to be treated differently - if this was handed out to the public, maybe it needs to be kept together as a collection of "things Sega of Japan let people show on their fan sites". And we'll probably need details of the event for context too. Which is code for "someone else do it". It's only 34MB so there shouldn't be a barrier for hosting the whole thing as one file, should the need arise.
Credits http://raido.moe/staff/index.html A good chunk of the games on Sega Retro have their credits mirroed, but there's tons that remain, most of which are in Japanese. This collection will save you some time - there's even screenshots to prove they're not made up (although you'll still need to format them for the templates to pick up people).
https://archive.org/details/guia-games https://archive.org/details/cinevideo-games-1 https://archive.org/details/cinevideo-games-2 https://archive.org/details/cinevideo-games-4 https://archive.org/details/cinevideo-games-5 These came through overnight - I'd upload them myself but I'm not super sure what they are. Supplements, probably.
https://archive.org/search?query=subject:"Gekkan+PC+Engine" 21 issues of Gekkan PC Engine that we don't have yet have been uploaded to the Internet Archive in 600dpi format, which includes the second special from August 1988, the March, April and August issues from 1989, the April issue from 1990, the July, October, November and December issues from 1992, every 1993 issue except January, and the February 1994 issue. The November 1993 issue is especially pertinent as it has a review for PC Cocoron, an unreleased PC Engine port of the 1991 Famicom game - the Lost Media Wiki claims Gekkan PC Engine wrote a negative review which potentially caused some of the game's delays, though it seems that wiki may have gotten them confused for Dengeki PC Engine's review. Just make sure you name the PDFs in accordance with our issue numbering with this magazine! (e.g. the November 1993 issue should be named "GekkanPCEngine_JP_59.pdf")
Shining books https://archive.org/details/@shining_lore I can't commit the time to cropping the covers and sorting out page numbers, and it's being added to daily. V Jump Books Game Series: Shining Soul was the second book from this set missing entirely from Sega Retro - oops.
I've already downloaded Shining Force EXA Visual Settei Shiryoushuu from an entirely different source a few days ago.
A mostly(?) complete set of Gamers (Brazil) has come through recently: https://archive.org/details/bultro_stacks?sort=-publicdate I spotted a Retro Avengers watermark in one of the earlier issues - stay vigilant. I uploaded issues 4 and 5 because they use a GamePro-esque rating system: "I'll make icons like I've done before" he said. Well I've decided the scans suck too much - the restoration time would take longer than drawing these again from scratch. Only two issues would use this system before they switched to percentages.
Since the PDFs provided by the person who originally scanned the issues were compressed and had OCR added, would it be better to just upload them directly or use the JPEGs in the accompanying CBZ (distinct from the raw scans' ZIP) to make a new PDF? I tried doing the latter in preparation for uploading one issue to the wiki, but it ended up being a little over 900 MB even with the DPI fix tool.
I usually batch-process the OCR JPGs with Photoshop™ to actually "shrink" them to 300dpi (half the dpi, half the pixels). Which seemed to work with these ones. ^^
I don't have access to Photoshop, so I tried using BIMP (a batch-process plugin for GIMP) and found it wasn't much better. After going through the whole process (using BIMP to make each image 300 DPI, then using DPIFix to make them 96, then finally compiling them with JPEGtoPDF), the new final PDF is still a little over 870 MB. Do you extract the JPEGs from the PDFs? I've been using the JPEGs from the CBZ (which are less compressed), and I suspect that may be the issue. I'd like them to be as high quality as possible without being too large, but I may need to make that sacrifice if it comes down to it.
The CBZ (or CBR) will always be the better option - I think archive.org automatically attempts to convert what you give it into other formats, one of those is a PDF, but its PDF conversion method is... questionable. ImageMagick is probably the best option when it comes to batch processing images (it's actually what the wikis use behind the scenes). magick mogrify -resize 50% -quality 100 *.jpg -> Then you put it together as a PDF https://retrocdn.net/File:JPEGtoPDF.7z One of the lovely features of the PDF format is that it can be used as a container of JPEGs, much like say, a ZIP file (or CBR/CBZ), the only difference is each file is treated as a "page", where the image is put at coordinate (0,0). That's what the program above does - some of the crappy online tools (and archive.org) compress the images further for god knows what reason - best to avoid those. Although if the person has uploaded a PDF to archive.org... that'll be the best version. In those cases CBR/CBZ won't be an option since it doesn't automatically split pages up... because PDFs can be more complicated than just a bunch of JPEGs and yeah. I've started doing a further step https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ What this does is turn a PDF into a PDF/A. It uses optical character recognition (OCR) to add a searchable text layer. Again, the JPEGs don't get touched, but if successful, you can search and highlight text as if it were a digital document. Archive.org does this but it compresses the crap out of a PDF to the point where the file is liquid garbage. For those playing at home I believe this uses Tesseract as a back-end (the same as archive.org), and is surprisingly decent at picking up text. Although video game magazines can get a bit busy, so it's never a complete success. I've also never tried it in Japanese. One day I'd quite like this PDF -> PDF/A conversion to happen sever-side so you guys never have to think about it, but... well. OCR isn't something to worry about (and it's not super straightfoward to set up), just something that exists and we're aware of.
That's strange. Did the dimensions change as well or just the DPI number? It could also have something to do with what Black Squirrel said. Maybe it's the way GIMP is compressing images. If ImageMagick isn't for you, to my knowledge, older versions of Photoshop doesn't cost money. Installing them might require a small workaround, though, since the servers don't exist anymore. Depends on the upload. If the JPGs themselves aren't up and the PDF about 1 GB, then, yes, I'd give it a shot with pdfsplit.
Today on "don't know how to handle this" https://archive.org/details/dcsdk-9e Someone has uploaded "release 9" of the "European" Dreamcast SDK. Two discs full of gubbins. Cool, except oh actually it's not just an SDK, there's a bunch of tools and documents here too. So while yes, uploading the ISOs to Retro CDN is probably the best plan, it probably needs sifting through just in case there's anything "interesting" we might want to mirror separately. With this and the other guidelines we've got, you could probably make Dreamcast games from scratch to the same quality standards as 20 years ago. No more indie game guesswork... though I'm in no personal rush to configure a Windows 98 VM for the authentic experience.
An opportunity has arisen to part ways with all these single-page scans of Israeli magazine Wiz. https://archive.org/details/@oldschool_rafael?&sort=-publicdate (okay maybe the opportunity was there for years - I never looked. But hey, now there's a set on archive.org).
Early Israeli gaming has always fascinated me, especially with their handling of material meant for left-to-right users. That's another one going in my "cool" pile!
