I have all the issues of Spanish magazine Mega Sega which I downloaded before joining Retro... all of good quality, but they are in the same condition than those Todo Sega scans... can I upload them in this condition?
Yeah, Todo Sega (along with the other Spanish magazines) and Mega Machines editing are on my todo list ... I'm back to work after quite a while at home, so haven't had as much spare time. I'll return to these on the weekend. I suggest downloading stuff from the Internet Archive just in case, but no need to upload the ones that need editing yet, as long as they are backed up somewhere. We should probably back up websites too, although I'm not sure how that could be integrated into the wiki. I generally just use adobe acrobat to save the pages as PNGs, as it's a lossless format I assumed that rotating them shouldn't lose any data, although when recombining them into a PDF there will be some minor losses if you convert back to JPG, I use a high quality setting though. Edit: Batch cropping / rotate / resize etc features in Irfanview or Photoshop are a massive time saver when editing stuff like this.
And now I have: Before: https://archive.org/details/TodoSega_07/mode/2up After: https://segaretro.org/File:TodoSega_ES_07.pdf I used the jpegcrop GUI on 124 pages and it saved... 8MB. From a 202MB file. Meanwhile it took the best part of 2 hours, because some of the default settings suck and there aren't any obvious hotkeys. This could be streamlined by using the command line, but as non-Spanish speaker this feels like I would personally be putting more work in than what I'd get out of this task, so I'll leave it to someone else. It's a fine tool for losslessly rotating JPEGs though.
Consoles + https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/affiche_mag.php?mag=51 Joypad (France) https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/affiche_mag.php?mag=84 Mega Force (France) https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/affiche_mag.php?mag=40 Player One https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/affiche_mag.php?mag=32 (and others on that site) There are a lot of missing French gaming magazines. This is because, when I was uploading things to Retro CDN many years ago, I prioritised issues which didn't require extra work. We have about two thirds of what's available. This is because: - many issues have missing pages. Some of these have more than a dozen. - many issues need cropping (see also: those Spanish mags, fighting JPEG lossless crop tools) - some scans are so bad you can't actually read the text - some page layouts are just... weird. - some downloads are close to a gigabyte (i.e. too big for Retro CDN)... yet still have one or more of the above problems So I left them with the view of coming back one day and cleaning things up. But as you can guess, that day has yet to come. There are usually supplied text files explaining which bits are missing... but they're not always correct. And they're in French. Most important for Retro CDN is that the page numbers line up and missing bits are marked somewhere, then we can replace terrible scans with better ones at a later date. For bonus points: French publications are notoriously bad at printing issue dates. I've had to use advertisements in other magazines to determine when some issues were released, but even then I've only found a small handful out of hundreds. This is an issue for much of the world, but French mags matter because they typically did their own journalism, rather than blindly translate the work from the UK or US. So if you uncover any clues, that would be great.
I've been unearthing other magazines on Retro CDN which have missing pages - they're getting dumped here. The ones without placeholders are worse because it means the numbers don't line up, which can break references. Inserting blank pages wouldn't be much of a problem if it wasn't for missing page numbers. In some cases I can't tell which pages are missing without having the real magazine next to me, so if you have these issues and don't have a scanner, that's one way to help the cause.
I've been looking at the "Max-Rez" scans (2560x3390) at the https://www.outofprintarchive.com/catalogue/dreamcastmagazine.html The first issue of the Dreamcast Magazine comes as a 240MB comic book archive (cbz). When I convert them to pdf using Gimp, it comes to a whopping 1.4GB. Should I load this to Retro CDN to replace the 614x809 scan already there, or is the file size too large? Looking at issue 7 on Retro CDN, the res of this issue is 2689×3480 but the file size is only 84MB, what's the secret?
Don't use GIMP, use JPEGtoPDF. It'll produce a pdf that's roughly the same size as the cbz, and we know for sure will be compatible with PdfHandler. PDF resolution doesn't reflect the real resolution of the scans, but rather their dpi. Sometimes scans have the wrong dpi for whatever reason, which makes the pdfs look tiny. There's a tool to force jpegs to have a dpi of 96. The resulting pdf thinks it's larger than it really is.
I don't suppose there is a linux alternative? *sigh* you're gonna make me log into my windows partition.
A new batch https://archive.org/details/@gamemags1957 Games Domain Offline! Mean Machines Sega! Mega (Action/Machines/Power/Tech)! Other things!
Hi all, I don't know how to wiki. I want to move this: https://retrocdn.net/File:Dreamcast_Magazine_№01.pdf into this: https://retrocdn.net/File:DreamcastMagazine_UK_01.pdf (in order to replace this, which I renamed as https://retrocdn.net/File:Delete_me_no1.pdf)
Spent a couple of days trying to automate the lossless cropping of JPEGs. It's been... educational. I was able to take care of a couple of old manuals, where the pages were already straight and aligned: https://segaretro.org/File:DeepFear_Saturn_EU_Manual.pdf https://segaretro.org/File:Fatal_Labyrinth_MD_US.pdf but trying to sort out one of those Spanish magazines... nope. To get decent results you're forced to check each page individually, and if you're doing that... it's not automated. But I've left my workings on Retro CDN if someone else wants to get involved: https://retrocdn.net/File:JPEGCropTools.7z (basically some batch files, a copy of jpegtran, and a load of crap code I either stole off the internet or fought with for several hours. You'll need Imagemagick installed because apparently detecting the widths and heights of images is a challenge, and you can only crop in multiples of 16). If I was really devoted to this cause, I'd cope up with some fancy algorithm that can have a good guess at what it thinks is the scanner bed and then try and crop accordingly. But I'm not convinced it's worth my while - most of the affected files need re-scanning anyway, and IIRC modern scanners can already do edge detection and what-have-you.
Just a thought: have you tried Irfanview's built-in batch auto-crop feature? I spent some time looking at it for Pico scans, actually, but it didn't serve the purpose well due to the tabs on Pico pages no matter how much I fussed with it. Might be more relevant for this activity though.
A chunky set of Japanese book scans have been uploaded to archive.org: https://archive.org/download/summer2020artbookcollect I must admit I've lost track with where we are with Japanese strategy guides, so we may already have some of these. But I suspect we don't. There is a very important one I'm sorting out as I type this. The original source is name-dropped as "E-Hentai", which I'm not super keen to go exploring.
